Bug 148154 - Reordering Conditional Formats in Manage CF dialog
Summary: Reordering Conditional Formats in Manage CF dialog
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Calc (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
7.3.1.3 release
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
: 153900 160651 (view as bug list)
Depends on:
Blocks: Conditional-Formatting-Managing
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2022-03-23 23:50 UTC by Carl2333
Modified: 2024-06-03 20:43 UTC (History)
8 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
Manage conditions dialog with more than one condition (21.46 KB, image/png)
2022-10-07 08:28 UTC, Heiko Tietze
Details

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Description Carl2333 2022-03-23 23:50:04 UTC
Description:
Hello,

I am using LibreOffice 7.3.1 and working on sheets using Calc.

Under “Format” > “Conditional” > “Manage…”, there is a list of Conditional Formats. When “Edit…” is clicked, a list of Conditions will show up. The order of Conditions can, indeed, be changed by the buttons labeled “Up” and “Down”. However, the order of Conditional Formats cannot be changed, as there does not exist similar buttons in the first dialog, but only in the second one.

The order of Conditional Formats affects their priority, which then affects the specific formats being applied. Can the feature be added to allow the rearranging of the order of Conditional Formats without removing and adding them one by one?

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Go to “Format” > “Conditional” > “Manage…”.
2. Add several Conditional Formats.
3. Attempt to rearrange said Conditional Formats.

Actual Results:
There exist no option to rearrange the order of Conditional Formats.

Expected Results:
The order of Conditional Formats can be rearranged through drag and drop or buttons.


Reproducible: Always


User Profile Reset: No



Additional Info:
There has been several bug reports in the past that mention a similar feature request, however it should be noted that this request is different and concerns a feature that is not yet available in the newest release at the time of writing.
Comment 1 Roman Kuznetsov 2022-10-06 19:07:00 UTC
UX-team, your opinion here?
Comment 2 Heiko Tietze 2022-10-07 08:28:32 UTC
Created attachment 182896 [details]
Manage conditions dialog with more than one condition

The CF management dialog shows all conditions in a spreadsheet, for example what is applied to A1:A5 and another for B1:B5. Having two CF for one range sounds like abusing the dialog to easily switch between presets, which might be a use case itself.

On the other hand I see no way to suppress multiple CF at one range. And adding up/down interaction is cheap and simple. Perhaps we should do it as icon-only buttons right of the list to not spam the dialog with buttons.
Comment 3 m_a_riosv 2023-03-01 22:32:35 UTC
*** Bug 153900 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 4 Alistair Saywell 2023-05-14 22:52:30 UTC
Following comments on https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/calc-how-to-change-conditional-formatting-priority/91488 it seems that the list of conditions is purely alphabetical and does not indicate precedence.

In Manage Conditional Formatting it looks as if the Highlighted condition is first in order of applying.

For most users, including myself until today, it is not immediately obvious which condition takes precedence just from the appearance of the Manage Conditional Formatting dialogue. This is also against the expectation of the original bug post.

Sample with differing order of creation at https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/calc-how-to-change-conditional-formatting-priority/91488/6?u=earnestal
Comment 5 m_a_riosv 2024-04-13 20:39:57 UTC
*** Bug 160651 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Comment 6 barruel 2024-06-03 20:43:06 UTC
It is worth noticing that the condition being applied is always the matching condition with an older creation date.

This is a nightmare when it comes to manage even an amount as small as 2 o 3 overlapping ranges.

I've just found out that editing the conditions for a range or even the range itself doesn't change the creation date of the rule. Because there is no way to debug the priority of the rules, this leads to the weird situation that it becomes easier and faster to delete the whole range than to edit it, which won't change priority because the ranges, even when edited, keep their original creation date and thus the priority remains unchanged.

In the current state of the main "Manage conditional formatting" dialog, it is impossible to tell which is the priority with which the ranges (with their set of rules) are being applied. If not a way to change the priorities in such dialog, at least an indication of which range is older and is then taking priority is absolutely needed, because otherwise the is no point in changing the ranges when there are overlapping ranges involved. Even with a couple of up and down buttons to reorder the ranges as proposed above, they would be meaningless if the creation date of the range (which determines its priority) or a number showing the priority is not shown.