[Libreoffice-ux-advise] [Bug 150264] FORMATTING: UI improvements to add automatic data validation of dates

[bugzilla-daemon at bugs.documentfoundation.org]

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=150264

--- Comment #11 from Mike Kaganski <mikekaganski at hotmail.com> ---
The UX problem is that people tend to confuse (mix) formatting to cell data
type.

In Calc, a cell can contain a text, a number, or a formula. The actual type of
data in the cell is defined at entry type, and then never changes until another
entry happens.

Also there is a cell format, including a "number format string"; and the dialog
categorized different pre-configured (and user-defined) format strings into
categories, like "Number", "Percent", "Date", "Time", "Text", etc.

Usually inexperienced users don't really understand the fundamental difference
between data and its representation, and that it's perfectly legal and normal
that e.g. a cell formatted "Date" may contain a text that *looks like* date,
but is not a date. People also may get large amount of data (e.g., from
copy-paste), that arrives as text into Calc cells, which users then want to
convert to a number (e.g., to dates). And the users tend to expect that
applying a Date *format* to the cells, they will get those cells contain dates,
when they had strings previously, like "01/02/03".

It is really large proportion of questions e.g. on Ask site, asking why Calc
doesn't work (just because it doesn't match the mentioned expectation).
Answering this: one of the main "whys" is because data conversion is always a
destructive process (you will loose leading/trailing zeros, number of digits in
year, spaces, digits that don't fit into machine number representation, lots of
things when convert a string into a matching number; you will make the
resulting number be shown using numeric format, potentially breaking your
titles) - and formatting is usually done on large ranges (like whole columns),
potentially breaking data somewhere out of your current view, if the
re-formatting would be allowed to change the data itself.

But given how strong this expectation is in users, it might be reasonable to
have some *explicitly opt-in* way in the format dialog to refer to the data
conversion. This is what this proposal is about: either allow users to use this
dialog itself to *also* convert (matching) data, or to provide a link to the
conversion functionality, so that users would be able to discover it from where
they look for it.

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