Re: Gnumeric usability improvements

[Jody Goldberg <jgoldberg home com>]

On Sun, Jun 10, 2001 at 01:47:44PM +0100, Neil Booth wrote:
> 1) Date input is awkward.  In Excel I can type "12Jun" "12Jun01".
>    IMO Gnumeric is overly strict in its interpretation of date input;
>    I can only get it to accept stuff like 12/6/1 or 12-Jun-01.
>    You might find it odd, but I would rate this the most annoying
>    aspect of Gnumeric at present.
Hmm, good point.  As things stand we only compare against that
standard list of formats.  It is trivial to add more.

> 2) Select part of a formula in the formula bar (or in the in-cell
>    editor) and press F9 to calculate the highlighted subexpression.
>    This is an extremely useful feature, especially when editing
>    complex formulae.  "Select a subexpression, inspect with F9,
>    Escape" becomes a very natural idiom after you use it a few times.
Interesting, I was not aware of this feature.  It will take some
playing in Excel to see how difficult this is to add.

> 3) The keystrokes "End then Arrow Key" to move to the end of a
>    consecutive list of non-empty cells in the direction specified (or
>    to skip all empty cells in that direction, as appropriate).
Is this different from Ctrl-Arrow ?

> 4) Ctrl+# formats a number as a textual date (there are various other
>    quick formatting key combinations).
Neat.  If you can find a list of these we can add them.

> 5) Shift+Space to select a row, Ctrl+Shift+Space to select all.  I notice
>    that Ctrl+Space to select a column is implemented (but doesn't work
>    the same way as Excel if the selection contains more than one column
>    - Excel selects all selected columns, Gnumeric just the one with
>    the active cell).  Not particularly important.
There are 2 things at play here.
1) 0.65 treats the full range selection the same way XL does.
2) We are forced to use Meta-space rather than Shift-space due to
   internationalisation problems.

> 6) Gnumeric appears to have no concept of "array formulae"
>    (used with CTRL+SHIFT+ENTER in Excel).
>    Array formulae are extremely powerful, and IMO an essential part
>    of any spreadsheet.  We couldn't use Excel without them.
Gnumeric supports array formulas.  I think 0.6[34] had a minor bug
that made them unusable from the keyboard, but they are there.
NOTE : we only support matrix mode, Gnumeric does not do implicit
iteration as yet.

> 7) CTRL+SHIFT+A after a function name, or a function name followed
>    by an opening parenthesis, lists the names of the arguments to
>    the function in Excel.  This is very useful.  e.g. try it in
>    Excel after typing "HLOOKUP" or "HLOOKUP(" before pressing enter.
Cute.

> Thanks for Gnumeric!  There's a long way to go; I wish I had time to
> help.
This is quite useful.  Please file 1-4 & 7 as enhancement requests at
bugzilla.gnome.org.

Thanks
    Jody