Comment from Rick Williams
Time: Tuesday, September 30, 2008, 8:08 pm

(sorry if this posts twice - are comments screened?)

A Chart User Interface Replacement? Sounds like a great (and of course highly ambitious) idea. I thought of this just yesterday when I had a look at the Office Labs Chart Advisor (). Aside from the main purpose of the utility (advising on the type of chart to use) there are a few aspects of the UI that I like much more than the 2007 Chart UI (although that’s not really very hard to accomplish, is it?). The utility provides check boxes to select series to include in the chart, and allows filters to be built within the chart utility, as well as providing a lot of the functionality up front, and including a preview of the chart.

Of course a utility of the nature you’re suggesting would have to include much more functionality… but it sounds very exciting:

If starting from scratch, what interface would you want for Charting?

Comment from Rick Williams
Time: Wednesday, October 1, 2008, 12:11 am

Ah, yes, having so many tabs on those dialogues is frustrating!

Another thing that I find very frustrating is how (for all graphic objects, not just charts) the text formatting is located on the home tab, while all the other object specific formatting is on the ‘context’ tabs (e.g. for axis formatting).
So, it’s not just a case of flicking between 3 chart tabs, but the home tab too.

And reinstating the F4 functionality would be godsend:
[F4 rant]
the other day I wanted to set ten of twelve series to have the same markers. That meant navigating those god-awful tabs too many times! Did you know that with the current F4 functionality I can’t even use it to change a series marker type from ‘Automatic’ to, say, triangle because it’s actually two steps (Automatic->Built-in, then select type)! It was immensly frustrating to have to run through my series hitting F4 for each format item (fill style, fore/backcolour, marker built-in, marker type, marker size, marker line style…)
[/F4 rant]

Also I was surprised and shocked to see that I couldn’t just use Format Painter… it would have been easy then.

Comment from derek
Time: Sunday, October 5, 2008, 2:48 pm

I love the astronaut rant from Joel Spolsky!

What I’d like to see from a New Chart “Wizard” is something that makes the users come away a bit smarter about charts than they were: some reference to S S Stevens’s scheme when choosing axes. A tree that asks you if you want a circular chart form and suggests why you might, then eliminates that whole tree of options if you say no, and sticks to the cartesian forms from there on in the dialogue. An understanding that orientation (horizontal vs. vertical) is one of the last steps in the choosing process, not the first (a bar graph is not a fundamentally different form from a column graph, they’re the same thing seen sideways). Perhaps a way of arranging a vertical line graph for dot plots in the “wizard”, even though such a form is actually unavailable in Excel itself (though it shouldn’t be).

An alternative to asking about polar plots first would be to ask for them last, at the same time as horiontal/vertical. It can be argued that polar is just another orientation of a bar, line, or area chart. Basically Excel’s entire scheme is a bad legacy of the way it was originally designed to be the unambitious clone of Lotus’s graphs. 2007’s ballyhooed “reboot” was an opportunity to bring something genuinely better, an opportunity that was scandalously botched in favour of a lazy layer of junk.

Comment from derek
Time: Monday, October 6, 2008, 4:00 pm

Speaking of orientation, dialogues, and the atefall utility, I tried it on my machine now that I have almost dragged myself to the threshhold of the 21st century and installed XL2000 (woo! cutting edge there derek :-)

I tried changing the reulting chart type from vertical to horizontal and it broke the little leader lines. It was no trouble fixing them, but I wonder if it might be desirable to write some code that asks whether the user will want a waterfall that goes up and down, or one that goes left and right, and lay out the data table accordingly.