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add recalculate button to worksheet windows


Markus Barrera-Kolb

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Worksheets interface desperately needs an overhaul. It's about as intuitive and user-friendly as Font-DA-Mover from System 6. (And some of the graphical hints in the Worksheet window also appear to hail from System 6.. from 26 YEARS ago....)

VW Worksheet formatting tools appears to take their interface cues from Excel's "Cell Format" window + tabbed panes -- why not extend the metaphor & borrow Excel's handy toolbar for speeding up the most common style changes. Font styles, text/background color, cell borders, etc.

A particular pet peeve of mine is the way the "sort" icons work. Clicking them is the intuitive behavior, but no, one must select a column, then *drag* one of the two sort icons onto the column.

Edited by Gilbert Osmond
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Worksheets should auto calculate

do you mean Auto-Update? I think they already auto calculate, there is a preference for that.

If auto-updating is added as a feature, it should be optional, as there are plenty of cases where you would not want the contents of a worksheet dynamically changing every time you added/edited/changed objects.

For example if I'm adding plants to a landscape and I have qty. 10 or 20 of say 12 different species to add, I don't need the CPU / disk overhead of having a worksheet auto-update with every batch of plants added. I only need to update the worksheet when I'm finished adding plants.

It would be nice to be able to control-click on a finished worksheet & choose from among "Auto-Update," "Manual Update," and "Update Now".

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If auto-updating is added as a feature, it should be optional, as there are plenty of cases where you would not want the contents of a worksheet dynamically changing every time you added/edited/changed objects.

I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't want my worksheet to be updated at all times.

Worksheets after all, are simple spreadsheets, with data links to plug-in-objects and records. Yes you may have thumbnails of windows, doors, plants etc also, but I fail to see how including these images will affect processing power to a great degree - unless you have many, many images perhaps.

Microsoft Excel users do not have to manually update their worksheets - they are dynamic, make a change to one worksheet and it'll update in another. I'd say Excel worksheets can be far, far more resource intensive than Vectorwork's worksheets.

What you describe is possibly a VW performance issue. And, if there is a reluctance to implement auto updating of worksheets because of CPU performance, where does that leave other performance related enhancements, such as auto updating hidden line viewports (which I think is coming in 2017 ;) ), live updating section viewports, live updating site model sections?

And, even if there is a performance related software issue to generating worksheets with thumbnails, these can be dealt with by background processing techniques, which have recently been introduced into VW big brother, Archicad.

Edited by Kizza
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I can't think of any reason why I wouldn't want my worksheet to be updated at all times.

What you describe is possibly a VW performance issue.

I can think of no reason that auto-updating shouldn't be a preference for each worksheet. Although I often want my worksheets to update constantly, there are many times I don't want them doing so.

If I have a lighting plot with 900 fixtures, and a worksheet referencing and calculating info for those 900 fixtures, I don't always want it updating every time I change a channel number.

Now, if performance were brought up to speed (pun intended) so that those changes were instant and didn't affect working speed, then I would be okay with it. But, that is not currently the case.

But really, there is no reason to not make it optional.

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Slapping on an option button doesn't really address the underlying issue does it?

Apparently the reason why auto updating is presently not implemented is because VW is still single threaded...

So looks like the status quo remains..

Edited by Kizza
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