Currently in Calc neither rows nor columns can be easily moved
manually.
It is possible to drag & drop e.g. a column into a new position,
but the dropped column is not inserted, but overwrites the existing
cells.
Of course, there's a workaround. First insert a new empty column
at the desired position, then drag & drop the column to the new
position and finally delete the old column. As this method is quite
cumbersome, the question is, if the described action can be performed
in a more user friendly way. In addition one may not want to restrict
to columns and rows only, but generalise the method to cell ranges.
After some discussions the following proposals came out:
1.) drag & drop with mouse pointer in column or row header
------------------------------------------------------
When dragging starts with the mouse pointer in the column/row
header, the whole column/row is copied or moved and
inserted at the target column/row. In this case, existing
cells are not overwritten.
cons: - Works only for columns and rows, but not for cell ranges.
- May not be very intuitive.
2.) use additional keyboard shortcuts
---------------------------------
Currently, the following modifiers are used for drag & drop
of cell ranges in Calc:
modifier action
----------------------
- move
Shift move
Ctrl copy
Shift+Ctrl link
As already written, for all those actions existing cells are
overwritten. In principal it's possible to use different
keyboard shortcutts or an additional modifier, e.g. Alt
for the insert case, that means existing cells are not
overwritten:
modifier action
-----------------------------
Shift+Alt move + insert
Ctrl+Alt copy + insert
Shift+Ctrl+Alt link + insert
cons: - Alt may not work on Unix/Linux platforms.
3.) ask user when dropping
----------------------
Another approach may be to ask the user, that means opening a dialog
after releasing the mouse button. The user may choose between
overwriting existing cells or simply inserting.
cons: - No visual indicator for the exact drop position.
- The dialog may be bothersome.
Any ideas and comments are welcome.
Thomas
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
