Setting Automatic row and column header reading does not work in Excel with UIA enabled

[msviolafangirl]

Steps to reproduce:

1. Go to advanced settings and tick "Use UI Automation in Excel spreadsheets) option
2. Open an Excel spreadsheet.
3. Enter text in a cell.
4. On the cell where you just entered text, press NVDA+shift+C to make it a column header.

Actual behavior:

When I press NVDA+shift+C or NVDA+shift+R to set automatic row or column header reading in Excel with UI automation enabled, I wind up in an edit box to edit the contents of the cell instead of creating row and column headers for automatic reading. Note that this is not at all a problem when UI automation support is disabled.

Expected behavior:

Pressing NVDA+shift+C or NVDA+shift+R should set automatic row and column header reading.

System configuration

NVDA installed/portable/running from source:

Installed.

NVDA version:

2021.2

Windows version:

Windows 10 21H1 x64 buiold 19043.1237

Name and version of other software in use when reproducing the issue:

Excel 16/365

Other information about your system:

Other questions

Does the issue still occur after restarting your computer?

yes

Have you tried any other versions of NVDA? If so, please report their behaviors.

no

If NVDA add-ons are disabled, is your problem still occurring?

yes

Does the issue still occur after you run the COM Registration Fixing Tool in NVDA's tools menu?

yes

[jage9]

I also notice that there is no script in Input Gestures that appears to be associated with either of these commands. Keyboard help does not give information as well.

[Adriani90]

This affects also MS Word.

[CyrilleB79]

@Adriani90, reading row/columns headers in Excel UIA is currently not possible at all with NVDA; and Excel UIA is still an experimental feature that is not enabled by default. On the opposite, Word UIA is not experimental anymore and is enabled for recent versions of Word and Windows. And there is a way to have row/column headers read with Word UIA; the UX is just different than the one used for legacy Word documents (see https://github.com/nvaccess/nvda/issues/16335#issuecomment-2019830373 for more details).

So we should avoid to factorize the issues with table headers reading between Excel UIA and Word UIA (if any).