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

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 09:54:01AM -0500, Pavel Shevchenko wrote:
> I think Excel GUI is the exapmle of the bad user interface. Ideo of writing 
> logical expression in the form of GUI looks strange. Basically you have list 
> in the form:
> 
> Expression1 -- Format1
> ......................
> ExpressionN -- FormatN
> 
> Then you evaluate expression starting from 1 to N and choose format which
> corresponds to the first expression returning 1(TRUE). So, you can use
> standard gnumeric expression parser/eval (less coding). Also this expression
> will be regular gnumeric expression, so it can contain references to the other 
> cells and use all available functions.
> 
> For the first design you can use up to say 10 rows containing text entry 
> fields for expression and labels for the format. 

The XL interface supports exactly that.  There are 2 types of
condition for each format.
    1) The basic version that defines simple expressions based on
       the value of the cell (called Cell Value)
    2) The more advanced version that allows the user to enter a
       generic expression as you mention (called as Formula).  This
       is cleaner in some ways, but ugly in others.  Standard
       expressions do _not_ have a nice simple way to refer to the
       value in the current cell.  The user is forced to just know
       that the relative reference A1 in an expression edited in
       cell A1 refers to the current cell when evaluated elsewhere.

I'd agree with XL on this point and suggest we support the
simplified condition types in the UI.  On the other hand having
different sets of basic condition types for
    - filters
    - validation
    - conditional formats
is bloody irritating.  It might be nice to homogenize them at some
point.