Re: [Usability] Default document formats

[Phil Bull <philbull gmail com>]

On Thu, 2005-09-22 at 13:50 +0200, Vidar Braut Haarr wrote:

> > 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.

So why not present the format options differently? The default should
definitely be an open format (for many reasons), but after that it might
be useful to only provide a couple more, with descriptive, non-technical
names. After that, an 'Advanced' option for people after an obscure
format.

Most format choosers are currently long lists in the format:

<product name> <version> <format type> <extension>
e.g. OpenOffice.org 1.0 Text Document (.sxw)

How much of this does the user actually want to know? Plus, the fact
that the lists are long makes it confusing for novices and time
consuming for everyone else.

All we really need for a word processor is:

Normal Document (.sxw)
Microsoft-compatible Document (.doc)
Document Template (.stw)
-----
Other Document Types...

'Other Document Types...' would open a nice, searchable list of formats
with short descriptions so people could find weird formats if they
needed to.

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

Because of the sheer number of formats out there at the moment,
unfortunately yes. But I agree that it could be a whole lot easier for
novice users. Clearly, some are just accepting the defaults and getting
unexpected results.

-- 
Phil Bull
www.livejournal.com/users/philbull/