Hi,
On 06.02.2013 19:17, James Plante wrote:
Oliver, You can get much of the behavior you desire by defining User
Fields instead of Input Fields. They have the added benefit of being
global. In other words, if you change one at the end of the document,
and that same field appears at the beginning, BOTH fields change if
you edit either one of them. The only thing User Fields won't offer
you is the editing if the doc is read-only.
Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, the User Fields do have a different UI which is a little better,
but also does not allow "in-place" editing.
From my point of view User Fields and Input Fields have both its
feature set which are both useful under certain user scenarios.
Input Fields are especially uses in forms - as I have learned from
certain customers - which are sent to a user and needs to be filled.
These fields are also used when corresponding Microsoft Word documents
are imported.
Why would you want to traverse all the input fields? OpenOffice, of
course, does that automatically when you have Input fields in a
template. You complain that you cannot back up to the previous field.
But if you've made a mistake in the previous field, just click in
that field when you've finished all of them, and make your
correction. Although I find that to be my preferred way of making
corrections, your requirements may differ. Perhaps you could write a
macro to list all the fields and allow you to change their contents
in a dialog?
Yes, the current UI works, but it does not seem to match all the user's
expectations, especially if the user is migrating from Microsoft Word.
Do not get me wrong, I do not want to clone an UI from another
application, but I am currently listening to some user's concerns
regarding our current UI.
Best regards, Oliver.
P.S.: Sorry for the long silence, again. I had got another viral flue
which knocked me out the last days.
Regards,
Jim
On Feb 6, 2013, at 10:23 AM, Oliver-Rainer Wittmann
<orwittm...@googlemail.com> wrote:
Hi,
recently I got notice about our (from my point of view) very
user-unfriendly way for editing Input Fields in Writer. Currently,
you can not place the cursor into an Input Field which in general
is shown with a grey background when Menu View - Field Shading is
on. If you click on the Input Field, a modal dialog pops up. In
this dialog you can edit the Input Field's content. On confirmation
of the dialog the Input Field's content is changed in the text
document. To edit the next Input Field you need to click on it.
There is also a special key shortcut - namely Shift-Ctrl-F9. This
key shortcut opens the Input Field content editing dialog for the
first field. This time the dialog has a Next button by which you
can confirm your change and switch directly to the next Input
Field. A Previous button is not available. By Murphys law the
dialog hides most of the time the Input Field in the text
document.
I have got the opinion that such an editing experience is bad,
especially, if the document is a form which makes use of a lot of
Input Fields to be filled by the user.
My idea is to be able to edit the Input Fields directly in the text
document's content together with some special handling. The special
handling which I had in mind is: - Some special key handling to
"travel" from Input Field to Input Field, forward and backward. May
be key Ctrl-Tab for forward movement and Shift-Ctrl-Tab for
backward movement. - Feedback when the user "enters" (cursor inside
Input Field) and "leaves" (cursor outside Input Field) a Input
Field. May be some transparent overlay, similar to the selection
overlay, when the cursor is inside a Input Field. - Even if the
document is read-only, the editing of the Input Fields should be
possible when configured correspondingly.
What is your opinion about the current Input Field editing? What is
your feedback on my idea to improve the editing of Input Fields?
If I found time, I would like to implement such an improvement.
Unfortunately, I do not have the resources, now.
Everybody volunteering to help/to provide feedback on development,
qa, user experience, documentation, translation of possible new UI
and the new documentation is welcome.
Best regards, Oliver.
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