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

[Christoph Noack]

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

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.

>  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.

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 ...

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.

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".

So if I can help with re-designing the feature, let me know, please!
Moreover, I try to reach out for some more UX people ...

Cheers,
Christoph

[1] User Feedback Program
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/OpenOffice.org_User_Feedback_Program

[2] Menu Specification
http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/menus/MenuStructure.sxw

[3] Recent blog posting covering this feature
http://blogs.sun.com/oootnt/entry/copying_web_data_to_a