Hoping you can help me as I have searched a lot of forums and did not find the same question, never mind the answer I need :)
I have a power point pack which I have put together. It is built to be a template for my team to use repeatedly and is set up using slide masters to control the layout. Each layout slide in the slide master includes two checkboxes to identify either a pass or a fail. My problem is that when you insert a new slide (by either duplicating an existing slide or adding a slide from the slide master layout), and change the checkbox value it also changes on the other slide. Is there a way either using some quick VBA or otherwise to stop this from happening and break the link between the two slides.
Any help would be really appreciated.
In a weird way, this is reasonable behavior from PowerPoint, though it certainly does seem bizarre.
Shapes on a master layout appear on any slide based on that layout. Though they appear on the slide, they're not editable on the slide; it's as though the slide were a clear layer above the layout, one that you can add more stuff to but that you can't "penetrate" to get at the stuff on the layout below.
Placeholders are a special case and so, apparently, are ActiveX controls like your checkboxes, which DO allow editing. So what's happening is that when you change a text box, you're changing the text box on the layout, not on the slide itself (the checkbox doesn't even exist on the slide ... you can't select and move it in normal view, for example, unless you go to the layout in Master view).
When you change the checkbox, you're changing the one on the layout, and since the checkboxes appear on any slide based on the layout, when you change the checkbox, you're changing the one on the layout, ALL of the slides based on that layout get the changed checkboxes.
Some mildly tricky VBA could look at each slide and if it's based on the layout that contains the checkboxes, COPY them to the current slide from the layout and finally make the checkboxes on the layout invisible.
The simpler solution might be to supply a sample slide with the checkboxes ON the slide and let the users copy/paste it into their presentations.
[later]
I've reported this to MS as not so much a bug as a design oversight; the behavior may make sense, but it's not useful and can mislead users (as you well know).
I'd suggest that you visit https://powerpoint.uservoice.com and suggest that ActiveX objects on masters/layouts behave more like placeholders ... spawn new instances of themselves when a new slide based on the layout is added rather than letting the user THINK that's what's happened.
Related
I've been building my Codename One app for the phone screen format so far. There is a separate Form for the main menu, then a second Form with a list of elements, and then a third Form to edit an element selected from the list. Each Form has an overflow menu and various Titlebar command buttons. And each (Extended) Form has a lot of code that implements the functions in the Form and shares variables etc.
However, to use the tablet (iPad) screen estate, I would like to show the main menu on the left of the screen, the list of elements in the middle and the element edit form on the right. Something similar to the screenshot below. This seems to be a common type of layout on tablets and suits my app usage pattern well.
However, I don't see an elegant way of structuring the code to do this. I can't easily combine the list and edit Forms into one Form, and writing a completely new Form just for the tablet format would be a lot of work. I assume others have faced the same challenge and would love to hear how you achieved this.
PS. I know the side menu can be made permanent but that only solves part of the problem, not how to show a list and edit Forms at the same time.
There is no one answer for this but if you look at apps like Codename One Build you would notice they adapt to this form factor.
We usually just use isTablet() to adapt the UI at key points to the different form factor. One element is the permanent side menu which we turn on in the init method using code like this:
if(Display.getInstance().isTablet()) {
Toolbar.setPermanentSideMenu(true);
}
It makes the side menu stay open all the time. Within the code we try to use Container instead of Form. This allows us to package multiple logical pieces into a single UI for the tablet mode.
I've got a massive UI that I'm designing. The way that my employer wants it, there are at least 100 labels. Now, I've always thought that in cases like this, breaking up the UI into smaller custom controls was the ideal way to go. However, someone recently told me that custom controls are really only for code re-use. What is the actual suggested practice for this?
EDIT
The finished form will look like this:
Now, I'm using WPF for the UI, and I'm thinking of breaking this down into smaller bits.
Based on your image i see some repetitions, each of this repetitions could be a custom UserControl
But it depends on the usability is it easier to write a custom UserControl so do it but if it would reduce the readability of your code and it also adds additional complexity don't do it
here are an example of what could be separate UserControl's
the green ones are possible useful encapsulations of logic
the orange ones maybe need some not market stuff (don't know enough about your software)
the red ones are the maybe's based on the intern use (from the visual part they are repetitions so the should custom UserControl)
Since your UI is read-only, I'd suggest using a grid.
Are you new to WPF? To break the View into bits WPF offers you CustomControls and UserControls. They are two very similar things yet completely different from each other. CustomControls are Buttons, Labels, TextBoxes, DataGrids...etc. They are basically simple stand-alone controls. UserControls are groups of stand-alone controls serving a purpose such as example a Button and a ComboBox next to each other so user can select something in ComboBox and confirm that by clicking the Button.
