When reviewing track changes the Manager dialog the list of changes can be sorted by Action, Author, Date and comments. The order in these list does not follow the order of appearance in the document. As consequence, approve/reject individual changes forces the cursor to jump back and forth in the document turning the revision process tedious because it breaks the comprehension of the text. Actual results -------------- When approving/reject changes, the cursor jumps back and forth in the document, in the order displayed in the Manager dialog. Expected results ---------------- The list of changes should follow the order appearance of the text, in which the changes can be better understood by the reviewer and revision process quicker. Further comments ---------------- As discussed with Heiko, An additional column in the Manager can sort the changes in the appearance order, making it easier to review.
Sorting according different needs makes sense. So we should keep that. But an opportunity to sort by the appearance in the document is missing. Can we perhaps add an empty column, label it #, and sort respectively? Jim, you have done some work around TC recently. What do you think? According Olivier, a workaround to get back to the sequential sorting is to close and reopen the document.
While looking at adding an order column I noticed the behavior of the Manage Changes dialog/panel context menu Sort By > Document Position doesn't seem to behave as expected. For me, gtk sorts by the Action column. x11 and qt do something other than expected. Here is a link to a patch that provides sort by document position results that seem correct to me: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/170059
Created attachment 195174 [details] Addition of a drop down box to select sort by method. Here is demo of an alternative to the addition of a position column.
(In reply to Jim Raykowski from comment #3) > Created attachment 195174 [details] > Addition of a drop down box to select sort by method. > > Here is demo of an alternative to the addition of a position column. The additional controls look clumsy to me. How about adding a first column to the tree view, with the caption # for instance and no content, and just sort by click. The context menu is also a good option.
Jim Raykowski committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/d9856b2ca5f3e80c978bd34330648b6345765202 tdf#161811 related: Fix change manager dialog context popup menu It will be available in 25.2.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.
Created attachment 195209 [details] screen shot of sort by control at the top of the dialog/panel Maybe slightly less clumsy than having the control at the bottom. I've no real love for it myself. Codewise, I struggle with the sort by unfilled column idea.
We may argue with accessibility, which is not given with click on the column header. Please take care to synchronize the column header click interaction with the dropdown. Perhaps just disable it.
Link to a patch that adds a drop down control to the Writer Manage Changes dialog/sidebar panel that can be used to select how the changes list is sorted: https://gerrit.libreoffice.org/c/core/+/170390 Header click and drop down select are synchronized. @Heiko, Does "Perhaps just disable it." refer to perhaps disabling the ability to sort by header click? Should Calc 'Manage Changes' dialog also have this drop down sort control?
(In reply to Jim Raykowski from comment #8) > @Heiko, Does "Perhaps just disable it." refer to perhaps disabling the > ability to sort by header click? That was my idea. But you took care of the synchronization and everything works well. One can also sort the sidebar by position and the dialog by author, which adds some icing on the cake. > Should Calc 'Manage Changes' dialog also have this drop down sort control? Calc has a Position tab, no need to put effort into it.
Jim Raykowski committed a patch related to this issue. It has been pushed to "master": https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/2c46d3c2ff6bbdcd387771f823aa5b3b812c80a8 tdf#161811 Changes in TC manager dialog should be in order of It will be available in 25.2.0. The patch should be included in the daily builds available at https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More information about daily builds can be found at: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.