Juan, You already have useful answers. I'like to add $0.02. I designed many applications that displayed data in grids for the user to peruse, and got kudos.
Firstly, I started by displaying all columns. Not the hockey scores, of course. Second, I let the user adjust the column widths at will, also to almost zero. Third, the system saved the column widths, as an Excel sheet does, and recalled those saved widths the next time. What's the next time? Well, that depends on your application. I designed and implemented software that saved the geometry settings (among other things) per user and per report. So "next time" means "the next time this user runs this same report" in the context of that application. Steve Boyd's suggestion about narrowing the column headings is valuable. I'd add that you use a smaller font for headings. In this vein I implemented in an application a word splitter for headings. So the user saw tall 3-line headings, but narrow, in order to allow more columns in the screen. The column header can easily sport a tooltip with its complete name and even a Wikipedia article in the subject. I also implemented a rather smart column width calculator similar to Excel's double-click in the column header's vertical border. Screen makers are willing to help you in this quest, as they make then much wider then before. Of course, you don't want to have anything else in the screen besides data, like navigation artifacts and menus, do you? Well, if you can't help then maybe implement sort of a blind that politely leaves all the real estate to the data and reshows the nav stuff when the user shows a will to navigate. I always measure the percent of the screen that finally contains actual data, and many times it's really small: this can be used as an argument to hide temporarily the branding and golbal nav. Consider using a nice background watermark image to keep banging the user's mind. Another useful resource could be displaying the content in smaller sized font. But not everybody can read small text, for example I can't. This should't stop you to allowing the users to reduce text size within their comfort zone. The font reduction should not trigger a column-adjust frenzy: you'd better set column widths in em units or so. All these features need affordabilities but without annoying the user with many visible artifacts. Another useful feature is to let the user export the data to an Excel sheet or similar. I set one-click export buttons in some Windows applications that would write an Excel file that included all the formatting, like fixed header rows with light gray background and adjusted column widths. Doing the Excel thing perfectly requires learning quite a lot of stuff, but else it's deceiving: you can slap the user a CSV file and let them either consume it with no frills (deceiving) or have to style it *every single report *(also deceving). Notice that in Excel exports the total cells should be loaded thet a formula, not a fixed number. Because the idea behind such export is to let the user peruse the information in an active mood, instead of just looking at it in the screen while drooling. For example a user might be using the screen content to integrate it into a report for his boss. Please contact me for any clarifications. Hmmm ... New Zealand ... I'm in GMT-3 (but it's Spring here!) -- Juan Lanus ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
