Straight copy from mailing list response.

On Fri, 2003-09-12 at 12:25, Jody Goldberg wrote:
On Thu, Sep 11, 2003 at 06:56:08PM -0700, Patrick wrote: 
> > (2) The icons and toolbars seem bulky. Particularly the X checkmark
> > equal, all of the toolbars (extra space above/beneath icons?), the
> > background colour selector and the text colour selector.
> >
These are gnome standard sizes.
> 
While thinking about how to change these I thought of something else
instead - I've never used those icons and I'm not even entirely sure what
they would do. Presumably X cancels your changes, checkmark accepts them
and equals displays the formula result? Now I've checked and the first two
are right but it appears that equals enters the equal sign for you, but
only if you haven't entered anything yet. Yeah :)

They have the following drawbacks:
 - They're common operations (cancel = ESC, checkmark = enter, = = =) so
you wouldn't want to be clicking on them frequently anyway -- if you're
going to use a spreadsheet for any real purpose you wouldn't use them for
anything, so why teach bad habits?
 - They take up valuable space.
 - They're big and bulky looking.

I've been noticing some things in Excel XP since I started looking at
Gnumeric and today I noticed that the X, checkmark, = are gone and only a
small f(x) (fn or fx?) is next to the editing bar which brings up the
function editor dialog box if clicked.

Something to consider.