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Thursday, January 19, 2012

Notes on site upgrade

Okay everyone, hopefully you've had a chance to play with the new spreadsheet UI.  We took our time to try and make it work correctly and address a lot of the concerns that you have let us know about.  Here is a list of the new functionality and how to use it.
  1. Show entries selector - the most obvious change is that the spreadsheet is shorter and defaults to 25 items.  You can change this to a different # or all items.  To do this, simply click the drop-down box and choose how many items you want.  We will keep the 3 most traded items on top and the default view as you requested (earbuds, bills, and keys).  From now on we will also add new items to the top of the list.
  2. Search box - any text in the sheet is searchable, including notes sections.
  3. Column sorting - the most requested feature.  In either ascending or descending order, click on the up/down arrow to the right of each column header.
    • Multi-column capability - by clicking on one column's arrow, hold down the Shift key and click on another.  For example, you can sort all the items by quality and then by their value in refined.  First click an arrow in the quality column, then hold shift and click on an arrow in the refined est. column. 
Other changes you may notice:
  • Change of "scrap" to "0.11".  This was not only done to keep the columns thinner but to also let sorting by the "refined est." column work better.   You will also notice that this column works in order of buds/bills/keys.  Thanks to our super-smart programmer for that.
  • Change in item qualities and some color coding.  We are trying to be more in-line with Valve's standards of color coding and item qualities.  At the same time we want it to be easy to differentiate between items that are of limited and unlimited nature.  Hopefully we've found a good solution now.
  • Usability on mobile/tablet devices, steam in-game - we tested this on both ipad/ipod and android tablets as well as while in game with the "shift-tab" option.  While not everything (ex: tooltips on tablets) works, the sheet is usable now on these other platforms better than before.
  • To everyone who requested we share the actual spreadsheet with them, there is a reason we don't.  The sheet itself is very slow because of the number of items and complexity of the formatting.  It would be even worse with everyone accessing it directly.   Having it as a published document makes it very speedy.
Although it may not seem like much it wasn't easy to reverse-engineer things after the sheet had been built for over a year.  This is not the end of the upgrading as we will tweak things as we get more feedback.  Thanks to all of you for your testing things for us and telling us when we screw up (praise is ok too!).  Happy trading!