Calc/Features/Sheet tab color

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Sheet tab color

Specification Status
Author Kohei Yoshida
Last Change See wiki history
Status In progress in CWS calctabcolor  .

Abstract

Calc's sheet tab now supports non-default background color. When a sheet tab has a non-default color, Calc displays a sliver of its color below the name if the sheet that the tab is associated with is active. For all the other tabs that are associated with the non-active sheets, their non-default color becomes their respective background color.

References

Reference Document Check Location (URL)
Issue ID (required) available Issue 5560
Test case specification (required) n/a

Contacts

Role Name E-Mail Address
Developer Kohei Yoshida kyoshida@novell.com
Quality Assurance Oliver Craemer Oliver.Craemer@Sun.COM
Documentation up for grabs!
User Experience up for grabs!

Detailed Specification

Original specification authored by Daniel Watson is available here. The specification presented here only covers parts that are relevant for QA purposes.

When a sheet tab has a non-default color, Calc displays a sliver of its color immediately below the sheet name if the associated sheet is active. For all the other tabs of the non-active sheets, their non-default color becomes their respective background color. When the color of a tab is Default, the color is determined by the application which may vary with system's desktop theme when one is available.

The following screenshot depicts sheets tabs with non-default colors.

Colored sheet tabs

Menu

New menu entry in the toolbar menu.

This feature introduce a new menu entry Tab Color... under Format > Sheet which launches the Tab color dialog when selected. This menu item is disabled when the active sheet is protected.

Context menu

New menu entry in the context menu.

The context menu for the sheet tabs now has a new entry Tab Color... which launches the Tab color dialog when selected. This new menu entry is present only when the active sheet is not protected.

Tab color dialog

Tab color dialog.

The Tab color dialog consists of a number of pre-defined colors and the option for the Default color. A new color gets applied to the tabs of all selected sheet, but the color will not get applied to the tabs of protected sheets in case one or more of the selected sheets are protected.

Either double-clicking a color directly, or hitting ENTER while a color is selected assigns that color to the selected tab(s) and dismisses the dialog.

The color table that this dialog contains can be edited in the Colors page of the Options dialog (Tools > Options).

API

This feature introduces a new optional property TabColor to the com.sun.star.sheet.Spreadsheet service. This property is of type com.sun.star.util.Color.

Migration

N/A

Configuration

N/A

File Format

ODF

This feature requires a file format change in the ODF specification. A proposal to the ODF specification has been submitted here. In a nutshell, the sheet tab color information is stored as a table property attribute as part of the automatic table styles.

Note that the tab color attribute is only saved in the ODF format when the specified ODF format version is 1.2 Extended.

Excel

The tab colors are loaded from and saved to the BIFF 8 binary Excel (xls) documents, and are loaded from the OOXML Spreadsheet (xlsx) documents.

Open Issues

When you open an ods document with colored tabs, re-saving that after you switch the desired ODF version to the standard 1.2 will strip the tab colors only for the modified sheets. This is because Calc caches the XML streams of non-modified sheets and re-uses them during export instead of regenerating the XML structure of all sheets, for performance reasons. What Calc should do under such scenarios is unclear.

Credits

A major part of this feature was developed by Daniel Watson.

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