If you wish to display data from database I suggest you DataGrid which will give you a table-alike look with rows and columns and all that. If you wish to place few buttons next to DataGrid on which the user may click to insert a new row or to edit a certain cell then I suggest you to wrap all that with a UserControl which you can reuse in other places where you have to display and change data from database too.
You should be using a datagrid and can customize its template to render individual cells as Textblock (lighter version of Label) from a rendering perspective. The main difference between Textblock and Label is very minor things such as access keys and disabled state behavior. But from a WPF object hierarchy - Textblocks are much lighter. But besides that point - from your employer perspective - once you have customized the grid template and render them (so as they look as textblocks/labels) - your employer should have no problems.
Also as somebody suggested above - if you want to logically break sections of the UI since they maybe coming from a different table in db - then User controls is the way to go (for maintainability of code)
Let me know if you are looking for more technical details or need help further technically.
There is nothing wrong in making and using custom controls or user controls or defining some data templates which will be reused depending on how your data is organized.
For sure the UI looks pretty messy and some sort of grid should be used with templates for example where there is similar data. I also have the suggestion and first think about the data and the functionality before starting and let the UI be driven by that. For sure you will the reuse controls/templates. If you think in front on the model and behavior the UI can afterwards more easily changed.
Create your viewmodel correctly, implement the functionality in commands, use bindings, after that the UI will come naturally, reuse controls, use several grids, make the UI more user friendly using several regions, tabs, windows or anything that makes the user more comfortable.
Has anyone seen an implementation or plugin for extjs where you can "pull off" or "dock" tabs/windows the way you can with a browser? Is it even possible?
Searching has not revealed much but I did come across a proposed solution in an older version:
http://www.sencha.com/forum/showthread.php?16842-Dockable-floatable-panels-in-ExtJS
#DmitryB
To clarify, in chrome if I have multiple tabs in the same window like so:
And I "drag" one of the tabs, it pops off into a new window:
I imagine you might accomplish this by moving the content of the tab panel into a window but not sure how to go about it.
In a nutshell:
- Make the tabs draggable, watch for the drag event and mark the
tab-strip as your "safe" zone
- When a tab is dragged and then "dropped" (as in, the drag event ends) you do a check:
> Is the tab within the safe area?
No: Create a new Ext.Window at the x/y of the mouse, copy the components/HTML
out of the original panel and insert them into the new window. Destroy the
original panel.
Yes: Do nothing.
Unfortunately, I am still quite jaded from learning D&D in ExtJS3, so I can't offer any help with this and real code pertaining to ExtJS 4, however the concept seems relatively straightforward to me. I would say you're going to probably want to do your best to NOT have this be flashy - unless you REALLY REALLY need to, I wouldn't worry about showing the panel's contents while you drag the tab - much less show the panel itself. Just let the tab element get dragged around the screen and copy when it's released outside of the safe zone.
In order to make a convenient UI for an .Net 2.0 Winforms application I am working on, I have need for a control that I'm pretty sure goes beyond the "out of the box" behavior of any standard control. A mock-up of what I'm trying to achieve follows:
Mock up http://www.claware.com/images/temp/mockup.png
Essentially, this part of the application attempts to parse words into syllables from tribal languages (no dictionary to refer to; any and all unicode characters are possible.) By the time the user gets this far, he has already defined the vowels / consonants in his language and some other configuration. There is then an iterative process of (1) the application guesses which syllables exist in the language based on some rules, (2) the user refines the guesses, selecting the correct parsings or manually parsing a word, (3) the application "learns" from the user's feedback and makes smarter guesses, (4) repeat until the data is "good enough" to move on.
The control needs to present each word (the grey headers), then all the syllable break guesses (the white areas with dots separating the parts of words.) There is also a way to manually enter a parsing, which will display a text area and save button (at the bottom of the mockup.) When the user hovers over a guess, the background changes and "accept / reject" buttons appear. Clicking on the accept, or entering a manual parsing, removes the entire word from the list. Clicking the reject button removes just that item.
I'm by no means 100% sold on the formatting I have above, but I think you can get a general idea of the types of formatting and functional control I need. The control will also scroll vertically--there may be thousands of words initially.
My question for you experienced WinForms developers is: where to start? I would really, really like to stay within the .Net core framework and extend an existing control as opposed to a third-party control. (At the risk of starting a religious war: yes, I suffer from NIH-syndrome, but it's a conscious decision based on a lot of quick-fix solutions but long-term problems with 3rd party controls.) Where can I get the most "bang for my bucK" and the least reinventing the wheel? ListView? ListBox? ScrollableControl? Do I need to go all the way back to Control and paint everything manually? I appreciate any help that could be provided!
