Objectsheet Tutorial

8. Conclusion

basics : referring to other cells : referring to cells in other rows : independent variables : cell formatting : cell styling : cell display : scripts and HTML : conclusion (objectsheet home)

Well, that was a quick tour of some of the main features of the objectsheet. The goal of this tutorial was to indicate the potential for a powerful yet easier tool than spreadsheets for complex models. This Objectsheet makes the simple things at least as easy as with a spreadsheet and many complex tasks easier.

In this tutorial, we have left out several existing features of the current software (the 'name' property, summary properties, the scratch area, inheritance, across-sheet referencing, persistance and file structure, as well as many other objectsheet-specific functions and objects). All these things are implemented the current objectsheet application; feel free to experiment with them. Some of these are defined (albeit a little more tersely) in the Reference page. Others will be documented at a later date.

Admissions:

• Since the objectsheet is written completely in Javascript, it gets rather slow as the number of cells grows. The intent of this implementation of the objectsheet is for proof of concept and experimentation, not for production. So, it is plenty fast for our purposes (at least on the author's AMD-K6/450 machine).
• The mechanism to delete and move objects and propeties relative to each other is unfinished, and therefore not yet exposed on the current version of the objectsheet.
• The current implementation focuses on individual objectsheets. A critical aspect of the objectsheet concept is that multiple sheets exist and can be manipulated in a graphical context. The current graphical context (html windows movable on your PC desktop) is very rudimentary. Also, referencing between sheets is not yet complete and thus is not exposed at this point.
• There are many flexibilities missing, including the ability to transpose an objectsheet (so objects appear columns, not rows, and the template is on the left, not the top) and graphical menus and dialogs for managing things like styles and formats.
• Static, class-level properties can be defined and exposed visually via summary properties, but is not satisfying since it wastes substantial screen real-estate. A more concise representation is needed. (certainly, class-level things can be defined in the script area, but does not make for very nice presentation-- we still want to apply formats and styles, for instance). More work is needed here.

Please provide any feedback on the objectsheet in general, as well as the usability of this tutorial, to prelem@yahoo.com.

Thanks!

--rk