[chaley]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Am I right in assuming that one cannot attach multiple icons to a single column - be good if one could.

Nope. The icon stuff uses the standard Qt table widgets that permit one icon per cell. Changing this would be lots of work, and might run quite slowly.

One possibility: create a column per icon using one of the types that does not appear in the tag browser, e.g., int. This sort of column has almost zero impact on calibre's performance. You would leave the value empty (or perhaps not) and set the width to be just enough to contain the icon. Everything would line up nicely, and the pattern of icons might convey as much information as the icons themselves.

Whilst doing this and a couple of related changes, I inadvertently ticked a long text column in the Preferences->Custom Columns dialogue. I was under the impression that such columns cannot be shown in the spreadsheet so I was shocked to see the column name sitting in the column titles.

Captain Renault: I am shocked, shocked to find long text going in here!

Obviously you cant see much of the content, but if you hover on it then its content shows as a 'tool tip', and if you double click or F2 on it you can edit it in a free standing comment editor.

Now I can edit everything, except Comments, from the spreadsheet

Which begs the question, if custom comment columns can appear in the spreadsheet and be edited from within it, then why not the built in Comments column - why should it be an exception.

When the long text custom column type was added, it was substantially more work to prevent them from being displayed on the spreadsheet than it was to let them show and have F2 work correctly, and I can be very lazy at times. As regards the standard column, it would be a fair amount of work to add them to the spreadsheet, and no one has cared enough to do it.