[Sorry for messed up threading and formatting, this is a copy&paste
job from the web archive]

> I guess there is a word count in there which will be nice and you can 
> assign keyboard shortcuts to styles, but all of that could be 
> accomplished before with macros.

IIRC here was a word count before, the only problem was that people did
not find it. I am very glad that usability problems like this have been
finally adressed.


> _Change #1_


> So, v2 caters to the Mary's of the world instead of catering to both 
> users like v1.1.x does. Why? To me, this is *embarrassing* that this >
> is 
> being changed based on this scenario.

> This is issue #39486 if you want to comment or vote for it.

While I personally would prefer the previous behaviour by a large margin
(I think that the change is motivated by a misguided sense of
"neatness"), I am very glad that there is one preference less. Good
riddance.

OpenOffice has about 500 preferences last time I counted them very
roughly.  *Anything* that reduces preferences is a good thing.

The current preferences dialog is just not comprehensible for the
average user. Even experienced users frequently overlook stuff
after using the program for years, because this thing is too
bloated, with useless preferences for completely nonsensical 
stuff like 
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=31188

I'd rather have some useful features removed and some sensible
defaults (like restoring cursor position) messed up than 
never getting rid of crap like 
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=31190
that is just scary to naive users.

> _Change #3_
> We also can't display the file name in the Title Bar anymore. Now we 
> have to use the file name only. No choice like there kind of was 
> before. 
> Why is this? Because users might get confused.

But that is a very good reason! OpenOffice should meet the user's 
expectation, not the other way round. Most users never set or use the
document title, and therefore the filename is a very sane choice 
for the window title. While it might not be as "nice" as the document
title, it will certainly be more helpful in finding the document again
at a later time, after they have stored it away somewhere.

> I guess now I have to read an ugly confusing file name with an 
> extension 
> because some mythical user will be confused by an easy to read title.

So don't use extensions! There is no law forcing you to use extensions,
and last time I checked OpenOffice opened files without extensions 
just fine.

Even if I think that some of the changes in the 2.0 version are
not for the better, but for the worse (I do think your example 
1 is a change for the worse) I am very glad, that *any* usability
work in OpenOffice slowly starts. 

Certiainly there is a huge room for improvement, but please do
give people some time. Making OpenOffice more comprehensible to
users is a gigantic task, and it won't show final results within
a short timeframe -- but within a few iterations stuff *will* fall
into place.

/ralph -- who wants to thank UI design people for the great 
          work they have done so far. 2.0 will be a great release.


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