[icon-users] Scope of selection in tables etc
- From: John Harrison <john@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: icon-users@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2007 10:48:40 +0000 (GMT)
> > All you need to make sure is that you highlight the target range of
> > cells before pasting (and the target range needs to have the same
> > dimensions as your copied range).
> I didn't know about this. Highlighting the target range was the bit I'd
> not realized.
That is an interesting example of an irritating side effect of a useful
feature. If it were not possible to nest a table inside a cell, then it
would be much better not to make the user carefully match the number of
rows and columns are being copied, and just accept the cell with the cursor
as the top left corner of the range. Even though I know all this, I find
it irritating that I can't do this, and continually trip up over it. Maybe
there is some way to make the simple function (pasting over a range of
cells) easier, with the more sophisticated one (creating a new table within
a cell) as some sort of option.
A related issue is the way that EW interprets tables when importing from
Word. Unlike EW, Word allows multiple paragraphs within a cell. EW
converts such cell contents into embedded tables. It also often breaks up
tables into many tables each of one row (I've not quite worked out when
this does and doesn't happen.) In terms of rendering, both are OK, but the
problem comes when you try to edit the result. For example, if you reduce
the page margins, it is easy to expand the master table to fit, but to make
the mini tables expand to fill the larger cells, you have to select each
individually. Similarly when a table gets split into lots of individual
'row tables' it is a nightmare making changes.
In both cases, the issue seems to be that there is no way to select
multiple entities (in this case mini tables) and to have the editing scope
as the entities, rather than 'part of <wider structure>.
A similar problem applies to sections and chapters. There are many cases
where I want to make changes to multiple items (multiple one line paras
into sections that I can then fill out, multiple chapters into sections
that I can then make into a new chapter, and so on). I hope these will be
solved by the structure editor when it arrives, but I suspect that tables
are a rather different matter.
John
--
John Harrison - http://www.jaharrison.me.uk
Message sent from a British built Iyonix PC running RISC-OS 5
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