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

[Christoph Noack]

Hi all,

the answer I've promised to you earlier today ...

Am Sonntag, den 06.11.2011, 12:59 +0100 schrieb Christoph Noack:
[...]
> Markus Mohrhard <markus.mohrhard at googlemail.com> schrieb:
>         Hello Christoph, Astron, Kohei, Eike,
>         
>         I finally decided to go the safe way and implement a modal dialog for
>         3-5. There are two mainly technical decisions for it: In my opinion it
>         is not yet sure that a modeless dialog is the best technical solution
>         and a modeless dialog would have forced me to change several parts of
>         the calc core.

Okay, as we said earlier, you know the code best and thus you have the
final say :-)

>         I hope that we can now concentrate on creating a nice dialog for the
>         3.5 release and after that maybe continue discussing if a modeless
>         dialog makes sense. Then we have time to try out different technical
>         solutions.

I have thought about several things all of you said. For example, Astron
mentioned that the "Insert Names" functionality ... it doesn't make much
sense in a modal "Manage Names" dialog. And so on.

Finally, I've ended up in a mixture of the today's modal dialogs and the
decisions we've already made. But, I really tried to take care of the
details (also changing existing behavior of e.g. the Name Box) to make
working with it really smooth. The main changes:
      * The dialog Manage Names is modal (OK / Cancel), but keeps the
        direct editing capability of the currently selected entry. We
        avoid the bad handling which can also be experienced in the
        color dialogs (Astron referred to it). Thus, multiple changes in
        the dialog can be applied via OK -> addresses the performance
        issue
      * The dialog Paste Names replaces / extends the Insert Name
        dialog. I hope we can make it non-modal, that would really
        help ... the user can keep it open while working with the
        document. It also covers some advanced use cases ... you'll see.
      * I also adapted the Name Box ... once a cell is being edited,
        selecting an item in this Name Box should paste it. So,
        basically, people don't need to open the Paste Names dialog.
        (Note: This means removing a very strange functionality of
        offering the most recently used function names in the - still -
        same Name Box.)
      * Many small refinements, e.g. clicking in the Name Box selects
        the whole text - I assumed that this makes changing names much
        quicker (but: if people primarily use this to tweak a given
        selection, it will be a non-improvement, of course).

All the details are given on the "all new" wiki page (sorry for the
lengthly description, but I wanted to take care of the many cases):
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Design/Whiteboard/Calc_Range_Names

>         Christoph, Astron I hope that you are not too disappointed but I'm not
>         comfortable with such a big change shortly before the feature freeze.
>         There are too many open questions and I think the technical part is
>         even more complicated than it looks for a non developer.

You know, that's one aspect why we need your input ... I would be happy
if you could provide a short statement whether the descriptions on that
page do make sense to you. And, if some behavior should be stripped for
the 3.5.

Astron: Could you please have a look as well?

Cheers,
Christoph