[Edit] Thanks everyone for the ideas. It seems like the most elegant solution for my purposes is to create a custom control consisting of a FlowLayoutPanel and a VScrollBar. The FlowLayoutPanel can contain instances of the custom controls used for each word. But the FlowLayoutPanel is virtual, i.e. it only contains those instances which are visible (and some "just out of scroll"). The VScrollBar events determine what needs to be loaded. A bit of code to write, but isn't too bad and seems to work well.
I would look at the TableLayoutPanel and FlowLayoutPanel controls. These will let you organize a series of controls with moderate ease in a vertical fashion. I would then create a UserControl that consists of a label and 2 buttons. The UserControl will expose properties like Text and events that are exposed for the button clicks.. For each entry in the list, you will create an instance of the UserControl, assign the text value, and handle the click events. The instance will be placed in the Table/Flow panel in the correct order. Both of those layout panels do allow for inserting items between other items so you can add/remove items from the list dynamically.
Edit:
Given the length of what you are trying to render, I would consider using the DataGridView and do some custom rendering to make it perform how you want it to work. Using the rendering events of the DGV you can merge columns, change background colors (like highlighting the dark gray lines), turn on/off the buttons, and handle changing the grid into edit mode for your rows to allow modification or inserting of new values. This method would easily handle large datasets and you could bind directly to them very easily.
Well, this certainly looks like a candidate for a custom component that you should be creating yourself. You can create this using standard .Net drawing commands along with a text-box, and a regular button control.
Now you want to find out where to start.
Create a Windows Forms Control Library project.
Drop in the textbox and the button control.
The panel drawing code should preferably be done by code. This can be done using the regular GDI+ commands.
Edit:
Here's another idea, and one that I've practically used in my own project with great success.
You could use a web-browser control in the app, and show your data as html. You could update the source of the web-browser control based on the input in the textbox, and clicking on the links in the web browser control will give you the event that you can trap to do some action. Your CSS will work.
I used this technique to build the 'desktop' in an app I made called 'Correct Accounting Software'. People loved the desktop so much that it is one of the best loved features of the app.
Here's how I would do it:
Create a custom control. In this custom control, have a ListBox atop a LinkButton, and when the LinkButton is clicked you can make it give way to a TextBox. The ListBoxes will have the top row unselectable... you can probably get the rest from there. When you get your list of words, fill a Scrollable of some kind with one control for each word:
(foreach String word in words){
myScrollable.add(new MyComponent(word));
}
From there, I'm not sure what you want to do with the boxes or the data, but that's my initial idea on the UI setup.
Use the WebBrowser control and generate the HTML markup into it using DocumentStream or DocumentText.
Is there a simple way to tell what triggered Click event of a Button apart from setting multiple flags in Mouse/Key Up/Down event handlers? I'm currently only interested in distinguishing mouse from everything else, but it would be nice to handle Stylus and other input types if possible. Do I have to create my own button control to achieve this?
Edit: To clarify why I care: in this particular case I'm trying to implement "next" and "previous" buttons for a sort of picture viewer. Pictures in question may be of different size and buttons' positions will change (so they are always centered below picture). It's quite annoying to follow such buttons with mouse if you need to scroll through several pictures, so I want to keep mouse position constant relative to clicked button, but only if it was clicked by mouse, not keyboard.
Edit2: It does not matter whether the buttons are on top or down at the bottom, since the center can change anyway. "Picture viewer" here is just an abstraction and in this particular case it's important for me that top left corner of the picture retains it's position, but it's out of the scope of the question to go in details. Scaling the picture is not so trivial in this sort of application as well, so I do want to know the answer to the question I asked not going into UI implementation discussion.
if (InputManager.Current.MostRecentInputDevice is KeyboardDevice)
You should instead handle specifically the MouseXXX, StylusXXx, and KeyboardXXX events.
Could you elaborate on why you would care?
Having written many custom controls myself over the years, I cannot recall one instance where I cared how a click event was triggered. (Except for that pre VB6 control lifecycle glitch that fired the got focus-click-lost focus in a different order depending on whether you clicked a button, used an accelerator key, or pressed ENTER as the default).
Personally I find it annoying when people place buttons at the bottom of Windows forms and web pages. Read some of the literature on UI and you will find that most people don't even get that far if they don't find something interesting on the page/form. I like to be able to click next as soon as I know the content is of no interest to me, so keep the nav buttons prominent at the top.
I would put the prev/next at the top of the picture where you can control their position. Dancing those buttons around goes against most opinions on UI consistency. Further creating a different experience for a mouse user versus a keyboard user also goes against most current wisdom on good UI design.
The alternative is to choose a constant max size a picture can obtain on the UI and if it exceeds that scale to fit, otherwise allow it to change freely within a frame. This keeps your buttons at the same place if you absolutely must have them on the bottom.
You could create an enumeration with the different devices, have a global property that you set every time the mouse/keyboard/etc. is initiated, and just refer to this when needed.