[Libreoffice-ux-advise] conditional format dialog

[Markus Mohrhard]

Hey Astron,

> Sorry for the extremely long wait. I am not sure if my mockups live up
> to any expectations that might have built up, but here we go...
> I've just updated:
> https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/File:Mockup-conditionalformatting.png
> Take a look. In the following, I will use (n) to refer to the part of
> the mockup I am referring to.
>
> So, what's changed?
>
> * I've integrated drag/drop sortability as well as sorting via buttons
> in a hopefully not too intrusive way.

Will need to investigate if this is possible in the way as you
suggested it but will try to implement this idea.

> * It can't be seen in the mock-up, but it would be good, if condition
> sorting via drag/drop had similarly nice animations as the slide
> sorter in Impress.

Can't promise that. Might be too much work to integrate that for such
a small feature.

>
> * The Add button has wandered into the position where Condition n+1
> sits, so it is now integrated in the conditions list box. This is to
> make it more obvious that one can add more conditions when there's
> only one set by default. That will indeed make it harder to add
> conditions once the initial space in the conditions list box is filled
> up. We might be able to mitigate that problem by moving the whole
> Condition n+1 field with the Add button permanently to the end of the
> list so it doesn't scroll when the rest of the list scrolls. (I hope I
> described that clear enough, although I fear I did not. Please ask.)
> * It's still not possible to add conditions in an arbitrary place in
> the list. I consider that a design decision.
>
> * When a condition is not selected, there's only a summary, as can be
> seen for Condition 1 in (2). This is similar to how Excel 2010
> displays conditions in its condition manager.
> * One important difference to Excel is that this design does not allow
> sort conditions that apply to different ranges. This is important
> mostly because ranges can overlap, so conditions from different ranges
> can conflict. I think, the sane choice is to try to apply conditions
> for the largest range first and and those for the smallest range last
> – although that doesn't remedy the whole problem. However, the UI of a
> document-wide conditional formatting editing dialogue would probably
> have been worse than Excel's, so I tried to avoid that.

I'm not sure if we support overlapping conditional formats but if not
this should be a feature that we can add.

>
> * There's an expander labelled Area, to edit the range of a set of
> conditions after they were created. It is not expanded by default, the
> expanded view can be seen in (2), though.
> * Note that the range is also part of the title bar of condition
> window (at least in my mock-ups), it should be updated accordingly if
> the information is edited in the window.
>
> * There's a completely new manager window. This is supposed to help
> with two things:
>   1 find the conditions/ranges that were set without lots of try and error
>   2 delete all conditions for a range
> * You may debate how useful the First Condition is in recognising a
> whole set of conditions. Other ideas very welcome.
>

I don't see that much use in the Conditional Format Manager. Excel
uses a totally different concept and treats each conditional format
entry as one entry in the manager while we would a set of conditional
formats treat as one entry.

But I have no strong opinion about that.

Astron, I would propose that we take some minutes in Hamburg and
discuss this together.

Regards;
Markus