Why do you think you should be able to open the pop up menu on the sheet tabs while you have a sheet object selected?

Because it's convenient, isn't it? If you right click on an other object than the selected one, the other is selected and the menu is opened for it. So why different behavior for tabs? The object can be deselected on this action, if that helps.

Quite many things do not work when an object is selected, actually. Ctrl/S was the worst one (and fixed quite fast), Ctrl/Z (bug 387853) is one of the most irritating (in chart properties, you change something and want to set it back, then you need go out of properties, deselect the chart, use Ctrl/Z and most probably double click the chart to continue with properties). All this is about convenience aka usability.

I think I should be able to pop up the menu on the sheet tabs when I have a sheet obejct selected because:

1. Making a new sheet is something unrelated to what is selected on this sheet.  Having an object selected on this sheet shouldn't prevent me from managing sheets, because in my workflow I was already finished with this sheet.  For a while I did not know why the popup menu wasn't popping up, and I found it was confusing.  As a workaround I tried right-clicking on other sheet tabs, and I was lucky to find one that didn't happen to have an object selected on it.  Making a new sheet just happened to be the operation I was looking for.  I'm sure there are valid rationales for accessing all of the other actions in the sheet pop up menu.  It really surprised me that sheet-level operations were disabled because of something as innocuous as having an "object" selected on that sheet.  Again, I had created the chart and I was done with this sheet.  The created chart was selected by default, and consequently the pop up menu wouldn't come up.

2. The context menu pops up when cells are selected.  You'll probably say that cells aren't objects... but to the poor user the cell is another thing on the sheet with a box around it, and it is indeed selected.  When I have a cell selected, or many cells selected I can access the pop up menu on sheet tabs.  The programmer's idea of an "object" has been somehow separated into something that specifically means "chart" or "image" that appears on the sheet with a dotted black lines and white balls.  This conflicts with the general idea of an object on the sheet (e.g. cells).  

3. Selecting chart doesn't mean I'm editing the sheet.
If I'm editing a cell, should I be able to access the sheet level operations?  No, I wouldn't expect so, because the sheet is in the midst of being edited.  The programmer seems to think that the sheet is being edited because I have selected an image or chart object.  I think this is faulty logic because selecting is something you do /before/ editing objects.


I hope this answers your need for info.

Vladimir: I don't really understand your second paragraph. The changes in the properties dialog are not applied until you click "apply" and the dialog closes. So if undo were accessible it still would not undo unapplied changes in the dialog but items from the undo chain. So in the moment you would just need to "cancel" the dialog.

I don't know of any program with an apply/cancel style dialog in which "undo" would undo unapplied changes in the dialog.

Well, you are right, I am mixing together two different things in that paragraph. First thing is a desire to have undo in the properties before apply is pressed, second that undo and others do not work when a chart is selected. 

Quite often I want to undo just one-two last of few not applied changes, e.g. movements done in the small window of 'customize chart'. When I learned that I can move in there Legend and Title with mouse, I started to use this possibility. Then I learned that often I move PlotXY1 instead of Legend, and if this was done after say, scale adjustments, I better manually restore Auto positioning instead of canceling or undoing.

Now about 'others' in 'undo and others' above. One is tabs described in this bug report. Some more: in Excel you can change font properties of all parts of a chart (or only of a selected part e.g. Legend) in the normal font toolbar or with a hotkey. This would be nice to have. I mean, for all parts together since we have no selection of parts. Similarly, formats can be applied to all scale labels, colors to all texts and lines, etc. The same way as they are applied to all selected cells.

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.