New Power FX formula bar - Painful loss of practical features from the old formula bar

[R3dKap]

Hello Power FX formula bar team 😉,

I've always loved the new formula bar even back in the days when there had been the first attempt with the Enhanced formula bar. But at the time I stopped using it because a very few practical features from the old bar disappeared with the Enhanced bar.

With the announcement of this new formula bar I was hopping that these features had been merged but unfortunately it's not the case. Here are these features, in detail...

1. Old formula bar: when you move around from a control to another, the system keeps in memory the last property you were on for each of these controls -> this is no longer working with the new formula bar 😥
2. Old formula bar: when you click on a property label on the properties panel (not the advanced one), that property becomes the active property on the formula bar and formula bar goes directly into editing mode (showing the editing carret) and code can be typed immediately -> this is not the case with the new formula bar 😥
3. Old formula bar: the bar could be resized at any size -> the new formula bar only allows 2 size positions 😥 -> why not providing a fully resizable formula bar dragging the lower right corner of the bar to (almost) any position a maker would wish ? -> why not (at the least) add a margin-right: 280px on the chevron down icon (used to open/close the formula bar) to prevent the bar to overlapp both the Properties and Advanced properties panels ? so easy to implement, so practical for thousands of makers 😉
4. Old formula bar: typing a function in lowercase would automatically transform it to the correct camel case function name when opening the parenthesis -> this is not working any more within the new formula bar 😥

To my opinion, just these few little features make the new formula bar less usable than the old one (for now 😉).

Hope this helps...

[ChrisBal-MSFT]

Hi @R3dKap - thanks for your note.  This is precisely the kind of feedback we want to hear from users.

For items #1 and #2, these are things we noticed as well and we were debating internally quite a bit about how impactful this behavior change would be for makers.  Your comments here help us understand the impact.  We'll take this feedback back into planning.

For #3, agree - we hear from a lot of customers that editor sizing and the fact that it covers the canvas and property area is annoying.  We have plans to address this in the coming milestones.

For #4, this is a bug.  It's in the process of being fixed as we speak.

This experimental-phase release is by no means "done" and we're going to keep iterating.  This feedback is truly valuable!

[R3dKap]

A few other requests here for the new formula bar:

     5. make the vertical scroll bar much larger than it is now (very painful to aim it since it's so thin 😅)

     6. offer a section feature that we can collapse/expand (when you have pages of code this could be really helpful)

     7. I haven't checked it but: when the suggestions box is visible, if we press ESC please just hide the suggestion box and make sure we keep the formula bar focused with the editing caret active 😉 so we can move around the code using the keyboard arrow keys

     8. Haven't checked this one as well: showing within the vertical scrollbar the position of eventual errors or delegation warnings so we can "jump" to it quite easily

Generally speaking, when using the formula bar it's all about optimizing (minimizing in fact) interactions with the mouse and the keyboard to achieve one's goals.

For instance, one of the things that I consider most painful today is that the left panel with the tree showing all screens and controls does not automatically scroll to the active control when switching from a control to another... 😩😩😩😩 I'm sure if you monitor the time spent by makers scrolling in that panel, it would be just huge... 😉

Don't know if you could push this feedback to right team...

[alexsolexToo]

I agree with all @R3dKap suggestions.
Plus this one :
- please add a keyboard shorcut so that we can easily open full size the formula bar, and directly focus into it 

thanks

[A-Team-2020]

Replying as the Power FX bar is now ticked by default in all newly created apps on my tenant. #3 has not been addressed and it's been 9 months since this post. What are the milestones out of interest? This 'feature' just feels like a big step backwards.

Also in the spirit of providing feedback, the intellisense suggestions constantly interfere with line breaks in code, with presses of the Enter key adding in suggestions instead of adding the line break.

[bobesponja]

Agreed. The resizable bar issue, while strange from my perspective, isn't as big of a deal to me anymore, but IntelliSense interfering with my line breaks is an inconvenience.

[ramzez]

How can I manually add indent to the code with the new Power FX bar? 

Pressing Tab does not add indent where as Shift+Tab reduces indent.

[ramzez]

Never mind, it seems that this is a bug in the maker and not related to the new Power FX bar.