Gnumeric 1.1.90 comments

[Patrick <pabos glypsube org>]

Very nice! I'm extremely impressed with how far Gnumeric has come.
Excellent work!


I'm just going to type in some comments as I play with it so bear with
the possibly rambling nature of this e-mail.

BUGS
(1) File > Send To
        a. create a new workbook using File > New
        b. click on File -> Send To
        c. Error dialog:
                "Can't open '/tmp/gnm-sendto/.Vn3eYW/Book3.gnumeric'
                for writing: No such file or directory

        - Shouldn't it automatically save the temporary file if it
        hasn't already? Maybe this is a problem with gnm-sendto
        (whatever that is)?
        - Should the error box text message box be the same color
        as the background of the dialog? It looks like you can type
        in the box which seems strange.


HEADERS/FOOTERS
(1) Is there a possibility of getting the path and filename as a
header/footer option? Several people at work have noticed that in
Microsoft Word you can insert the complete filename in a header/footer
while in Excel only the workbook name is possible. It is useful to have
the full filename when all your data is on the network on a shared
drive. Printed reports can then specify exactly where they came from
(ie. \Sales\Customers\2003\so and so.gnumeric). Presumably on export to
XLS this would then need to be reduced to just the filename or turned
into a string + the filename.


EDITING
(1) Selection hilighting is strange?
        a. Enter some text in a cell.
        b. Press F2 to edit.
        c. Use Control-Left Arrow to start selecting text.
        d. The selection is only hilighted in the top-editing bar
        and not in the cell itself (although the cursor does
        move properly).


SEARCH
(1) I think it be an improvement to have the [Advanced] tab of the
search centre be hidden by a disclosure widget at the bottom of the
dialog instead of another tab. Flipping between tabs while editing
connected information is a bit of a pain. Alternatively, should the
search bar be moved above all of the tabs since every tab's information
is related to it?


FORMATTING
(1) Looks quite comprehensive.

(2) What is a GENERAL format anyway? Is it really the same thing as
implying that Gnumeric will automatically format it as appropriate? I've
always switched the formatting to a number or text because I don't
understand what GENERAL is.


SELECTIONS
(1) Can't make fragmented selections by holding down Control when using
the mouse to select cells for a formula such as =sum()


USABILITY
(1) Comments don't automatically show after hovering on a cell
containing them. This reduces their usefulness a great deal.

(2) I keep assuming the little icon beside cell reference boxes will
scroll up the dialog box to show more of the screen when selecting a
range but it doesn't do anything. But I'm beginning to just ignore it.


AESTHETICS
(1) Insert hyperlink icon is unclear and 'unpleasing'. Should "External
link" be called "File link" instead? It seems more straightforward.
Inserting a hyperlink does not display anything in the cell containing
the hyperlink. Only the mouse cursor changes. Is this intended?

(2) The icons and toolbars seem bulky. Particularly the X checkmark
equal, all of the toolbars (extra space above/beneath icons?), the
background colour selector and the text colour selector.

(3) Activating/deactivating of toolbars seems slow and/or too visible. I
find myself looking up to see what happened when its only the toolbars
changing.

(4) The advanced filter dialog is messed up visually (ie. the labels
don't align properly).

(5) It seems like the tear off menus on the zoom / font / font size
controls would be too error-prone (ie. people who don't know about it
will do it accidently?) It might be cleaner to tear-off if clicked on
and dragged some distance away?

(6) Is the ObjectBar used enough to justify being on by default? It also
suffers from the problem that its controls seem to be rather bulky by
default (ie. a combo box down arrow can easily be twice as tall as the
entry box when hovering over it) and to promote bad habits via the use
of primitive drawing tools which should really be done in another
program (ie. someone at my work drew a scale map of the company using
excel drawing objects and formatted cells). Additionally, deleting some
of the controls or drawing objects is finicky. Finally, it just looks
weird for a default setup. :)


TERMINOLOGY
(1) This menu sequence doesn't seem to make sense "Insert : Name :
Define?"

(2) Or this one - "Data : Filter : Add Auto Filter" (especially not when
you click on "Add Auto Filter" to turn if off).

(3) "File : Preferences" and "Format : Gnumeric" bring up the same
dialog. Neither seems intuitive for what it is intended for. Almost
every other application has application preferences under "Edit :
Preferences" which while not perfect either at least has consistency on
its side.


INSERT MENU
(1) There is no "Insert symbol" option. Ideally this should share a
similar widget with AbiWord for consistency which is focused on easily
displaying dingbats, legal symbols, currency symbols, etc. (I've been
looking into this a little already).


NICENESS
(1) Autofilter appears to correctly show all the values for the filter
when there are more than 1024 unique items in the rows. Excel 2000 seems
to be limited to only showing the first 1024 unique items.


DOCUMENTATION
(1) What needs to be done to get the function library popup dialog
completed?


SCRIPTING
(1) Are there any proposals for scripting anywhere for scripting, shared
Python IDE/GLADE with AbiWord/GIMP/etc... anywhere? I would like to try
to distill out problems with Excel (& more generally Office) VBA before
they become entrenched...


WEB
(1) Is gnumeric.org registered? And are there any plans to cleanup the
Gnumeric (and GnomeOffice webpage)? Are volunteers capable of working on
some of these details?


That's all for now.
Thanks for the great work!

Patrick