Alan Kirk wrote: The disappearance of the text is a known issue and there's a technote on it somewhere. (I know it's referred to in one of my TM1 Bytes videos but I'm only on my mobile at the moment and will have to look it up later.)
It's in
Byte 040 at around the 07:30 mark. The technote referred to was
1413700.
However:
(a) That referred to Excel 2007, whereas Charles is using 2010;
(b) The technote has been updated since I made that video. At the time the latest SP for Excel 2007 was SP2. There was apparently a subsequent one (SP3) which broke the fix again;
(c) Although the Abstract of the problem refers to actual Excel crashes, it also applied to the slow redrawing that can cause the ribbon not to be fully redrawn as per Charles' first image.
Double however:
(a) Although I said in the film that I hadn't seen the problem after updating to Excel 2007 SP2 and 9.5.2... I did
after that on occasion. It's intermittent, and I haven't found a way of consistently reproducing the thing, but yes, it can happen.
I would still recommend that you make sure that you have all SPs / FPs implemented on both Excel and TM1. If it persists (particularly if you're on Citrix) you may need to disable the ribbon as described in the article.
Sidebar: I loved this bit from the technote:
Technote 1413700 wrote:This is partly caused by its new ribbon that replaces the Excel 2003 menu and toolbars. Due to its new implementation of updating ribbon button status, it can sometimes cause significant slowdown if ribbon buttons need to be constantly updated. This is not a normal case for standalone Excel 2007 where ribbon buttons usually do not change status often. But in Perspectives, TM1 ribbons and buttons within it need to be constantly updated when users change cell selections for instance. Depending on which cell users select, ribbon buttons need to enable or disable themselves, and sometimes need to update the tooltip content.
That's not the good bit,
this is the good bit, this bit almost made me spit my breakfast at the screen with laughter when I read it:
Technote 1413700 wrote:NOTE: A code change was made in TM1 9.5.1 which works around the Excel limitation, but it must be used with Excel 2007 SP2. SP1 and SP3 will still cause the issue.
{Raised eyebrow} I'm sorry, what?
Excel's limitation?
What did I have to say about the context sensitive nature of the ribbon tab, hmm, let me think...
In TM1 Byte 040 at 07:40 I wrote:That's pretty cool, right? No, actually it's not; in my opinion it’s a very BAD piece of design. Think about the overhead that Excel has to perform to redraw this ribbon tab every time.
That, not Excel, was the cause of the problems in 2007 and is probably still the cause of the occasional problem in 2010.
A GUI design approach that is somewhat less fixated on brightly coloured, dynamically changing eye candy might instead leave all of the icons enabled and simply change the context of what they do. Specifically, if the user tries (for example) clicking a spreading icon when they're in an empty cell, then instead of trying to do the spreading and erroring out it could pop a dialog box up in front of the user:
- ErrorDialog.JPG (17.73 KiB) Viewed 5513 times
In this way you make the application self-educating, and you don't screw up Excel by drawing and redrawing and redrawing the ribbon tab every sodding time the user moves from this cell to that cell to the next cell. Who thought that was a good idea anyway? Just because a feature (like Excel's ability to disable ribbon items)is there, it doesn't mean that you use it. It certainly doesn't mean that you need to bash it with a hammer by using it with every cell movement. I mean seriously; they wrote it themselves: "This is not a normal case for standalone Excel 2007 where ribbon buttons usually do not change status often." Yuh-huh...
why do you think that is, hello??
(Disclaimer: I'll admit that I do use context sensitive enabling or disabling of controls on some of my own applications. But that's half a dozen (maximum) buttons. It's not something like 50 icons like you have on the TM1 Excel ribbon tab. Doing that with every cell movement is in the realm of "Are you kidding me?" )
Alan Kirk wrote:The second issue appears to be an Excel option. Make sure that the Edit In Cell option is UNchecked.
Now that I have Excel in front of me... in 2010 it's File tab => Options (in the left hand column) => Advanced tab => Allow editing directly in cells. It's checked by default but if you don't turn it off you'll get the kind of thing that you show in your second image when you double click a SubNm formula.
