Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Tab interface

Joseph — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:07:39 GMT

When do project launching the Office suite on to the market? Second, I have an add-in that adds menu items when installed. With the tab controlled interface will I have to rewrite this code to be compatible with Excel 12?

Tab interface

Joseph — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:07:49 GMT

When do you project launching the Office suite on to the market? Second, I have an add-in that adds menu items when installed. With the tab controlled interface will I have to rewrite this code to be compatible with Excel 12?

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

David Gainer — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 10:01:53 GMT

Hi Joseph. There are some brief answers to your add-in question on the Office preview site (http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/uifaq.mspx), and watch Jensen Harris' new UI blog for more detail (https://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/default.aspx).

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Colin Walker — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 10:02:53 GMT

I am really enjoying this blog and thanks to such informative posts feel that I already know how to use Excel 12 :)

Keep it coming.

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Andy Cotgreave — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 13:27:39 GMT

I'm already beginning to miss the good old days of complicated Conditional Formatting! You're putting us developers out of business... In the old days, those of us who knew how to do Conditional Formatting wielded great power over less competent users.

No longer!

Seriously, though, this looks great.

One question:
How will the ribbon work on different resolutions? I'm running 1024x768, and the first image in this post (the one with the full ribbon) is too wide for my screen.

What happens if i'm running low resolution screens? Does the ribbon show/hide less buttons, or shrink, or something else?

Thanks

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Andy Cotgreave — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 13:28:02 GMT

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Helen — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 13:56:29 GMT

Will the defaults for one-click conditional formatting (data bars and colour scales) be truly default, or will they be based on a customisable colour palette like in current versions?

For example, we have a customised palette at work (where we've changed the "additional" colours at the bottom of the palette), and charts etc therefore automatically pick up our own colours, which is very convenient. I hope that the same will be possible in XL12.

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Jan Karel Pieterse — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:14:25 GMT

Hi David,

Looking at the Less than and greater than fly-out items:

Wouldn't it be nice to have a textbox immediately next to them so you can actually enter your limit value in place? (might clutter the flyout too much, but hey, if you don't try you never know, right?)

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Step — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 15:26:41 GMT

Right at the end, that last little bit about the Conditional Formatting Rules Legend, where you said "manage rules" - I'd love to know more about that! Thanks for everything you're sharing with us. I'm really liking the big improvements in creating powerful documents.

But what about a year later, when somebody has to go back and edit, or repurpose a document that perhaps they didn't create? Being able to easily see what rules have been setup is a big step forward. Will there be an overall "dashboard" or other way to tell what rules have been applied to a given cell or group of cells?

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

mschaef — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 16:25:59 GMT

David (and any other folks on the Excel team reading these comments),

This looks _really_ nice.

From all these posts, this will be the first version of Excel is a long time that I really _want_ to upgrade too. (and not just wait for the next computer to have it bundled)

BTW: I've been switching back and forth between Excel 2000 and 2003 a lot lately. Whoever "copied" the tooltip that pops up with function paramaters from visual studio into Excel needs to be paid double whatever they're being paid now. :-)

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Harlan Grove — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 23:52:05 GMT

I'll grant that I'm a curmudgeon, but I'm curious whether one will be able to use XL12 *WITHOUT* a mouse. It's possible to do most things in XL11 and prior using only the keyboard. It'd be annoying if much of XL12's new functionality could only be accessed with the mouse.

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Michael Martine — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 02:54:57 GMT

WOW! This is the most excited I've ever been about Office. I can't wait to show everybody the new features in training.

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Jan Karel Pieterse — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 11:23:26 GMT

Harlan:

You can use the keyboard:

1. Old control shortcut keys still work
2. There is a "legacy" mode with which you can still use the old menu shortcuts of Excel 11.
3. If you hold the alt key in "normal" mode, the ribbon will show tiny tooltips on each and every command indicating the key that fires them.

re: Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

David Gainer — Sat, 15 Oct 2005 00:25:35 GMT

Greetings. Again, I want to thank everyone for their feedback and discussion. Positive feedback is always great to hear, and requests and suggestions are also very welcome. Excel 12 is close to going into beta, so we are no longer adding features, but we are interested in people’s opinions, and your feedback will be one of the sources of information that we take into planning for future versions.

Andy – Briefly, there are a bunch of smarts built in around scaling – buttons can shrink in size, text can disappear, and “chunks” of the ribbon can collapse. The ribbon will be designed to work well at 1024*768 but also take advantage of more resolution when available. I would watch Jensen Harris’ UI blog for more details.

Helen – The defaults are truly defaults – they don’t pick up colour palette changes. Thanks for the feedback.

Jan Karel – That is one design we prototyped, but in the end, we observed in usability studies that people were more successful/preferred a dialog that allowed them to adjust both the condition and the format at the same time.

step – Hopefully my next post answered your questions.

mschaef – Glad you like the tooltips.

Jan Karel – Check out Jensen Harris’ UI blog – he had a topic recently about keyboard access.

Microsoft Excel Conditional formatting meets the ribbon | bar stools

Microsoft Excel Conditional formatting meets the ribbon | bar stools — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 09:43:16 GMT

PingBack from http://barstoolsite.info/story.php?id=3793