Re: Logic behind CLOSE and EXIT.

["Darin Maxwell" <falcon wt net>]

FYI, in Excel, you can use Ctrl-Tab to cycle through open workbooks(i.e.
files) and Ctrl-PageDown/PageUp to cycle through worksheets. This works for
almost all operations you can do on workbooks from creating formulas to cut
and paste/paste special. I haven't checked to see if this behavior exists in
Gnumeric or not. The only time you can't use this method is to copy/move a
whole sheet to another file. Then, you have to use the mouse and the
worksheet's tab or do some very annoying window manipulations.

I believe the stated goal of Gnumeric is to, at least initially, replicate
the functionality in existing spreadsheet programs, if it makes sense. I
don't see anything wrong with the behavior of Windows programs like Excel in
regards to close and exit. It's logical and consistent. It's what people
coming from Windows expect. Why change something that works and is familiar
to so many people, especially at this stage of development?

The document-centric view of work flow is just a buzzword(tm). Back in the
old days in accounting, which is what I do, if you were working on a
document, you'd be going from typewriter to calculator to dictionary and
back to typewriter. You can do all of those things within a spreadsheet or
word processing program now, so the work flow is as tight as it can get
until computers get a whole lot smarter. Like when you can tell them what
you're trying to do and they do it, a la Star Trek's computer which
understands commands like "analyze the data and tell me what I'm trying to
find out". <grin>

There are a lot of things about Excel that I'd change, but this isn't one of
them. One thing I would do is make it easier to organize your worksheets.
One easy way to do that is to allow users to change the color of the
worksheet tabs. This one little thing would help make hidden workbook
structure more obvious.

Darin Maxwell
falcon@wt.net



> I see. Personally that is one thing I really dislike about Excel. It
> is so annoying when one work on 2-3 different files where one are
> moving data from one to the other. I keep pressing Alt-Tab, but that
> only gives me the next window not the next worksheet :-). So i like
> the gnumeric approach. Note I'm not one of the developers though :-)
>
>
> --
> Preben Randhol -- [randhol@pvv.org] -- [http://www.pvv.org/~randhol/]
>          "Det eneste trygge stedet i verden er inne i en fortelling."
>                                                       -- Athol Fugard
>
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