The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 5 (of 5)

Stupid Office Question

When you use the mouse to drag the scrollbar in Word you see the document move up or down the panel in real time.

When you do the same in Excel you see no change until you release the mouse and then you get a redraw.

Does anyone know why?

name withheld out of cowardice
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Because they programmed it that way?

Just guessing.

Kyralessa (unemployed)
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Crap, I thought I'd changed my name back.

Kyralessa
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Laziness.

Ralph Nader
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Consider Outlook: The Inbox pane doesn't redraw until you release the mouse button after scrolling with the scrollbar. The Preview pane, on the other hand, redraws dynamically.

My gut reaction would be that it's 'has rows' versus 'doesn't have rows'. Or something.

Kenae
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

It is laziness. If I'm using a plain old JListBox to scroll something and it does live scrolling by itself, that's fantastic.

When I suddenly have a custom widget that has all sorts of weird crap going on, I might not bother to add live scrolling unless someone really wants it.

Bobo
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Actually, in the Outlook 'header' pane, it will do a 'live' scroll once you've managed to get scrolled all the way to the bottom. Excel never 'live scrolls' as far as I can tell.

Ron Porter
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Well does anyone here program using the same widget set as Office, and if so is the default for that widget set to do live scrolling for text documents but not tables?

name withheld out of cowardice
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

I guess it's just a matter of processing SB_THUMBTRACK notification messages in addition to SB_THUMBPOSITION. Not responding to SB_THUMNTRACK can be because of laziness, but I don't suppose that's the reason in Excel. Another reason can be that updating the client area is too expensive to do continously; I suspect that's why Excel doesn't do it.

vrt3
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

name withheld out of cowardice = Philo

Wednesday, June 30, 2004

I would hypothesize that Excel has been optimized to avoid recalculating off-screen areas of the spreadsheet whenever possible. At a previous employer we created a development environment that was a spatial language edited using spreadsheet metaphor, and it would find the cells that were visible nd only recalculate what was needed for those cells.

With blazingly fast machines and simple spreadsheets it's easy to forget recalculations can sometimes take a significant amount of time.

Sheldon Young
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

Excel 2002/XP does live scrolling.

Phil
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

"name withheld out of cowardice = Philo"

Huh?

Philo

Philo
Wednesday, June 30, 2004

"There are no stupid questions, only stupid people."

:-P

Wisea**
Thursday, July 1, 2004

"
"name withheld out of cowardice = Philo"

Huh?

Philo

"

Huh?

name withheld out of cowardice

name withheld out of cowardice
Thursday, July 1, 2004

Kenae: "My gut reaction would be that it's 'has rows' versus 'doesn't have rows'. Or something."

I guess it has something to do with that. Psychologichal stuff.

In Excel --this is my personal opinion-- it's more comfortable the way it is: *not to auto-update* presentation frame when you are scrolling inside a spreadsheet with thousands of rows.

Usually, a spreadsheet is the way we all know: rows and rows full of data: text and numbers. There is not a shape, just every line of data counts, very similar one to next one.

A Word document, for example, uses to be on the contrary more 'shaped'. And it has got too, less data to scroll around. It has got more high level "shape", you watch paragrafs, images, text bloks and pages; you can not read every word while scrolling --imagine it at zoom = 40%-- but you are getting all that 'not so low level' information while you are scrolling.

A spreadheet, usually it is all the same, one row and another and there is not 'high level' shapes to get.

So, my conclusion is that
a+b => not very useful auto-refreshing the panel while scrolling (you are not going to really pay attention, scrolling goes too fast and you'll have to stop to watch where are you)

a = no high level information in spreadsheet
b = many many many rows in spreadsheet

PS: of course, using colors and other things, a spreadsheet can get some 'shape', so while scrolling you would get some useful feedback if the panel was refreshing the data

Ross Sampere
Thursday, July 1, 2004