Hi Eric,

> I see that one, I just bought a netbook (Asus 1000H, which by the
> way work great with Moi) and there is
> not much room left for additional UI.

I also just recently got a netbook as well (Asus N10), it is cool how MoI can work well on a small screen!


I'm not really familiar with Excel's Pivot tables, but I'll try to take a look. Do you maybe know of any existing tutorials or overviews of it online that I could check out? I'm not sure how far I will get just with directly messing around with it.


> In general though, I feel that flyouts and popups are more
> distracting and a slowdown than a bigger UI.
> (my personal opinion).

They're definitely a compromise, and certainly tastes are always going to vary.

The thing that they do tend to do well with is to provide a smaller initial surface of stuff to a beginning user. It is really a common problem for beginning users to get easily lost when presented with too dense of a UI initially.

Also prioritizing things can help a lot - if something is not needed too often then it doesn't do much actual harm if it takes you an extra second to do it. For example something that takes an extra second to do but only happens once every hour just does not add up to very much wasted time overall.

But it can be tricky to get the priorities right, and sometimes it may even be impossible because they can vary between different kinds of projects.

- Michael