Make the options dialog easier to follow and customizable
Posted: Thu Feb 05, 2004 8:59 pm
The options dialog for tchart (tchart.showeditor) is tremendously powerful. However, it is very difficult to understand and follow. Here are some comments that may help:
- Having tabs within tabs is very difficult to understand. You can get tabs 4 levels deep in places. In particular you can end up in situations where a "series" tab appears multiple times on a single page. It is easy to find something, and then forget how the heck you got there.
- Many of the tabs are either unnecessary because we have implemented other dialogs, or actually problems because it allows the user to do things we don't want them to be able to do. For example, we have our own data table, so showing the TChart one is confusing. There are ways with the API to turn off some tabs if you use the showEditor techinque. Unfortunately, due to another bug (which was submitted to the ActiveX forum), we can't use that. We embed the options sheet into our own VB form. We'd like to be able to turn tabs off from there.
- In particular the things we'd like to turn off:
- Print (We invoke the print dialog from a toolbar and menu item)
- Export (Same)
- Data (We forcibly control data)
- Series/Data Source (same)
- Chart/Series (same)
- Chart/General/Scroll and Chart/General/Zoom (we enforce behavior)
- Alternately, if each low-level tab was a different control, we could just rehost them into our own format.
- Don't use the same word to mean different things. Zooming can mean changing the axis scales OR scaling the whole chart, titles and all in and out in 3-d mode. There is an additional confusion over scrolling the axis and scrolling (moving) the chart.
Overall your tool is really great. If I seem like I'm hitting you guys with a lot of requests and bugs, it is only because we like the tool and are using it heavily! I look forward to updates.
- Having tabs within tabs is very difficult to understand. You can get tabs 4 levels deep in places. In particular you can end up in situations where a "series" tab appears multiple times on a single page. It is easy to find something, and then forget how the heck you got there.
- Many of the tabs are either unnecessary because we have implemented other dialogs, or actually problems because it allows the user to do things we don't want them to be able to do. For example, we have our own data table, so showing the TChart one is confusing. There are ways with the API to turn off some tabs if you use the showEditor techinque. Unfortunately, due to another bug (which was submitted to the ActiveX forum), we can't use that. We embed the options sheet into our own VB form. We'd like to be able to turn tabs off from there.
- In particular the things we'd like to turn off:
- Print (We invoke the print dialog from a toolbar and menu item)
- Export (Same)
- Data (We forcibly control data)
- Series/Data Source (same)
- Chart/Series (same)
- Chart/General/Scroll and Chart/General/Zoom (we enforce behavior)
- Alternately, if each low-level tab was a different control, we could just rehost them into our own format.
- Don't use the same word to mean different things. Zooming can mean changing the axis scales OR scaling the whole chart, titles and all in and out in 3-d mode. There is an additional confusion over scrolling the axis and scrolling (moving) the chart.
Overall your tool is really great. If I seem like I'm hitting you guys with a lot of requests and bugs, it is only because we like the tool and are using it heavily! I look forward to updates.