Bug 170570 - Better way to display many precedents and dependents (Detective)
Summary: Better way to display many precedents and dependents (Detective)
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: needsUXEval
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2026-02-02 14:37 UTC by Buovjaga
Modified: 2026-02-02 18:42 UTC (History)
1 user (show)

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Description Buovjaga 2026-02-02 14:37:01 UTC
1. Open attachment 203151 [details]
2. Go to cell AB2
3. Tools - Detective - Trace Dependents

Observe thicket of arrows.

Noel said in bug 168696 comment 16:
"I agree that we need a better strategy for drawing arrows when the numbers get high, probably merging destinations into a bounding box and having one arrow per destination bounding box would be good.

Doing that might be suitable as a G-Soc or similar project, it is mostly contained to one or two files in writer, and does not touch large amounts of our internal API."

This is not really a case of hierarchy, but perhaps "bundling" of the lines for a cleaner result would be interesting to explore as seen in https://www.data-to-viz.com/graph/edge_bundling.html
Comment 1 ady 2026-02-02 17:53:10 UTC
FWIW, for the case of Precedents, there is an extension named "Show active cell's references", that shows the list of cells that are Precedents of the selected cell (and clicking on one of the addresses on the resulting list takes you there). This extension is an alternative to the Precedents arrows.

Finding (and moving to) Precedents is the easier Detective (aka Trace) case. Unfortunately, the most relevant Detective (Trace) function is finding the (usually unknown) Dependent cells (especially on other worksheets and opened workbooks – there is an old request-for-enhancement for that).
Comment 2 Buovjaga 2026-02-02 18:42:52 UTC
(In reply to ady from comment #1)
> FWIW, for the case of Precedents, there is an extension named "Show active
> cell's references", that shows the list of cells that are Precedents of the
> selected cell (and clicking on one of the addresses on the resulting list
> takes you there). This extension is an alternative to the Precedents arrows.

https://extensions.libreoffice.org/en/extensions/show/99424