The other design goal should be some compatibility with Excel, right? Whatever we do should be a superset such that imported Excel files are displayed properly, yet we can still do things above and beyond their offering. Hal On Fri, 2004-11-05 at 08:45, Jody Goldberg wrote:
On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 11:04:35AM -0800, Hal Eisen wrote:I had read an article on Footnotes about the Gnumeric 1.3.92 release. I posted a comment asking about "Conditional Formatting" and someone named 'jody' replied that the implementation was easy but that the UI was still to be determined. I'd like to volunteer for that job. Can someone point me to a developer who I can coordinate with on this feature?Discussion on the list is the best way to proceed here. The core of the problem is that the cell format dialog is a large complex beast. Conditional formats add two wrinkles to it - the possibility of specifying only _part_ of a format eg if val >3 make background red but change nothing else which means that we suddenly need 'undefined' states for everything and a means of selecting that state. - Specifying the conditions. MS Excel uses a fixed limit of 3 conditions with previews of the associated format. Then put the entire mess into another dialog. That is just too ugly for me to accept. Additionally after talking to people I've decided that the main usecase for conditional formats would be better served by what I call 'calculated formats'. People want to colour code their schedules (steve == red, bill = pink). It seems more useful to be able to say 'background == lookup from table A1:A20) but that will require some interface changes. As I mentioned in the gnomedesktop response. Implementing the internals will not be horrificly difficult, we've had the ability for a while now. The key will be coming up with a coherent user interface and implementing that. As a starting point have a look at the MS Excel and OOo approaches (they're pretty similar) to get familar with the problem space. Thanks
-- Built On Linux - IT Consulting for cost savings, security and reliability http://www.builtonlinux.com (415) 336-7182
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part