Re: Formatting rules

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 07:55:07PM +0100, Nicholas Lamb wrote:
> The poor state of Excel's conditional formatting has been discussed more
> than once on this list, and apparently the Office 12 Excel team intend to
> fix this.
>
> http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/

I've been reading it with interest.  There were a few tidbits in one
of the videos that showed some interesting tweaks.  MS seems to have
added a layer above the existing conditional formats.  They talk
about offering things like
    - colour unique elements (I'm guessing they assign a colour per
      value ?)
    - highlight duplicates
    - live updating up the sheet while selecting the conditions.

We already have a few ideas on how to adjust the architecture to
support some of it (GnmRenderedRegion) but it's hard to say.

> Maybe (I'm not familiar with this code) there is useful material there for
> Gnumeric, in terms of ideas and structures rather than UI, and at the very
> least it's a checklist - Office 12 will be exporting files which use all
> the conditional described, and it would be nice for Gnumeric to import them.

Their schemas sport a GPL incompatible license.  We can't look at
them and need to be very careful to avoid contamination.  However,
once we can see a few of the generated files it should be simple to
expand the SpreadsheetML importer to support the new elements.

> Also, they earlier mentioned that the row & column limits have been very
> seriously increased in Office 12, so it will be interesting to see how (if
> at all) they handle import and export for that.

This will be interesting.  I've had a few long term plans to move
the entire cell structure into the quad tree to improve scalability.
It will be alot of fun to see how we perform with the new limits.
Although frankly once we move into the tree I was aiming to just
make the bounds dynamic.

We can kick off some discussion of 1.7 features shortly.  I'd like
to start with making the python bindings more complete and official
then move on to getting an Excel compat VB.NET layer in place.
Any other wishes ?