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Global vs Local settings for all manner of words and numbers on graphs

JMP may very well be my favorite program. 99% of things I absolutely love about it. One thing that constantly messes me up though is that I rarely use it to present if I can relatively easily use excel to do a similar graph. The reason is that it takes so long to get all of the fonts and formatting right. It's also not often clear which font refers to the word on a graph I'm trying to fix. I've often thought I wished something like the following features were available. 1) If I click on a word/number/symbol/etc, everyone would have a drop-down menu to change the font and associated attributes. To be sure, some categories do have this. But on graph builder I multiple times run into a few that I can't change. For example. In graph builder, the y and x categories can't be changed with a drop-down menu. Another example is a contour plot I'm currently making. I cannot do anything about the data labels for each contour line. They are both too small and overlap with the dots on the contour line so one can't see them. I can't find a solution to move them, and to change the font size I would have to go into preferences and generally change all uses of a specific font (ie. Text, Heading, etc). This brings me to my second thought. 2) Having multiple sets of preferences for different types of presentations would be useful. Sometimes I'm showing something on a computer, and every word needs to be massive for my aging boss who needs to squint to see small fonts. Other times however I'm presenting in a conference hall and have a 30-foot screen, and the font size to graph size ratio can be much lower. Having a set of presets that you can quickly choose without changing every setting globally would be really nice.

 

I'm not a developer so I really have zero ideas how hard this would be to implement. It seems that part of this would involve having text be able to be dynamically moved in and out of categories of fonts so one could uniquely change individual pieces of text or change all similar types of text inside a single plot (ie. all data labels for a single plot) or having a set of font presets for specific types of plots. It sounds like a complicated hierarchy of font presets that are also dynamical and maybe this is too difficult, in which case I completely understand.

 

Either way, JMP is my favorite program and this is more of a suggestion so that I can present it as well rather than a full-bodied criticism. Regardless of if this gets taken up or not, thanks for all the work y'all do on this program!

4 Comments
Status changed to: Acknowledged

@ehchandlerjr - Thank you for your suggestion! We have captured your request and will take it under consideration.

Status changed to: Investigating
 
ehchandlerjr
Level V

Hello - @Sarah-Sylvestre did y'all end up doing anything with this idea? 

Status changed to: We like it! (in the queue)

Hi @ehchandlerjr.  We are working on features that will support this request in JMP 18 and 19 (and potentially beyond). I will update this wish when I can provide more detail on what these features are. This request will not be completely fulfilled in JMP 18, but there will be new functionality available that might be of interest to you and that we would love your feedback on (to see if it truly helps with this problem and makes JMP easier for you!). Also, semantic formatting, availing in JMP 17, might help with part of this request. If you check that out (or are already aware of that feature), let me know if it is helpful.