[Usability]Re: Viewpoints on conditional formatting, anyone?

["Laura Arlov" <laura wordfixers no>]

Hi, I'm Laura, a friend of Jon Kåre's.  
I work professionally with User Interface Design in Norway,
but have no expereince with Gnumerics yet.


I've tried out Excel's conditional formatting.
I'm sure it can be done better. 

THE IMPLICIT RANGE PROBLEM

The biggest problem I see with Excel's dialog is that I have no clear sense of what 
range the conditions apply to; and it doesn't seem to be all cells, but just
"The cells you had selected when you entered the dialog."

This means that conditions I have set seem to "vanish" if I have another
ranges selected when I next open the dialog - and then I must re-enter the
conditions if I want to re-use them for this range. If I don't happen to
select exactly the same range when I go to delete a condition as I did when
I set the condition, do I get little "islands" of leftover conditional formatting
in my spreadsheet?

So: Make the range visible and editable for the user.


MULTIPLE CONDITIONS

Ketil T. writes;

>I don't think it's confusing to make this unlimited, the user asked
>for it.

I agree with him.


FORMAT BUTTONS

But I can't figure out the structure: Why a Format... button on each
condition, but one Delete for all?  If Format button in each, Delete button in
each.

My opinion is that an edit field should look like an edit field, a display field should
look like a display field, and a button should look like a button, so I don't think that 
a display field should do double-duty as a command button.

You might direct the user simply to format the sample text. Some people
may prefer to use the shortcuts on the toolbars rather than opening the whole
format dialog.  

Ideally, I'd let the user choose from a drop down list displaying formated text with 
a few of the highly likely choices: Bold, Red,  Bold + Red,  Italics,  Strikeover...and let
the final choice be Custom format...  to open the Format dialog.  
Then add each custom format he creates to his dropdown list.


Thanks again for inviting me into the discussion.

Laura Arlov
laura wordifxers no
+47 21 91 45 99  / +47 909 12 454