Bug 83947 - TRACK CHANGES: No visual indication that a tracked change has a comment
Summary: TRACK CHANGES: No visual indication that a tracked change has a comment
Status: NEW
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: Writer (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: Other All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: needsDevEval, topicUI
Depends on:
Blocks: Track-Changes
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Reported: 2014-09-16 21:17 UTC by Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired)
Modified: 2018-04-10 19:15 UTC (History)
2 users (show)

See Also:
Crash report or crash signature:


Attachments
sample doc with change comment the first change (10.84 KB, application/vnd.oasis.opendocument.text)
2014-09-21 18:43 UTC, Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired)
Details
track change comment only visible in the accept and reject dialog (38.36 KB, image/png)
2014-09-21 18:45 UTC, Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired)
Details

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Description Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-09-16 21:17:23 UTC
When a tracked change has a comment, the only means of knowing this is through the 'Accept or Reject' dialog (.uno:AcceptTrackedChanges). So i'd like to suggest that track change comments appear similar to regular comments in the commnets column but wouldnt be printable and/or some visual indication be given next to the tracked change (similar to how calc has the red square in the upper right corner), and that the comment appears in the tooltip that appears when you hover over a tracked change.
Comment 1 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-09-21 18:43:56 UTC
Created attachment 106613 [details]
sample doc with change comment the first change
Comment 2 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-09-21 18:45:06 UTC
Created attachment 106614 [details]
track change comment only visible in the accept and reject dialog
Comment 3 Luke 2014-09-24 02:57:57 UTC
I agree that the track change comments lack visibility. I don't think adding them to the hovering tooltips is the right way to address this since tooltips are also not easily discoverable. My preference would be to put the comments on the side with the regular comments when the document is in Show Change view. 

Another option would be to make a track changes sidebar or vertical panel. This could include all of the buttons from the toolbar plus a listing of the changes and their comments in chronological order.
Comment 4 A (Andy) 2014-12-24 23:25:18 UTC
@Jay: In your attached WRITER document I don't see any comment on the changes?

I added a comment on the first change via the Track Changes toolbar.
-> Issue reproducible with LO 4.4.0.0.beta1 (Win 8.1).

-> I would agree, the visibility of comments on changes should be improved.
Comment 5 Yousuf Philips (jay) (retired) 2014-12-25 07:30:00 UTC
(In reply to Luke from comment #3)
> I agree that the track change comments lack visibility. I don't think adding
> them to the hovering tooltips is the right way to address this since
> tooltips are also not easily discoverable.

As tooltips appear within a second after hovering over track change text, having it also included here is useful to users that normally do look at the tooltip.

> My preference would be to put the
> comments on the side with the regular comments when the document is in Show
> Change view.

Yes i think this would be the most ideal and most visible, but we'd have to distinguish track change comments from regular comments in some way, as documents can have both.

> Another option would be to make a track changes sidebar or vertical panel.
> This could include all of the buttons from the toolbar plus a listing of the
> changes and their comments in chronological order.

Yes i see that MS Word shows it in these two views. The track changes sidebar was recently implemented after also being suggested by Heiko in a design meeting and Kendy pushed it in.

(In reply to A (Andy) from comment #4)
> @Jay: In your attached WRITER document I don't see any comment on the
> changes?

Sorry about that. :D
Comment 6 Heiko Tietze 2016-08-10 10:11:06 UTC
Adding TC comments to the TC tooltips could be an EASYHACK. 

Showing them with ordinary comments could be misleading, different colors (as an idea for discrimination) are used when various users comment, and placing them to the left of the document or showing with another form (e.g. balloon) might be not easy to implement.

The proposal for redesign [1] discusses also the idea of comments in the sidebar which might be the best solution.

Moving this ticket forward to Writer.

[1] http://user-prompt.com/de/tracking-changes-with-libreoffice/
Comment 7 Luke 2018-04-09 23:57:26 UTC
(In reply to Heiko Tietze from comment #6)
> Adding TC comments to the TC tooltips could be an EASYHACK. 

If we're going sacrifice UX for ease of implementation, we should make this optional and possible to disable. See bug 114523, as an example of how users hate the tooltips UI. 

If a user wants information, it should be readily available in a nice format. Tooltips not only make you wait, they are hard to activate. They can also be very annoying when they activate accidentally based on where you leave the mouse. 

The right way to do this is either on the on the side with the regular comments and/or in the sidebar.