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

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 11:22:06PM +0100, Reinout van Schouwen wrote:
> I admit I don't know much about spreadsheets, but I have to wonder why
> 'conditional formatting' is so special it warrants its own menu
> item/dialog. In my view, the format condition could just be a property of
> the style that is applied to a certain range of cells. I imagine a Cell
> attributes notebook like OOo's, with one more 'Condition' tab. Or would
> that be too simple?

Yes and no.  I would certainly prefer to have it a part of the
format dialog itself, but remember that the conditions select a full
style, not a single element.  Here's a pseudo-xml example in an
artificial dtd.

    <Style>
	<Font name="Arial" size="10"/>
	<ConditionalStyle id="0" type="cell-value" condition="&gt;10">
	    <Font name="Arial" size="20" bold="true"/>
	</ConditionalStyle>
	<ConditionalStyle id="1" type="expression" condition="$A$1&lt;0">
	    <Font name="Hevetica" size="0" italic="true"/>
	</ConditionalStyle>
    </Style>

Conditions are not just elements of a style (like font = Arial) they
contain a subset of a style.