Active cell property should have a "Select all except header" option

[Mads]

In MultiColumn listboxes there is a very useful (but slightly hidden, I'm sure a lot of people do not know about it) option that allows you to set the properties of entire rows or columns in one go by setting the active row or column to -2. Similarily you can set the properties of the headers by setting the row to -1.

However, if you want to set the properties of all rows or columns *except* the header, there is no such shortcut available; you have to first use the -2 option, then use -1 to undo the action on the header...

Idea: Add a third shortcut (-3 ?) to select all except the header.

[Petru_Tarabuta]

+1. I needed this feature twice in recent times: yesterday (14 Feb 2025) and on 30 December 2024. How do I know? On those dates I recorded my thoughts in a Notepad file, planning to create a LabVIEW idea asking for this feature. Fortunately, this exact idea already exists and has accumulated a good number of kudos.

The following is a screenshot from the LabVIEW Help page of the Active Cell property.

Perhaps the simplest solution would be to add a [Row = -3, Column = -3] option that would select all cells except column headers and row headers.

It's great that the latest LabVIEW version - 2025 Q1 - has added two new properties - Word Wrap and Alternating Row Colors - to MultiColumn Listboxes, Single Column Listboxes, Tables, and Trees. This shows that the R&D team has recently worked on the MCL source code, which is great. This idea would follow on naturally from those recent improvements.

Implementing an additional option - such as [-3,-3] - to the Active Cell property would probably positively impact not only MultiColumn Listboxes, but also Single Column Listboxes, Tables, and Trees, just like the latest two additional properties have.

My two cents on the discussion above: NI should implement ideas not in decreasing order of Kudos, but in decreasing order of benefit-to-effort ratio. In other words, the key metric that makes an idea viable should be the benefit-to-effort ratio. If an idea gathered 10 kudos but it takes an estimated 16 programmer-hours to implement (including the creation of any necessary unit tests) it should be implemented ahead of an idea that gathered 100 kudos but takes an estimated 300 programmer-hours of effort.

In my opinion this idea has a high benefit-to-effort ratio. The question "Should we implement this idea?" should have a relative no-brainer answer: yes.

The benefit: MultiColumn Listboxes, Single Column Listboxes, and Trees are commonly used GUI elements. Any/all improvements would be beneficial to a large number of users, and would be steps towards making LabVIEW GUIs more competitive with other GUI frameworks such as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF).

The effort: Adding an extra option such as [-3, -3] would have virtually no side effects. This is key to making the idea self-contained, which is great. It is true that codebases that at the moment, for whatever reason and perhaps mistakenly, feed value [-3, -3] into the Active Cell property might start to behave differently. In that sense this feature could be considered a breaking change in the strictest sense of the word. However, it seems acceptable to tell people that might be affected by this something like: "Look, your code behaves differently because your code was perhaps mistakenly calling option [-3,-3], which now means something else. Please make this small change to your code and everything will be fine again."