GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 587084
autocompletion dropdown list for formulas
Last modified: 2010-07-21 04:15:14 UTC
When typing a formula in a cell or the expression entry widget, it would be very nifty if gnumeric could show a real-time list of matches in function names. For example, typing "=av" would start showing "average" and "averagea".
Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported into our bug tracking system, but please feel free to report any further bugs you find. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 338695 ***
Reopening as per latest comment on bug 338695, since this report here is not tied specifically to a particular implementation (ie: gtkentrycompletion) and the feature request still stands.
This would probably be the one type of autocompletionthat I would also find useful.
With gtk 2.14 or newer, a list of possible completions is shown in the function tooltip of current git (but this does not yet provide a completion)
Once the completion is unique you can now use F4 to apply it. So the number of letters required depends on the uniqueness of the prefixes, ie. ztest can be entered z-F4 while most need more characters. This problem has been fixed in the development version. The fix will be available in the next major software release. Thank you for your bug report.
Shouldn't we use the Enter key instead of F4? This is how autocompletion works in most programs (if you want to "cancel" out of the autocompletion, you use the arrow keys or Escape) and I don't think F4 would be discoverable for users. Furthermore, the Enter key is universally available, whereas the F1-F12 keys are not (on Macs, netbooks, and other devices). Also, just to be sure: this is shown in a gtk tooltip widget, so the user has no way to "select" from multiple autocompletion matches, right?
The enter (and tab ) keys are used in a spreadsheet program to end editing a cell an to move to the next cell. It would be very confusing if sometimes they would complete a started string. So we definitely will not use that key. Which spreadsheet programs are using Enter for that purpose? Excel and Gnumeric are using F3 to paste defined names from a dialog so F4 is not unusual. F4 is also used to switch between addressing styles while editing but that function is never available at the same time as completion. I can't find a function name autocompletion in Excel so they don't seem to have a standard key stroke for that.) Autocompletion of formula names in Gnumeric works the same as it has been in shells and other programs for decades. Using Enter, Esc etc assumes that you want to have a separate modal dialog to select from. If you are looking for that you can use the function selector. The last paragraph of comment 6 indicates to me that you haven't even tried this autocompletion yet. I suggest you do that first. Of course you can use your keyboard to "select" from multiple matches.
It occurred to me that you in fact may not be looking for _auto_completion but for a way to select a function name and paste it into a formula (ie. a simplified version of the formula guru). In 1.10.8 that will be available via Shift-F4.
Thanks for the clarifications (and sorry for the noise). Just wanted to make sure it wasn't overlooked. I don't have access to the git version of gnumeric to test yet, so I had to rely on the name 'tooltip' (and I thought "gtk tooltip"). My autocompletion assumptions were drawn from Excel (tab key), OOoWriter (enter key), Google Documents Spreadsheets (enter key), and pretty much every other app I've seen out there using one of those keys. From this point of view, gnumeric may feel less intuitive "among other applications that behave similarly". I also think that when an autocompletion widget shows up, it is somewhat like a modal dialog; one can expect (or not be too confused by) the fact that it requires either a validation with the Enter/Tab keys or escaping with the Esc/arrow keys. To me, this wouldn't make everything confusing and throw society upside down; if the user actually expected to "exit the cell editing entry and move one cell down by pressing Enter", the worst result is that the entry would get autocompleted and the user would have to press Enter a second time. I doubt that it's a huge unexpected side-effect, but at the end of the day, you be the judge (as long as F4 is easily discoverable).
Oh, and I forgot to list OOoCalc in that list (which uses the Enter key to autocomplete).
Jean-Francois, If I run OOoCalc and start entering =ind in a cell and then type enter it simply closes the cell and moves down to the next cell leaving =ind in the first cell (which of course evaluates to #NAME?). So no auto- or any other completion. How do you get completion using "enter"? (I am pretty sure that happens in Excel with tab but I can't try that out here.)
Not sure about "ind", but if I type "=so", a tooltip appears and by simply hitting Enter, it autocompletes to "=SOMME()" and places the cursor between the parentheses. Note: SOMME is the French version of SUM; who the hell thought that localizing function names was a good idea? I'm glad GNUmeric lets me enter English function names :)
I guess OOo doesn't have any of the OpenFormula functions INDEX and INDIRECT so nothing happened when I tried "ind". I think you will prefer Gnumeric's completion tooltips over OOo's.