Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 58304
color picker doesn't appear when selected from the "more buttons" list
Last modified: 2013-08-07 15:13:21 UTC
When I first opened Calc, the formatting toolbar had too many tools to completely show up on the toolbar. On the right side of the toolbar there is a little arrow with a dropdown box showing the extra tools that don't appear on the toolbar. This in itself is not unusual. This happens many times in programs where you've got your toolbars packed with so many tools that they don't all show up with your present screen resolution. The two tools that weren't visible on the toolbar and instead were showing in the dropdown box were the background color-picker tool and the font color-picker tool. When you click on these tools, you're supposed to get a color-picker dialog. This is a grid of colors that you pick a color from and the selected cell gets that background or font color. The bug that I encountered was that the color-picker tool didn't appear at all. Instead, clicking on the tool in the drop-down box simply changed the color of the selected cell to whatever color had already been previously set in the tool. After the first time, it had no effect at all because it was merely 'changing' the color of the selected cell to the same color. In order to get these two tools to work, I had to make more room on the toolbar by removing a couple of other tools.
can you reproduce the problem? can you give a step-by-step description?
Note: If I could include a few screen shots, this would be easier but I'm not sure if screen shots are permitted here. Is it appropriate to attach a few screenshots? If so, I can get down to some serious bug reporting. A picture is worth a thousand words. Steps to reproduce: 1) Open the Calc program in OpenOffice.org 2.0 with a brand new spreadsheet or any spreadsheet. 2) Be sure that there are enough 'visible buttons' on the Formatting Toolbar (the toolbar you use to format cells in Calc) so that the [Background Color button] and the [Font Color button] are NOT visible on the Toolbar. On the list of Visible Buttons, be sure they are checked. With a screen resolution of 800 X 600 this should be pretty easy because if you put a check mark next to ALL the buttons in the list of Visible Buttons, they won't all show up on the Toolbar. Some of them will be offscreen on the right side of the Toolbar and you will see a little button with two little arrows like this >> on top of the button and a down-arrow on the bottom of the button. This little button shows up on the extreme right side of the Toolbar when you choose to have more visible buttons than the screen size will accept. If you click on this little button, you'll see a list of tools that are not visible on the Toolbar. You click on one of these tools on that list and the expected action should be the same as when you click on that tool from the toolbar. 3) Now click on that little button I just mentioned and you will see the rest of the Visible tools. A real simple way to test this is to just resize your Window so that some of your Visible buttons don't show up on the Toolbar. Just be sure that the [Background Color] tool and the [Font Color] tool are two of the buttons that show up NOT on the Toolbar but rather show up in the list of tools that pops up when you click on the little [>>] button on the extreme right side of the Toolbar. This list of tools appears ABOVE the section that contains the two entries [Visible Buttons] and [Customize Toolbar...]. If all the buttons are visible on the toolbar, no tools will show up in this list. In order to test this you MUST be sure that the [Background Color] tool and the [Font Color] tool show up on this list instead of on the toolbar as buttons. 4) Now, from this list of tools, click on the [Background Color] tool OR the [Font Color] tool. When these tools are visible on the toolbar as buttons, you click on them and a color chart pops up. From this color chart you can pick a color for the cell's background or the cell's font. When these tools are NOT visible on the toolbar, you have to access them from the list of tools that pops up when you click on the little [>>] button I just mentioned above. When you click on the [Background Color] tool OR the [Font Color] tool from this list, you will NOT get a color chart. It's as simple as that. What will happen is that the Background Color of the Cell will only be "changed" from the color it already is to the same color it already is = NO CHANGE. Here is what I think is happening. In Excel, these two tools don't work quite the same way as they do in Calc. In Excel, they are two-part tools. You can either click on the little down arrow on the right side of the tool button to get the color chart OR you can click on the left side of the tool button and change the color of the cell to the color that was LAST USED because this tool in Excel remembers the last color you used. In Calc, this tool does NOT remember the last color you used. It only knows what color the selected cell is right now. This means that you ALWAYS need to have the color chart in order to change font color or a background color. It's quite useless to "change" the color of a cell or the color of the font to the color they already are. In Calc, you don't have the option of changing the color with one click. You ALWAYS have to access the color chart. This is OK (or not?) but the tool needs to be working the same way when you pick it from that list as it does when it's showing up as a button on the toolbar. At the present time, it DOES NOT work the same way in both instances. I'm not a programmer so I don't know what needs to be done here but I have a feeling that the implementation of this tool needs to be changed to a two-click operation just like it is when it's a visible toolbar button on the toolbar. Right now, it's a one-click implementation. This is ok for some tools, but it's not ok for these two particular tools. When you click on these tools from that list, the tool is not calling up the color chart. This is probably a simple code change? This bug is extremely easy to reproduce. I can open Calc 100 times and reproduce the bug 100 times.
I see that I can in fact include a screenshot as an attachment so I'm going to send a small gif. Please note where the mouse cursor is in the screenshot. That's where I clicked in order to show the small window that pops up.
Created attachment 31770 [details] Two tools that don't work like they should.
confirmed on Windows XP SP2 with OOo-dev 2.0.139: the color picker doesn't appear when it is selected from the "more buttons" list
Hi Cartsen, your construction site ? Frank
cd: Duplicate, see 45812. *** This issue has been marked as a duplicate of 45812 ***
cd: Closed.