[Solved] Cell comment in pinned side window, solution exist?

[karim.chaaban]

Hello,

I hope you are well.
I hope someone can help me with this. I looked around for a bit, but could not find a solution. I am not sure either if what I am looking for exists. Thanks in advance for your help.

Description of problem :
- I use the comment feature in open office calc to write down a comment associated with a cell
- I encountered the issue of writing a long note that takes a large real estate of the screen
- It is difficult to manage reading that large note when you have the freeze option on the first few columns
> i have to micro manage the note size & position so display the entire note, or else it doesn't
> it is time consuming process
- I expect to do this often, so this seems worth as time optimization

Solution needed :
- I am looking for a solution similar to the way the properties window is pinned (in my case) on the right, I can hide it easily if I wish, or click on the side (tiny 5 dots between 2 arrows) so it appears
- so if I scroll the document, I have my notes fixed, even if there is a freeze of columns as described above
- If I click on another cell, the note of that cell appears
- Ideally, I need the option of displaying the comment in a vertical window on the right, but also maybe in an horizontal fashion at the top or the bottom (not sure yet which configuration I will prefer the most)

Do you have a solution for my problem? The simplest solution to implement would be most appreciated. Thanks for your time. Wish you a good day.

[RoryOF]

Write your long text in a standalone OO writer file, then place a hyperlink to that file in the Calc comment.

[karim.chaaban]

Hi RoryOF, Thanks for your reply. That's an interesting solution. I will wait and see if someone else have another suggestion, I really want to keep the ability to cycle through the cells quickly without having to open a document for each cell. I will keep that solution in mind if nobody suggest an alternative, maybe someone has a solution to suggest.

For your information : If I have to use your idea, say each row is a unique client. And let's say I am documenting my phone interaction with different clients (rows) on different dates (columns), so I would have one document for each client (row), which is somewhat manageable. But having the ability to have all my comments in 1 calc document make it compact and easy to manage, and more like a system that combines the best of both worlds (oo calc for structured cells/visual display & oo writer for note taking).

[RoryOF]

Experiment has shown that an OO Comment (in Writer - nothing else tested) has a character limit of 16K characters; Ctrl clicking the hyperlink in the comment will cause OO to open it without further action on the reader's part. Comments in Calc are (from reports) somewhat uncertain in maintaining their positioning through Save and reopening of the file. It might be more stable to add a text column at the end of each row and enter your text directly into that column.

[karim.chaaban]

Hi RoryOF, Thanks for your reply. I tried your method and it worked very well, the document opens faster then I expected.

For you information : I was concerned about folder paths stopping to work if files are moved later on to a another folder. For example, when I change the location of the writer files in the hyperlink (say I have 100 writer files), I was concerned that I would have to re-do the hyperlink for all the writer files, which is time consuming. Reorganizing my folders is a real possibility, so this could have been an issue. I did a test and I was pleasantly surprised to find out the following. If you put the writer files and the calc file in the same folder, the hyperlink works as initially programmed the first time. If you move the writer file to another folder, the hyperlink breaks and the writer files don't open. The good news is if you move together the calc file and the writer files to a new folder (different then the 1st folder), then the hyperlink for the 100 writer files still work even thought the folder path has changed... this means the folder path automatically updates to the new folder path where the calc file has been moved to, which is really great. I wanted to share this maybe it would benefit somebody wanting to use this method you suggested.