[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 108531] Typing in a list box to select an item results in chaos

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=108531

--- Comment #3 from Howard Johnson <BridgeportContractor at gmail.com> ---
(In reply to Alex Thurgood from comment #2)
> Well, this seems to work mostly for me, depending on how fast I type the
> subsequent letters ...

Thanks Alex.

I have an accounting database I built long ago and have recently ported to
LibreOffice.  

Every month I sit with my partner to help balance her accounts and enter what
is missing.  Every month I'm embarrassing at how badly LO works for production
entry of items with list boxes.  And I have to apologize to her for how long
it's taking me to keystroke the simple entries just to lookup fields like
category, or payment type.  It should be quick and easy and it's not.  I have
to fight with the list boxes.

Some of the fields I was able to convert to using a Combo Box, which works much
better in this regard, but it is limited to direct keyed fields, and can't
currently provide a solution to indexed fields.

I know it can be better because the older version of this accounting software
is written in Access, and it had none of these difficulties.  And before that I
used something similar called chex in MS DOS (yes that long ago), and it also
had none of these difficulties.


When you type in the first few letters of an entry, the LO List Box should do
exactly what the LO Combo Box now does well: quickly select the item you want,
and without any fuss.


And furthermore when you hit the delete key it should delete the entry.  This
also doesn't work, and I've put it in another report.  In reality the combo box
has so many issues that I think a major face-lift of it needs to be considered.
 Perhaps we should just abandon the old List Box and start over with a new
control, possibly called Lookup or something like that.

And when you hit the backspace it should subtract from your keystrokes (to fix
a typing keystroke) without loosing your entry so far.


Now I have 40+ years of working with computers, and if I'm frustrated at this
control, then somethings is wrong in how it works.  I can only guess that newer
computer users just see it as flaky.


I can understand if we don't have the technical ability (and/or the man power)
do do this work right now, but that's not the question on the table at the
moment.  The question on the table is does this thing need someday to be
improved or replaced?  And if so how?

I think we should begin with a list of all of the things that don't work well
for List Boxes and Combo Boxes and lay out a solid plan to fix these darn
things.  They are so vary important in Base.


I still can't get LO to build on my machine because of a bug related to MariaDB
10.1 and LO MySQL dependencies.  I'm hoping that later this month when the new
version of Debian is released I might be able to get past this bug and finally
be able to Build LO, that is without having to walk away from my database.  

But even then I'm no expert in C++, but will do what I can to help with these
efforts.

:-)

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