[Libreoffice-ux-advise] new range name dialog proposal

[Christoph Noack]

Hi Markus, all!

I had hoped for some more time today, but before I'm never able to
answer, some quick thoughts.

Am Montag, den 31.10.2011, 00:06 +0100 schrieb Markus Mohrhard:
> Hello Astron, Christoph, Kohei,
> 
> sorry that it took me a bit to respond but I tried to finish my
> remaining tasks for 3.5 before focusing on this task.
> 
> Let me just respond to the comments you made in all your posts:

Thanks in advance! :-)

> I think that performance is an important factor even if it only
> matters for 20% of our users. We are working hard to make Calc faster
> and easier to use with complex documents. In my opinion it is a
> central point because the person using calc nearly every day are the
> people who have much more big documents. And then range names are an
> advanced feature which helps a lot in handling big documents.
> Therefore I think we should be extremely careful introducing a nice
> dialog which on the other hand makes it nearly unusable for the people
> who really need and use this feature.

Well, as I said earlier ... to me it is not about the time for doing
recalculations. But the time that gets spend by working with a modal
dialog which itself needs some child modal dialogs that requires further
interaction by the user.

So, personally, I still can't estimate the impact of the recalculations
vs. the improvements due to better interaction design. Still, what I'd
like to know, why MSO doesn't have such problems? Do they generally
perform better with regard to ranges and calculations (being meant to be
a serious and neutral question)?


> I'm still not totally convinced that a modeless dialog is the best way
> to go, so I list here my pros and cons for this:
> 
> pro modeless dialog:
> 
> - can be used like the navigator(opened all the time if needed)
> 
> - modifications in the spreadsheet are possible while working with the
> dialog( is that really an advantage? makes handling of the dialog much
> more difficult if we for example delete a sheet and now several of the
> range names disappear or are modified)

I don't understand the "handling of the dialog ... more difficult". I
assume that's the developer's point-of-view, not so much the user's
point-of-view, right? Because, users would benefit from knowing what's
going on ...

> con modeless dialog:
> 
> - marking a range in the spreadsheet can no longer automatically be
> used for the expression line ( nice feature in my opinion )

Mmh, I had hoped it would still be available when e.g. editing the
expression ... click in the field, select the cell range. To me, the
"mode change to edit" is much saner communicated than today.

> - a lot of undo steps in our undo history, with a modeless dialog we
> can still use one undo entry for all range name changes that were done

Not sure whether this is neutral or even an advantage ... since we
"design for errors", so people can go step-by-step

> - we can recalculate the sheets when we close the dialog
> 
> 
> So my idea would be to use something in the direction of Astron's
> suggestion but modal. Then we can think about how we can make ( if we
> still want) this dialog modeless without loosing performance for the
> 3-6 release. We would have a nice dialog for the 3-5 release without
> any regressions and will have enough time to think about how we can
> address the disadvantages of a modeless dialog. And we should not
> forget that the feature freeze is 5 weeks and we should have finished
> our work on this except for some minor bug fixes.
> 
> I know that this is not a perfect solution but in my opinion a new
> dialog which introduces performance problems is neither perfect.
> 
> What do you think about this idea?

Well, finally its up to you being the developer who needs to take care
about the implementation ...

On the other hand, we've spend quite some time in ideation and concept
improvements I personally don't want to say goodbye to (too quickly) :-)
The "perceived interaction quality" still matters to me, and is an
important factor besides the "computational speed" - although I have
much less experience with the latter one. My assumption is still, that
all the improvements (like the non-modal dialog that lets users work
with the document without opening/closing the name dialog)
over-compensate the potential time loss (for people who do e.g. three
changes at once).

However, whatever we'll go for, I need some time (and help?) to update
the whiteboard page. We need to provide some hints to documentation and
QA ...

@ Astron: What do you think?

Cheers and good night everyone,
Christoph