Attachment NVDA Columns.xlsx added by csm120 on 2015-10-01 23:33
Description:
Excel spreadsheet with columns set to read in NVDA

Comment 1 by jteh on 2015-10-02 09:16
This is because Excel defines a blank row or column to indicate a new region. In order to facilitate headers for different regions, NVDA honours this and only reports headers within the region.

That said, this seems to be causing a lot of confusion and I wonder whether we need to drop the region support. The reality is that regardless of whether Excel defines these as new regions, users (rightly or wrongly) don't seem to care.

Comment 2 by bramd on 2015-10-26 22:34
The region support is useful in some situations. We might "extend" the search for headers to regions left/above of the current region if the current region doesn't define headers? This might be what users expect and still allows for per region headers. That being said, this is just from a functional perspective and I don't know if there are any technical issues preventing this.

This was incubated months ago in b283199, but the automated script didn't catch it for some reason.

There are a couple of additional things that are needed for this:

• If one defines two sets of headers, the first set will be read as the headers when moving over the second set of headers. For example, if a1 and c1 are set as column headers, a1 will be read as a header when moving from c2 to c1. We shouldn't search for a header in the same axis for a cell which is a header in that axis itself.
• NVDA 2014.3 RC1 not reading a specific Excel spreadsheet #4409 fixed an issue which caused exceptions in a protected sheet if reporting of headers was enabled. I think (but am not sure) that this just disables headers, rather than just disabling region checks. That case needs to be checked.

Incubated in c7ec64c.

Incubated in 6637f7f.

Note: c14f16e in next on 12 April reverted 35f0f0d.