Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 47183
Selection of objects needs improvement for copying, moving or editting.
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:32:36 UTC
I have been trying to help someone move from Microsoft Office to OOo and we have come across this major headache. On openning a MS office document that has Charts (Graphs) imported or pasted from Excel are impossible to copy or change. The ability to select items or the whole object can be almost impossible to do. In the two examples that I am submitting, I have tried to copy the files from a MS Doc (opened in OOo 2.0) file into a different document. There is no way to select and copy the image and ensure that it is all there. The selection process is poor at best. Select all won't work as it isn't designed to do this. See issue 46958. When I tried to select each item, the selection box would change to cover an area of items, not the actual selected items. The section process should either include all the items within the selection box or inidividually mark each and every item selected. To test the selection process, using RGfig5a.odt, try to select one of the lines to convert. If you select on one diamond, you end up with a selection block around the selected diamnond. While holding CTRL+SHIFT, select a second diamond. Then select a triangle or square. You now have a bigger selection box that covers a larger area. Now if you move the selection box, you will find that only the items selected are moved. This has the effect of making it almost impossible to select the whole image that you are attempting to copy. For what it is worth, MS Office works the same way as OOo and it is still a real pain in the A**. Here is one area that OOo can be better than MS Office. I used to make forms in Paradox for Windows and if you selected multiple items, each was boxed seperatly. You knew what was acutually selected. A drag window to select multiple items would be really help in these situations. Another option would be a selection to convert the objects into a Drawing file. This option would allow the graph or object to be dealt with as a Drawing file.
Created attachment 24934 [details] Example for need to improve selection
Created attachment 24935 [details] Example of need to improve selection of an image.
Reassigned to requirements. This is about enhancing the selection of objects and frames together in OO Writer.
OpenOffice.org Issue Tracker - Feedback Request. The Issue you raised is currently assigned to 'Requirements' pending review, but has not been updated within the last 3 years. Please consider re-testing with one of the latest versions of OOo, as the problem(s) may have already been addressed. Either use the recent stable version: http://download.openoffice.org/index.html or consider trying the new OOo 3 BETA (still in testing): http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta/ Please report back the outcome so this Issue may be Closed or Progressed as necessary - otherwise it may be Resolved as Invalid in the future. You may also wish to search for (and note) any duplicates of this Issue that may have advanced further by checking the Issue Tracker: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/query.cgi Many thanks, Andrew Cleaning-up and Closing old Issues as part of: ~ The Grand Bug Squash, pre v3 ~ http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/announcementbeta.html
As I don't have the original documents or access to MS Office, it is hard to test the full aspects of this problem. Testing the two examples that I submitted, I still cannot select the whole chart and copy or move to a different location or even resize. There is no way to pic a box that encapsulates or groups all the elements into a single entity for moving or copying. This is using OOo 2.3 - Linux F8 rpm. I can select each individual item and move those. I can use a drag box to select most items and capture those to move. But there is no way that I can get all items into the same drag box. I cannot capture the text this way. If you take example one and using the mouse, click on the left button and select all the times that you can. You now end up with a larger selection box, even though it is over the text, resize the box and the text will remain in its own location and size. Selection of the text is not happening with the mouse when trying to capture all the items related to the chart. This is still an issue.