Re: [Usability] Default document formats

[Vidar Braut Haarr <vhaarr+usability gmail com>]

On 9/22/05, Joachim Noreiko <jnoreiko yahoo com> wrote:
>
> --- Vidar Braut Haarr <vhaarr+usability gmail com>
> wrote:
>
> > You didn't read the manual, I didn't read the
> > manual.
> > Noone reads the manual.
>
> Actually, I do read the manual :)

Hot diggity! :-)

> Maybe not from cover to cover, but I do frequently
> click on the Help button in dialogs.

I used to do that some times, but when I realized the only thing the
help texts provided was sentences like:

"<option>: Select this option to enable <option>."

(and thereby being completely useless, as they don't explain what
<option> is or what it does/how it does it), I stopped using them.

What also added to my frustration was that Yelp seems to rebuild the
sidebar from scratch every time I launch it (why does it even show the
sidebar? when it is ever useful?), which takes a lot of time.

> OOo throws up a warning dialog when you try to save in
> RTF or DOC, along the lines of "not all formatting may
> be saved", so perhaps a similar dialog for the OpenDoc
> format could be added to warn about MS Office
> compatibility. (The dialog in question is horrible,
> but that's another issue.)

Which suggests that internally, OOo knows that some formatting might
be lost, and so it should just automatically select a document format
that will work, and not assume the user has a faintest idea what
"format", "RTF" or "OpenDocument" means.

He's writing English and it should fit on a piece of A4 paper - does
he really need to concern himself any further?

--
Vidar Braut Haarr
"Programmers don't die, they
just GOSUB without RETURN."