Beta 1 Feedback

[John Oram]

At 5:17 PM -0500 3/17/02, James Spahr wrote:
>First off - OO 2 is really, very nice.

I was floored by the additions.  Definitely worthy of a full integer 
rev.  Thanks, guys.

>Being able to define a column with a spreadsheet-like calculation would be
>very cool as well.

A boolean column type would be nice too, with and/or logic available 
in the summaries.

In rich text mode, an interesting option would be to have the summary 
inherit colours of the children.

Does anyone know how the summaries work for text/rich text?  At first 
I didn't think there was anything.  However, sometimes values revert 
to their previous value when I try to edit them.  Is this a bug or a 
feature?  Unfortunately I've only been able to replicate the 
behaviour sporadically, so this could be something else entirely.)

>I'm a bit confused as to the value of hidden summaries...

Me too (though it is a nice way to keep things from getting 
unnecessarily cluttered).

Is there any way to hide columns?  A step beyond that would be a 
column hierarchy.  I'd love to be able to collapse columns like we 
can with rows.

>That's about it, the beta looks great (and those alternating row colors are
>brilliant :) )

An option for alternating column colours would also be cool.  I'm 
trying to figure out if having both row and column colours would be 
useful.  I'd imagine you'd have to use really, really light 
transparency/opacity (10% or lower) otherwise you'd get inadvertent 
interaction effects at the row/column intersections (1+1=3. a la 
Albers and Tufte).

Again, lovely work.  Ahh, one more reason to use excel and powerpoint 
less often...

-John