Beyond Comments in Excel.

I’m not sure how it happen. I’m not sure when it happen. At first I was shocked, then I felt used, now just anger. [;-))))]
Somehow Mike Alexander has hacked into my laptop, and started to steal my blog post ideas. I use ATnotes to jott down any ideas I have for blog posts, here what’s on my desktop at the mo:

As you can see top of the list is “x things I hate about Comments in excel”. Well the old piglet has just posted this – nice work. So slightly after, slightly following here’s my list:

• Can’t change default colour via UI
• Cant change the default shape via the UI(?)
• They look rubbish – mac, google anyone
• Can’t set the start up position – robustly
• Damage formatting of cells
• Don’t display correctly with frozen panes etc
• Can’t get rid of the line (?)
• The line & arrow are poor quality
• Are as technically advanced as a stone wheel.
• Have never been significantly updated
• Indicator triangles are wrong colour by default (green is a formula error?!)

And I bet there’s more. Unlike Mike though I’m not implementing them for tool tips. I’m interested in error feedback.

Modern programming technologies like .Net, have error providers, these are controls developers can use to track and respond to errors, proactive and reactively. Comments are dumb. They’re just there, and from a user experience P.O.V they don’t offer much. Sure there’re better than nothing, but only just.

Luckily we can work around this. Its really quite easy to put together a formula which can check for errors, then display a message accordingly. It won’t solve all of my issues but it’s another tool in the tool box. Here’s an example from a project I recently worked on. In this case data was entered into a “table” layout, errors where reported at the top of the document. I used a set of functions to the right hand side of the input table to check the important cells in the table.

Here’s another example but for a more orthodox form. It’s clear to see the benefits over the comments here. If the user enters the right data then no errors message is given, but when it’s wrong, bingo they can get some meaningful feedback, you can also add an additional checks at the end to see if there are any outstanding error on the sheet. As you can imagine you can make this as simple or as complex as your needs require.

So there you go, if you’re building a worksheet or form thats going to get used a lot, by a lot of different people, then maybe you should take the time to implement custom error messages, and get ride of those rubbish old comments!!!

P.S here’s the last example: MIE Tool Tips Comments Example