On Thu, 2007-12-06 at 20:13 +0200, Leonard Mada wrote: > my vote for turning the Auto-Date OFF!
(rant) > I always hated this Auto-Date bullshit. So, Leonard is mad. ;-) That makes me sad. (they rhyme!) But the funny thing is, Calc's date input seems to always infuriate users. They are not just annoyed, but "pissed" at Calc's handling of date input. I can certainly see a pattern here. That means, the usability with our date input is broken, and we probably need to tackle that sooner or later. Here are some facts (from a developer's point of view). * dates must be store as fractions internally. This won't change. * parsing an input to determine whether it is a string, a number, or a date must be done when the value is committed to the cell, no later. * determining whether the input is a date without any other clues has been (almost) proven to be error-prone, can never reach an acceptable level, and leads to the wrath of users, largely due to localized date formats. So, what can we do? The rough idea I've just come up with is to do what web applications do: provide a date input box. This way Calc also knows that the user is about to enter a date, and try not to even parse an input as a date if the date input box is not used or be more strict about what format is considered a date in that scenario. That would also allow us to localize the date format too without causing too much headache. Other ideas are welcome. Kohei -- Kohei Yoshida - OpenOffice.org Engineer - Novell, Inc. <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
