On Saturday May 6 2006 11:37 am, Fabian Flores wrote:
> Dan, I understand the context perfectly (but I'm an system analyst). It
> seemed to me that this sentence could be ambiguous to the end-user. At
> least that seemed me when translating to Spanish. But really I don't
> know if it's the same in English.
> I think that somebody could interpret the sentence thus:
>
> "Set the length to this field 20 units up or down respect to the
> longest FirstName". So that, if the length to the longest FirstName= 35,
> the reader could set length=15 (35 - 20) or length=55 (35 + 20).
>
> But, it's very possible that it is a bad interpretation of my part, and
> that the sentence it's fine. My English is very poor, obviusly, and for
> this reason I try to verify always my interpretations.
>
> Regards, and thanks for your attention.
What I wanted to write and what you understand are two different
things. Perhaps this would be better:
This field must contain at least as many characters as the longest
name in your list. If you are not sure what this value should be, look at
the longest name you have and count the number of letters in the name. Add
5 to that number in case a name added later might be longer. For example,
if the longest first name you have has 12 letters, use the value 17.
(Suggestion: since most first names are shorter than 20 letters, you could
use 20 as the value. Unless you know some people with long first names,
this value should be sufficient.)
Dan
