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In a few of my posts, I reference something termed “usability studies” as information that we considered when making a decision. Jensen Harris has recently put a post on usability studies up on his Office UI blog on this subject, so you may want to take a look.
We do a lot of studies on the Excel team too. One recent example was something we called a “PivotTable Longitudinal Study”. This basically means that we found around a dozen Excel “power users” internally at Microsoft (non-development-team folks that work in our finance, operations, and other business groups and who spend time every day working on PivotTables in Excel), and we gave them a pre-beta version of the product and asked them to do their work in Excel 12 for an entire week. During the week, they provided us with spontaneous feedback via email. We also met with them several times during the week, had them fill out surveys on specific areas, and we went and watched some of them perform their work during the day. The following week, we conducted some focus groups to prioritize their feedback on Excel 12. These sort of studies gives us a great chance to see how actual users will react to the changes we have made to features and make adjustments as necessary before we ship beta and then final versions of our software.
Comments: (3) Collapse
Please please please can you finally conduct a usability study of charts containing log axes.
It's been an eternal complaint right back to Excel 5 that there is no way to turn off the stupid error message you get over and over again if the series contains zero (or even negative) data.
The only way is to use VBA pretty much to disable all alerts.
I'll concede negative data is technically illegal, but zeros may be there quite legitimately as they are in truth represent "less than" some limit of detection.
Please, let us turn this off!
:o)
Gamma...
|Please please please can you finally conduct a
|usability study of charts containing log axes.
...
|I'll concede negative data is technically
|illegal, but zeros may be there quite
|legitimately as they are in truth represent
|"less than" some limit of detection.
Especially since Excel treats any text in X or Y series as zero in charts. It's be VERY WELCOME INDEED if Excel charts would FINALLY ignore text like they ignore #N/A values.
Actually, even better would be a #MISSING! or #BLANK! value that would be treated the same as truly blank cells. It should be possible, since the udf
Function blank() As Variant: End Function
returns the same value as blank cells, i.e., =ISBLANK(blank()) returns TRUE. Unfortunately, Excel's calculation engine won't propagate blank values. It insists on converting them to "" in explicit text contexts and 0 otherwise.
Yes,
"Excel charts would FINALLY ignore text like they ignore #N/A values"
I'd forgotten that. It's a complete and utter PITA.
I'd not be quite so upset if it only issued a warning once and once only. But it repeats the ERROR dialog each and every time something is changed. As you note: even for text which are clearly never meant to be charted.
It's about usability but probably to a very small subset of users. And like fixing bugs in other functions, it's much less a "Visible" sign of progress than changing the color scheme and layout of the UI.
Gamma (Spectrometry)
Comments: (loading) Collapse