Rod Engelsman wrote: > Not in this case. I'm not really a newbie by any means; I've been using > computers -- mostly Windows -- since about '92. When I first installed > OOo about a year ago, I was a bit taken aback at first when all my blue > "W"s and red "X"s turned into seagulls. I figured out what the deal was > pretty quick but it was something I hadn't really thought about before. > I had just assumed that the icon was derived from the file extension > rather than the file association. I can understand why someone less > knowledgeable would be confused and even panicky at that result.
That's something completely different. Earlier versions of OOo automatically took over those formats. That was just wrong and was fixed by showing exactly the dialog we are discussing. > The dialog text *is* unclear. It can be read two ways: 1) do you want > OOo to *always* open these file types? or 2) do you want OOo to *be* > *able* to open these file types? Agreed. I never wrote that I'm against changing the text to make it more clear. I'm just thinking that OOo is not the right tool to explain people *how checkboxes work*. Sorry for writing this again, but it seems that nobody seems to understand my writing. Maybe I'm chosing the wrong words and my english is not good enough (I'm german), but please try to understand it *now*. So a text like "OOo should become the program that is automatically used for the following formats: ..." would be much better (or any similar text you can think of that might express the real purpose of this dialog more explicit). But it would be ridiculous to add "please click on the checkbox left to the name of all the formats you want to assign to OOo". People should know how checkboxes work. If they don't, they should get instructed, but OOo (or any other application program) is not the right tool to teach them. > My opinion is that the checkboxes should just go away. Devise some way > to set the file associations through the options or tools menu. If the > installer could detect an installation of Word, etc. then I would only > set those associations at install time if the installer *did not* detect > those programs on the machine. I suppose you could skip that step for > other platforms. Your proposal is exactly the way I would implement it, but obviously the people that designed this functionality thought that this would be too much automatism or maybe there are situations where it is not possible to make sure that nothing gets screwed up. But that's only a guess. But anyway, it would be my choice to remove the dialog because I think that this dialog is a superfluous step in the installation, not because I think that it is too complicated for the users. Do you really believe that people that don't understand this dialog will understand it when it is moved to "Tools-Options"? I doubt that they will even open it because it will look scary to people that don't understand checkboxes. :-) Best regards, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer - OpenOffice.org Application Framework Project Lead Please reply to the list only, [EMAIL PROTECTED] is a spam sink. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
