I've been on several OOo mailing lists for years now, because I formerly used Calc and a few other OOo functions reasonably extensively (principally on Linux). The work I do on it now administering my wife's company (on OS X) is minimal, although it is likely to scale up in future.
My day job is heavily Excel focused, which is probably the least painful of the Microsoft Office products. I've run into a(nother) limitation with it that OOo also has, when I look back at my work in past. I don't work with an infinite screen width, not even dual heads. So, by the time this 1600x1200 display has a full screen spreadsheet with a dozen or so worksheet tabs, the tab bar doesn't show everything anymore. One fairly easy approach to ameliorate this for larger numbers of worksheets (I am working today with about 30 worksheets) would be to "wrap" the tabs around in multiple levels. That would be one small step work OOo could be better than Excel. But if we extend this logically, we might be able to confer a level of hierarchy through the multiple levels of tabs, which could be quite useful for overview information. The present document I am manipulating is a Master Bill of Materials (BOMs) for a family of electronic products. At the top level, we have a number of products that the client can order. These call up sub-BOMs, which it would be useful/informative to have on the next layer down in the tab structure. And, those sub-BOMs call up smaller subassembly BOMs before we get down to component level. I am sure there are plenty of other reasons why one would want to consider building worksheets in a hierarchy - I can think of some complex financial models that would benefit from this. The ability to not just "wrap" worksheet tabs, but to actually assign worksheet tabs to different "layers" would be an enabling factor to permit structuring worksheets in a meaningful hierarchy. This is beyond my present coding capability, and for my very immediate requirement, I can't see any way I could justify having my employer fund this, but for the moment I leave this thought with you as a future direction, and a capability that the OASIS file formats would want to leave as a possibility for future generations of spreadsheet software. (I may be showing my naivete with that last statement, but there you go...) And hopefully I can help in some way to make this (and other OOo things) happen in future, Arnim --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
