Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

John Drummond — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 12:50:18 GMT

I wonder what other people would say about this - I rather think the 10% limit is a flaw, I can think of clients of mine who would not use DataBars for this reason - they just would not be able to cope with a graph thats basically wrong, and not being able to change it through the UI makes it impossible to produce graph thats reliably accurate. Would a one pixel line not be possible, or perhaps an option somewhere in the UI? I hope I'm not having a nit-picky kind of day, but I think this needs another look at.

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

spursfan56 — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 14:34:44 GMT

No, I'm with you John - no bar or an arbitrary 10% are just plain wrong - the least bad choice would be a fixed 1 pixel as you suggest

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

Sebastien Caisse — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 15:59:06 GMT

I would have liked to also be able to set a single solid color instead of a gradiant since it can be hard to see where the fading ends...

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

A User — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 20:15:19 GMT

Please reconsider. Sometimes what a majority of users perfer as a matter of apearences is inconsequential. Sometimes you just have to have the integrity to stand for truth. This choice is literally wrong, and makes the feature and product untrustworthy.

Make the bars accurate by default, and provide a UI for people who just want pretty pictures instead of accurate information.

"Round numbers are always false."

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

David Gainer — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 22:43:54 GMT

Thanks for the feedback. I will talk to the team.

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

Francis — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 23:56:12 GMT

This is precisely the kind of tweak that I only discover after searching newsgroups! I doubt most people have either the inclination or the leisure to do so.

I always wondered why previous versions of Excel hid chart element dimensions from users--and why there is still no obvious way toggle automatic layout in Excel charts. Or why "distributed" alignment can only be accessed by CTRL+SHIFT+J in Word. (It's not in the Paragraph dialog.)

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

SteveA — Fri, 22 Sep 2006 10:51:41 GMT

I was excited about data-bars when I read about them, but when I tried them in the beta I thought this 10% offset was a bug rather than a feature.
Excel is about accuracy so having this 10% offset is just not accurate. As Mr Spock would say, " illogical captain".

Dave, please make sure your team do reconsider.

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

Zach Gemignani — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 17:08:31 GMT

Are there other decisions on data presentation that were made with this particular user testing group? I'm concerned that you may be falling into the New Coke sweeter-is-better-the-first-time-but-eventually -it-makes-you-want-to-vomit trap. When we all have to end up living with this tool, we'll appreciate straightforward displays that show actual values and don't both with the window-dressing of gradients.

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

Chris Gemignani — Sat, 23 Sep 2006 17:18:21 GMT

David, I'm glad to hear you're taking this back to the team. Misrepresenting data by default is like shipping Excel with broken statistical functions--it's something that should never have been considered. It's discouraging that user testing is used to justify this.

The gradients are a problem too. They make it hard to tell where the bar ends. Long bars have quite a bit of their length in hard to see gradient. This skews the results toward making the short bars appear more consequential.

Check out: http://www.juiceanalytics.com/weblog/?p=239 for a discussion of how data bars can be done in an easier to read, lower tech way. I think folks are justifiably excited about the potential of data bars, so I hope you get them right.

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

Andy — Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:50:52 GMT

An option to turn off the 10% easily, is needed to make it easier for the user.

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

Bob Umlas — Mon, 25 Sep 2006 21:55:27 GMT

If I add another cell with 170 (so I have two cells with 170) and use the command you suggested:
activecell.FormatConditions(1).percentmin=1
then the display seems to affect BOTH 170's, not just the activecell, as the VBA would imply. It this correct?

re: Conditional Formatting Trick 3 – The percentmin Property

David Gainer — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 08:24:10 GMT

Bob - it does appear to set the PercentMin for the whole rule, not just the activecell, which makes sense in one respect but which isn't really clear. I would expect people that are doing this to be working with someting other than the activecell object though.

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