[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Libreoffice-qa] LO 3.6.2 : about Manage dialog from Conditional Formatting

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Pierre,

On Sun, 2012-10-14 at 02:21 -0700, pierre-yves samyn wrote:
> A great and beautiful work has been done, thank you for that. 

	Agreed - it's rather lovely; thanks Markus :-)

> I think it introduces a non-homogeneously managing of relatives references.
> I do not see others dialogs doing this...

	Relative references are (AFAICS) a nightmare for visualisation; They
represent a simple vector but in an horrible way - it'd be nice if A1
style referencing had never been invented (IMHO ;-) - personally I would
love a clean R1C1 world.

	There are a few things that could be done whatever the outcome to try
to make this more intuitive - eg. "instant apply" of the conditions that
are being edited: such that the user can see if the result they're
getting is sane. Rendering vectors on the screen to show the way the
range is depending for it's formatting on other ranges might also help.
Other crazy ideas might be demanding that the user draw the vector
themselves for a relative reference - that way they have to select a
start and end cell ;-) but ... there is nothing very obvious there.

	Either way - good solutions involve yet more work - big new patches are
most welcome - but the exact semantics of which bits of what selection
to choose for which base-cell to render relative references with are a
nightmare. I suspect the UX team needs to go / work that through with a
selection of users - to avoid developers experiencing the churn there.

	ATB,

		Michael.

-- 
michael.meeks at suse.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot