Project Proposal for Calligra

[Friedrich W. H. Kossebau]

Hi Jigar,

Am Mittwoch, 14. März 2012, 17:23:16 schrieb jigar raisinghani:
> Hi
>                Here is a project proposal which i would like to implement
> in Calligra Tables and Calligra Words.
> http://dl.dropbox.com/u/49042576/Project%20Proposal_JIGAR.pdf

Instead of opening a different window (and technically starting a separate 
program) I would prefer to be able to edit the table directly inside the 
current document, which could be the page of a document, the slide of a 
presentation or whatever other virtual object the table is inside.
At least if the table is self-contained, and not linked to some bigger table 
or other data source.

This is what I find so great about the Flake/Shape concept of Calligra, so you 
can have a document composed from all kinds of objects and are able to edit 
all the objects directly where they are located.

So instead of implementing support to extract the data of a table, start 
another program, stream the data there, wait until they are modified and 
saved, stream the data back to the current program, I think you can rather 
look into improving the existing tools for the spreadsheet shape and how they 
are provided in the different Calligra programs, so the user can do all the 
operations which are able in the spreadsheet centred program Calligra Sheets 
also on the spreadsheet shape in the other Calligra programs, e.g. doing the 
sorting or editing the formulas.
This could/would also involve support for having the shape influence the 
rulers, e.g. for the spreadsheet shape the ruler should have the row and cell 
markers A,B,C... and 1,2,3,... for the range where the shape is located. Could 
be done by having the shape also provide ruler plugins which would take over 
the handling of these areas.

While talking about tables:
currently there are two types of tables offered, once the table from the text 
editing tool and once the table from the spreadsheet shape. I wonder why these 
could not be merged somehow, and just have different tools, one for simple 
text editing and one for calculation/sorting related operations. Because the 
first is basically a subset of the latter for me. Besides the ability of the 
text table to embed another text table in a cell.
So I see a chance to do something about this at well.
A typical workflow I remember from myself: start a text table, then find out 
you want to do some operation on it, e.g. sorting the rows or calculating a 
percent value into an additional column. From my user point of view I always 
disliked it, that so far I then had to do all kind of complicated stuff to get 
my current table transformed into a table which also supports calculations, 
while having it still look like it did before.

So in my perfect world there is only one type of table in non-spreadsheet 
documents (like pages document, presentation slides, etc.) which is easily 
layoutable (like the current text table is, e.g. takes as width the whole 
width of the container element, like the text frame, by default), but also 
supports all kind of operations a spreadsheet table does.

Cheers
Friedrich