On 11/23/09 18:06, John Kaufmann wrote:
Hi Uwe,
My OO education owes much to you seeing the crux of my questions.
However, in this case I think you missed my concern:
In a message dated 2009.11.23 10:12 -0500, Uwe Fischer wrote:
... functions in the Table toolbar are different from the
"corresponding" functions available via the menu. [In the toolbar,
the Background Color icon has a paragraph/text context, as opposed
to the cell or table context for Background color via the Table
menu. I don't know whether that is right, or good design, or the
intent of the design team, but at least the extended info is
consistent with the behavior.
you can set different background colors to characters and paragraphs.
In Calc, you can set different backgrounds to cells, too.
Yes, I know that. The concern is this: In the Table toolbar, the
Background Color applies not to the table or cell itself, but to
paragraph/text within a table or cell. Via the Table main menu or
context menu, however, the Background Color applies to all of the table
or cell. (The difference is easily seen if you increase the border
margins.) This seems to me erroneous on multiple levels: There are
other ways to apply a paragraph/text background color (including via the
Formatting toolbar), without also using the Table toolbar for that
function. Should not the Table toolbar provide shortcuts to Table
functions?
This is not the only case where a toolbar function is different from the
"equivalent" function via the menu; I just chose it because it is easily
visible. It seems to me that a certain lack of consistency in
nomenclature and methods raises the OO learning curve unnecessarily, and
that toolbar functions being different from menu functions, as a class,
fall into that category. Or did I miss something [again ;-) ]?
John
Hi John,
your ideas how to improve the user interface of OOo are certainly worth
some more thoughts and dicussions. But this is the users mailing list,
where users ask about how to use OOo. If you want to get into some valid
discussions about UI, you would want to join one or more of the UX (user
experience) mailing lists.
The UX project web page is at http://ux.openoffice.org/
The lists [email protected] and [email protected] are quite
active. Those lists have a much higher probability of being read by the
people in charge of actively initiating such changes.
Uwe
--
[email protected] - Technical Writer
StarOffice - Sun Microsystems, Inc. - Hamburg, Germany
http://documentation.openoffice.org/
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation
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