You're missing the fact, for a start, that much of the world (99.9% of my locations) doesn't have counties AND states :-) - or any logical equivalent.
Some of the more detailed discussion of just the US shows that there is no uniformity, even in the US - so you'd have to have multiple boxes, many of which were irrelevant for most or all of your locations.
Apart from the fact that you'd never get everyone to use them as designed - if they could be designed even to satisfy half of Legacy users.
Why bother to go back to boxes when you can simply add all locations appropriately as a text string with relevant fields for each region separated by commas?
Sorting is not a problem when all locations for the same region end in the same manner. You can even add appropriate commas for real missing information if you insist. I prefer to stop and look it up or add my guess with a question mark. This is far more obvious to everyone that I wasn't sure or didn't know than a comma that, to the uninitiated, is simply a typo.
Sorting would be even less of a problem if Legacy numbered the fields from the right instead of from the left. Currently Legacy shows 9 fields in the Master Location List sort. However Legacy has entered US town, county, state, country as 1-4, in that order (leaving some to speculate on this list whether it was intended to add Continent, Earth, Solar System, Galaxy, Universe in the other 5 fields ;-) Although you can change to "generic", it doesn't work for sorting unless you add multiple meaningless commas at the beginning of your locations to make them all the same number of fields. Simply numbering from country down solves this problem. So no need for boxes that clutter up the entry screen and complicate the entry process.
Names are different again. I have some need of a field to mark the married surname of women and the surname of divorced women. I have a cousin who didn't revert to her maiden surname when she divorced but by deed poll chose another one altogether. It's clear from previous discussions on list that many Europeans also need at least one other name field.
Cheers, Cathy
At 08:20 12/12/2004, you wrote:
In replying to my posting, Cathy wrote:
<big snip>
> Certainly, we don't want to go backwards and have separate fields/boxes for > each part of a location.
Boy, Cathy you and I sure have different views of this issue! I think a separate field for each location part is a good thing, just like it's a good thing for names.
Seems to me that it solves your sorting problems. You just say Sort by counties, and all the Washington counties go together, whether they were in the same state or not. Or you could sort first on counties and then on states. Then all the Washington counties in New York would be together and all the Washington counties in Ohio wold be togther but the NY and OH counties would be separate from each other, etc.
Tell me what I'm missing here! jr
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