[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Libreoffice] [PATCH] make STR_MERGE_NOTEMPTY more understandable

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Kohei, Michael, all!

Am Donnerstag, den 10.11.2011, 15:44 -0500 schrieb Kohei Yoshida:
> On Thu, 2011-11-10 at 12:20 +0000, Michael Meeks wrote:
> > On Thu, 2011-11-10 at 12:51 +0100, Bjoern Michaelsen wrote:
> > > Isnt this something for ux-advise?
> 
> Sure.

Sure ;-)

> > 	Agreed. IMHO by the time we have worked hard to make the question
> > comprehensible to people answering "Yes" "No" - hopefully we realise
> > that Yes/No answers are fundamentally broken anyway and IMHO ~all of
> > them should be killed ;-)
> >
> > 	Could we not fix the text and also the button texts at the same
> > time ? ;-)
> 
> While we are at it, please bear in mind
> 
> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=30456
> 
> Apparently some users want the contents of the hidden cells to be
> removed when merging them *and* not choosing the contents to be joined
> together.

Absolutely true ... there are lots of tiny use cases that cannot be
resolved completely (e.g. AutoCorrect magic) and sometimes need user
involvement. On the other hand, such pre-action-questions are efficiency
killers. What can be done, is to use sensible defaults and let the user
decide afterwards if something was wrong. (There is a nice theory about
the level of automation that applies here...)

About four years ago, I've made up a wiki page to address this problem
([1] it is an enhanced version of the Action Refinements available in
Microsoft Office). Each time such a question like "merge should do ...",
I do mention this proposal, but people usually respond with "such a tiny
issue, let's solve that quickly with <insert_suboptimal_solution_here>".

Michael, all, is it finally time to address all these tiny issues
properly by planning such a LibreOffice enhancement? (hint, hint, *g*)

Cheers,
Christoph

[1]
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/index.php?title=User_Experience/DirectManipulationSnippets&oldid=69731