[Libreoffice] Discuss " Easy_Hacks: Remove Sheet From File" ?

[Kohei Yoshida]

On Tue, 2010-11-23 at 23:39 +0100, Christoph Noack wrote:
> Hi all!
> 
> Sorry for being a bit later ... yesterday, I had to fight against some
> electronic devices (what irony...).
> 
> Am Montag, den 22.11.2010, 14:27 -0500 schrieb Kohei Yoshida:
> > > There should be some data from the Improvement Program on how often
> > > this item is used, no? 
> > 
> > Sure.  But such data was not available to us mere mortals (or hackers
> > as we might like to call ourselves).
> 
> Aehm, the data is available in the OOo wiki ... the data collection is
> part of the Renaissance project that published that data frequently.
> http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Tracking_results

Thanks for this.  I wasn't necessarily keeping track of the Renaissance
project, so it is no surprise that I was not aware of this data.

> Published means, that the data is getting old - you may see this when
> looking on the counter values. Therefore it would be great if (at least
> in the mid-term), if we could make use of the data (e.g. if LibreOffice
> changes, then the OOo data will be less helpful for us). As far as I
> (not being a "mere mortal" *g*), it is rather well documented [1].
> 
> One plea from my side - if you look at the data, please be careful. It's
> just numbers :-) For example, if a feature isn't used that much, it
> might not mean that it is unhelpful. In contrast, people may not be able
> to discover it ... so whenever data looks strange, it's just an
> indicator to start some more analysis.

Yup, understood.  Data doesn't provide interpretation, we do, and we are
always subjective when it comes to interpreting data. ;-)

> >  But hopefully Christoph can fill us in on that. 
> 
> Back to the topic. I had a look at the user feedback data (see below),
> and at the menu specification - which didn't provide further details.
> Another interesting source would have been the "Project Q" documents,
> which have been removed quite some time ago (a large part was to be UI
> "compatible" with Microsoft Office). Furthermore, I tried to get some
> information on Microsoft Office 2003, but I don't have access to it at
> the moment.

I believe we are interested in providing some degree of UI familiarity
for the MS Office users.  To what degree and in what method is still
unclear, but there is an interest.

> Here is the user feedback data - a comparison between using the "Insert
> - Sheet" dialog (but not knowing what the people do, since we don't have
> access to the sequential data), and the "Insert - Sheet from File
> functionality". You can see that 25% of the "Insert*" uses are done via
> the "from file" option - remarkable.
> 
> .uno:Insert 6073
> .uno:InsertSheetFromFile 1571
> 
> But, I assume the reason for having the menu item is related to
> something I already referred to. I assume that the "Insert Sheet..." did
> feature the "from file" option since the beginning - but people did not
> find it (oversimplified, might have been a special request by one
> customer). So, another menu item has been added that "rewarded" people
> by just scanning through the menus ...

That's probably the reason.  It would still be nice to know what
triggered the addition of this menu, but I guess we'll never find
out. ;-)

> Thus, I seems costly to me to get rid of the menu item. At least, since
> we do not have a viable alternative at the moment. Instead, it might be
> more helpful to merge the "from file" function and the "from external
> data" [3]. Both can link to external data - the only difference is
> whether it can be found via an URL or whether it is located in a file.
> And one feature lists workbooks, the other feature the tables on a
> website.

This I agree.  I too was sometimes confused with these two menu items.
They sound so similar yet they lead to two totally different dialogs.
Merging these two would indeed be a good usability improvement.

> Sorry for being not that much helpful here ... I would love to say "get
> rid of it" :-) Maybe we should add "Easy Hacks" like "Calc, please don't
> autocorrect again, if the user manually corrected the capitalization in
> cell".

Oh no, you are being a big help here, always sticking to your
principles, which I appreciate a lot. :-)

Regarding Calc's autocorrect behavior, feel free to add these items to
the Easy Hacks, or perhaps a separate page for UI improvement items,
whichever makes sense.

> So if I can help with re-designing the feature, let me know, please!

That would be great.  Let's fix this UI deficiency once and for all. :-)

Thanks,

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida at novell.com>