Bug 168689 - Add preview functionality to the Sort Options tab
Summary: Add preview functionality to the Sort Options tab
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Calc (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords:
Depends on:
Blocks: Sorting
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2025-10-04 08:32 UTC by Eyal Rozenberg
Modified: 2025-10-08 22:01 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments

Note You need to log in before you can comment on or make changes to this bug.
Description Eyal Rozenberg 2025-10-04 08:32:21 UTC
When playing with sort options, it would be useful to see what they actually mean in action.

One possibility is to apply the sort for previewing purposes on the actual data, in the spreadsheet. This would have the benefit of not expanding the dialog, and also being able to preview the sort key choice. If we are worried about the performance impact, we could have the preview be controlled by a toggle on the dialog, e.g. "Show Preview" or "Preview Result" - and even have it off by default.

Another possibility is to have some mock data shown before and after sorting. This is more relevant to the Sort Options tab only, and would allow us to only have a single column, unsorted + sorted, so not to take up a lot of space (and it could be columnar always). A preview would need:

* A pair of cells whose order would switch based on case sensitivity, e.g. "F" and "g".
* A pair of cells whose order would switch based on whether or not we parsed numbers in them, e.g. "B9" vs "B10".
* A pair of cells whose order would switch based on whether or not we parsed the numbers in them with a fractional part
* A pair of cells with textual values such that a different choice of locale would switch their orders, when parsing numbers, e.g. "1,200" and "1.200"
* Probably _no_ need to include values corresponding to the custom sort order.

... but we should try to use the same values in more than one of these pairings.