Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 59706
Persistent toolbars
Last modified: 2014-12-31 16:28:12 UTC
A toolbar may disappear depending on the context the user is working in at the moment. This not only causes an annoying flicker if the context changes (the entire row may disappear causing the entire document to shift). But is IMO also bad UI design, if something is disabled shade it out, don't remove it from view, that's the domain of the user and not yours to alter. It's especially annoying when you are drawing figures. When you start drawing a new figure you always first have to enable the drawing toolbar.
Reassigned to requirements.
This is not a special WRITER problem.
FYI, I find this very frustrating as well. The main problem I have is the outright disappearance of an entire toolbar row: IMO, it would be better to make the toolbar row persist across context shifts, even if the toolbar itself must go away. For example, let's say I'm editing a writer document in a standard text area and my toolbar setup looks like this: | <default 1st toolbar row> | <default 2nd toolbar row> I then go over a bulleted list. I've set up a seperate third toolbar row to hold the outline toolbar, so my display flashes and a third toolbar row appears: | <default 1st toolbar row> | <default 2nd toolbar row> | 3rd toolbar row with outline toolbar That flash is a bit disconcerting, but I can live with it. My problem is that after moving back into a normal area, my toolbar layout once again looks like this: | <default 1st toolbar row> | <default 2nd toolbar row> I think it would be better if it looked like this instead: | <default 1st toolbar row> | <default 2nd toolbar row> | <empty toolbar> i.e.: if a new row is created to hold a context-sensitive toolbar, keep it around even if the toolbar itself disappears. this shouldn't be too difficult to implement, doesn't involve a radical ui redesign, and would remove the major source of frustration (the document view jiggling up and down in response to toolbars appearing/disappearing depending on context)
There should be an option to turn off context sensitivity in toolbars. I frankly can't stand them. Every time I click in a table up pops the table toolbar. I have to close it so I can navigate the table. When I have numbering and I want to add numbering to another paragraph I click on the paragraph and the numbering toolbar goes *off*, so I have to add numbering from the format menu. These sorts of problems occur regularly. However, I can't recall any situations where I have found context helpful.
I have the same problem. An activated toolbar should stay activated!
As a user I find it non-intuitive to use 'View->Toolbars->(toolbar name)' to permanently close a context-sensitive toolbar. Using ribbons as in MS-Office could be nice. However the problem could be easily dealt with by giving the user an obvious way to turn off the context-sensitivity of a toolbar. Googling help-forums should not be the way to find how to do that. A simple way to achieve user-friendliness would be to e.g. add a checkbox at the toolbar tab in the View->Toolbars->Customize dialog, which will determine if the selected toolbar will be context-sensitive or not. This is still not the best solution but it's much better than the current situation. Note that issue 42072 and issue61452 are both related to this one.
This was bad news. I wanted to insert lots of screencaptures in a document, for documentation. My solution (to avoid too much clicking for each picture) was to add the "(Insert picture) From file" button on the Standard toolbar.
Context sensitive toolbar could be a nice feature for some but, can also be very frustrating as well. Need option to either globally disable / enable or select by bar context sensitive ON/OFF.
I'm using Oo 3.2.0 and it seems this issue still hasn't been resolved. Or I don't seem to find an option to remove the context-sensitivity. As previously noted, this is really bad UI design and extremely frustrating, especially to users used to keyboard shortcuts and who'd rather not clutter their screen with 5 undocked toolbars popping in and out.
This context sensitivity is a nightmare, even worse on a slower computer where there's a significant delay and text shifting. If you can't turn it off, it's a killer NOT to use OOo.
I think calling this defect an enhancement is being overly generous. This post has some suggestions for working around this <cough> 'feature': http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2010/03/23/dealing-with-ooos-braindead-context-sensitive-toolbars/
1) If the Lists toolbar for example goes off when I'm not selecting a current list, I can't use it to create new lists. The current solution (adding some basic list buttons - as all the list buttons are not available - to the formatting toolbar) is insufficient as it creates redundant buttons and forces you to use one toolbar to create the list and another to edit it. 2) I do not use any of the buttons in the standard toolbar, so I turned it off under view. Unfortunately, the moment I move to another part of my document, the standard toolbar reappears, forcing the toolbars I do use off the right side of the screen, as they don't seem to automatically move down a row. I end up manually closing it, only to have it pop back up the next time.