Good morning, (or whatever time it is where
you are, I’m not really sure). Anyway, Thanks so much for
writing back. I’ll check out that github thing, never heard
of it. And I’ll send you both spreadsheets so you can have a
look. The one that’s called my books data base a-l is the one
where half the columns don’t read properly, with crossing by
night showing as “title”, and suspense showing instead of the
column title genre. The spreadsheet called my books data base
m-z works fine. And now I’m having trouble with NVDA and
Outlook, where I’m happily typing along and NVDA freezes and
when I get it back I’ve lost the message I’ve been typing!
I’m back in Jaws now, never thought I’d have to do that!
Things were fine until yesterday when I had a guy from
Microsoft accessibility reinstall my NVDA in hopes that that
would fix the excel issue. This has been a struggle, I can
tell you.
Anyway, attached are the two spreadsheets,
see what you think. And I do have whatsapp, so maybe if you
want, we could talk that way. We Excel people need to stick
together! My mobile number is 301-922-2994. Those of us in
the United States are so provincial, that I haven’t a clue
about a country code, sorry.
Jane
Great to meet you, jane!
I appreciate the
difficulty with wading through full data in the cell before
getting the feedback on which column is in focus. I believe
there is pressure on the programmers to bring in a change to
allow the user to choose whether to have column title before
the data or after.
Have a look through this
discussion on Github:
https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/4629
NVDA is an ongoing
project and bits are being developed all the time. It seems
there was early pressure to give the data before the column
title but that might have been because cell coordinates were
also getting in the way. It is a good idea to get familiar
with Github so that you can raise issues with the developers
and build a case within the community of developers and
users.
I am puzzled by your
problem on the second worksheet. Could you forward it to me
privately at my email below and let me see what is
happening? I promise to destroy it after I understand what
is happening and will, of course, keep it private.
There is no logical
reason why the column title would drop to the second row
without actually being assigned to that row before the first
row was inserted. Guessing is futile! I would need to run
through the actual table.
Alternatively, you could
ring my mobile in Facetime or WhatsApp and I could walk
through the issue with you with NVDA turned on and speaking.
Hi Cearbhall,
Thanks so much for writing, it’s so great
to talk to someone who uses Excel as much as I do! Let me see
if I can explain my problem:
I have two spreadsheets that are the same,
except that one has books a-l and the other has books m-z,
each is over ten thousand records. One spreadsheet reads
fine, with the titles in row 1 and the data starting in row
2. In the other spreadsheet, moving across, some of the
column titles read fine, but about half of them, the NVDA
reads the data from row 2, the first line of data, as the
title. I followed what the user guide said and put my cursor
in b1 and hit insert-shift-C, and that worked for most of my
spreadsheets, but not for this one. So I plunked the data
from the bad spreadsheet onto the bottom of the good one, so
now I have one spreadsheet with 29207 records in it, and the
column titles read fine.
My problem now is that I wish I could get
NVDA to read the column title before the data instead of after
it. Is there any way to do that?
Thanks so much for your help!
Happy Excelling!
Jane
Hi Jane,
I am a keen user of
Excel with NVDA. I use it almost every day. I would be happy
to answer any queries you have.
I wonder exactly what
problem you are finding with column headings?
I note that you start
your columns one column in and one row down from the top.
That is no problem. Place your cursor on cell b2 and press
NVDA+shift+c. This will fix b2 as the start of the column
headings. If there is a break in row 2, the column title
will stop being spoken with the last column before the
break. Simply move the cursor on row 2 to the right until
you get to the first filled cell after the break and press
control+shift+c again. This will set the whole row to be the
next set of column headings until the next empty cell in row
2. Repeat this until all the column cells are enabled as
column headings. Each column will be echoed even if you are
moving on the 1048576th row of the table.
The trick is to watch
the gaps.
Let me know if this
solves your difficulty and let me know if I can answer any
more questions for you! I write complex formulas and macros
with no problem using NVDA. It is a great product!
I don’t use row titles, just column titles
in row 1. I usually have column A blank, just because that’s
how I did it in WindowEyes. So my data starts in B2, and goes
from b2 to p17288. Not sure what else I can do at this
point. I’d sure hate to have to go back to jaws, but if I
can’t read the column titles of my big spreadsheets, I may
have to.
