Bug 39180

Summary:	UI: missing visual cursor-hint when a cell is draggable.
Product:	LibreOffice	Reporter:	Richard Neill <xorg>
Component:	Calc	Assignee:	Not Assigned <libreoffice-bugs>
Status:	NEW ---
Severity:	enhancement	CC:	jarl.arntzen, jeffdchang, LibreOffice, lists, yfjiang
Priority:	medium
Version:	3.3.2 release
Hardware:	Other
OS:	All
Whiteboard:
Crash report or crash signature:		Regression By:
Bug Depends on:
Bug Blocks:	109139

Description Richard Neill 2011-07-12 16:42:13 UTC

In the spreadsheet, when I click a cell (or row), that cell becomes highlighted with a thick black border, with a black square on the bottom-right.

|---------|
|  cell   |
|---------#


1. If I move the mouse over the cell, in any (non-special) position, the cursor remains the standard arrow.

2. If I put the mouse over the bottom-right square, the cursor changes to a "+", to indicate that I can use auto-fill or auto-delete.

3. BUT, if I move the mouse over the black border of the cell, (which would be for dragging the cell/row), the cursor does not change. I think it should change (usually, to the "hand" icon).

imho, this is a major usability bug, though it should be trivial to fix!

Comment 1 Jeffrey 2011-07-12 19:03:40 UTC

I guess this is reproducible on LibreOffice 3.4  340m1(Build:103) and master. I will mark this as an enhancement.

Comment 2 Rainer Bielefeld Retired 2011-07-12 23:47:01 UTC

[Reproducible] with "LibreOffice 3.4.1  - WIN7  Home Premium (64bit) German UI [OOO340m1 (Build:103)]". 

A) I never heard about this feature before. Until today, to drag/drop a single cell, I followed the instructions from
<http://help.libreoffice.org/Calc/Selecting_Multiple_Cells#Mark_a_single_cell> and highlighted the cell before drag / drop.

B) I can't find any Help text concerning the possibility presented by reporter. Additionally that works with very los reliability for me, may be 5%, then when I click on cell cursor cell (or mostly 2 cells) become highlighted and I can drag / drop cell with contents.

C) So for first we need a decision whether that "select by click on cell cursor" really is an existing feature or only a bug, that has to be fixed.

D) If yes, Function has to be fixed that it is reliable, mouse cursor reaction has to me modified, and Help / documentation has to be modified.

@David:
Please add to help if necessary


@Kohei
Please feel free to reassign if it’s not your area or if provided information is not sufficient.

Comment 3 Richard Neill 2011-07-13 07:34:20 UTC

Re #3, the help docs I saw (which is the first google hit for "open office drag row") is: 
http://www.oooninja.com/2008/03/drag-drop-move-copy-link-cells-calc.html

Imho, this is definitely a useful feature, and it is also (iirc) the standard way of doing it in Excel. However, it's currently a bit hit-and-miss (and not very discoverable), because the cursor shape doesn't make it obvious what's happening.

Comment 4 David Nelson 2011-07-27 01:35:08 UTC

I tried this myself and it works. But maybe a cursor shape change on hovering and/or a tool tip would be helpful? The downside of a tool tip in UX terms would be that it could also be user-unfriendly to have such tool tips popping up every time you move your mouse/pointing device... Opinions about this?
 
In any case, there is an incidence for documentation: the behavior is not documented in either the Calc guide or the Getting Started guide. A quick consultation of those docs did not show any proper documentation of the concept of moving cells by dragging and dropping. Same applies for the online help. The docs team would need to fix that.

I'm forwarding this bug to the docs ML for team tracking, discussion and action.

Comment 5 Richard Neill 2013-02-20 19:29:15 UTC

For a simple inspiration, please take a look at how google docs does it.

They change the cursor to a hand shape when the pointer is in the right place over the middle of an active cell.
 
This is much more user friendly.

Comment 6 Jarl Arntzen 2017-03-04 21:24:20 UTC

Moving columns, rows or multiple cells is fully possible.
However, the method for moving a single cell is very hard to discover.

A simple and easy solution would be to:
1. Any single cell clicked is set to state "selected" to allow dragging (the same way cell range selections work)
2. Show cursor of type "draggable" as an indication that the selected cell(s) are draggable.

As it happens, moving a single cell is currently possible but only by utilising a workaround which involves a sequence of interactions which are very hard to discover adding to the fact that as a user of Calc one would expect a single cell to be as easily draggable as any cell range selection.