Issue 70602

Reassigned.

This is a quite obvious user interface issue. It probably should receive more
attention than it currently does. To illustrate the issue, I attached a small
presentation. It contains 10 animated shapes, and depending on your screen
resolution, some of the entries of the objects under "Custom Animation" will not
be displayed on the screen.

Suppose we want to edit the animation settings of object 9:
- We scroll down
- Click the object and then the "change" button, choose an effect and click "OK"

After the edit, the list auto-scrols to the top, despite the fact that Object 9
remains the highlighed object. To continue working with the objects down the
list, the user has each time again to scroll down throughout the entire list.

Created attachment 51653 [details]
Sample presentation to illustrate the issue

I was able to reproduce this issue with OOo-dev 3.3.0 (DEV300_m71 build 9481) on
Windows XP using the original steps described by ftack, as well as the follow-up
example attachment provided.

If you have a high resolution screen, exploring this issue may be easier if you
re-size the Impress window to be smaller, so that fewer items are displayed in
the “Custom Animation” object list.

The following tests can be done with either a new or an existing presentation.

Behavior with the “Change...” and “Remove” buttons:

1) Add a rectangle to the screen. By default the shapes toolbar is at the bottom
of the screen.
2) Copy the rectangle on the slide until there are more items than will fit in
the list in the “Custom Animation” section of the Tasks pane. Resizing the
window will help minimize the number of shapes needed.
3) Select all of the shapes on the slide and click “Add...”, then apply the
“Appear” effect.
4) Deselect them, and scroll down the list and select one of the last shapes
created.
5) Click the “Change...” button, and change the effect, as mentioned in ftack's
steps.
6) The list of objects will automatically scroll to the top, but the selection
will not change. The object that you just modified will remain selected, even
though it is not currently visible in the list. Clicking “Change...” again will
allow you to change the effect on that object.
7) Repeat steps 1-4, but then click the “Remove” button. The list automatically
scrolls to the top, but the object is no longer selected. Clicking “Add...” will
not allow you to add an effect to that object. This seems to be the correct
behavior, as the object is no longer in the list (since it no longer has any
animation), but it could still be confusing to the user given that modifying an
object's animation causes the same behavior from the list of objects.

Effect changes from the main screen:

1) Add a rectangle to the screen. By default the shapes toolbar is at the bottom
of the screen.
2) Copy the rectangle on the slide until there are more objects than will fit in
the list in the “Custom Animation” section of the Tasks pane. Resizing the
window will help minimize the number of shapes needed.
3) Select all of the shapes on the slide and click “Add...”, then apply the
“Appear” effect.
4) Deselect them, and scroll down the list to one of the last shapes created.
5) Select it, and modify the settings without using the “Change...” or “Remove”
buttons. This includes changing the “Start”, “Property”, or “Speed” dropdown
selections.
6) The object list will automatically scroll back to the top. Changes made to
the animation effect without opening the “Change...” dialog also cause the list
to scroll back to the top, but leave the current object selected.

This behavior appears to be consistent will all types of objects (charts,
pictures, tables, etc), not just shapes. Clicking the “Change...” button causes
the issue even if nothing is actually changed. The list scrolls to the top when
the change dialog is closed, regardless of whether anything was actually changed.

I agree with ftack that this can be an inconvenience for users working with many
animated objects on their slides.

As given in description
AOO410m18(Build:9764)  -  Rev. 1589052
2014-04-22 12:11 - Linux x86_64
Debian