Bug 130508 - FILEOPEN: "File > Recent documents" and Toolbar Open recent button dropdown arrow menu should show filetypes relevant to the current application
Summary: FILEOPEN: "File > Recent documents" and Toolbar Open recent button dropdown a...
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 56696
Alias: None
Product: LibreOffice
Classification: Unclassified
Component: UI (show other bugs)
Version:
(earliest affected)
unspecified
Hardware: All All
: medium enhancement
Assignee: Not Assigned
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: needsUXEval
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
Reported: 2020-02-07 14:52 UTC by Jeff Fortin Tam
Modified: 2020-05-03 21:10 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

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Description Jeff Fortin Tam 2020-02-07 14:52:42 UTC
When I hit the "⯆" arrow next to the Open button on the toolbar, I am presented with a list of 25 "recent documents".

The problem is that when I'm in Calc (or just recently launched Calc because I want to open a recently used spreadsheet quickly without going through my file manager), I care only about spreadsheets, and yet Calc shows me the 25 most recent documents regardless of whether they are spreadsheets or not. So out of 25 items, maybe 20-23 are Writer (.odt) files that are just cluttering up my view.

Conversely, the same can probably also be said of Writer, Impress, etc. Typically when I am in Writer I care about text documents, not the rest.


There are two approaches I can imagine to solve this:

- Filtering the "recent documents" menu to fill the 25 entries with only entries relevant to the application type it is called from

- Alternatively, if you still want to have your cake and eat it too: use two columns in the menu, populated with 10 (or more) entries each. Indeed, https://developer.gnome.org/gtk3/stable/GtkMenu.html (don't know about other APIs) lets you have multiple columns. You could therefore have a layout with some *bold* headers, such as:

----------------------------------------------------------------
| *Recent spreadsheets*        | *Other recent documents*      |
|  1. Foo                      |  1. lalala.odt                |
|  2. Bar                      |  2. sales pitch.odp           |
|  3. Baz                      |  3. TPS report.docx           |
|  4. Marketing budget         |  4. War and Peas.odt          |
|                              |  5. Tools Story.odt           |
|                              |  etc.                         |
| ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Clear List                                                   |
| ------------------------------------------------------------ |
| Open Template...             | Open Remote File...           |
----------------------------------------------------------------

These two approaches would have the advantage of being able to show MORE application-relevant file choices, rather than having them buried/outweighted by other file types.

If however you strictly want to retain a single menu column with all-file-types in it, there are other solutions, probably less appealing for the user:

- A checkbox in the menu for "[x] Show only documents relevant to the current application"
- Using a different color (or bold type) to differentiate the documents for the current application vs the ones meant for other LibreOffice applications to open.
Comment 1 Roman Kuznetsov 2020-02-07 16:59:33 UTC
>- A checkbox in the menu for "[x] Show only documents relevant to the current application"

that ^ may be...

and -1 for all other from me

opportunity to open any support recent files from any modules is very good for me. I like to see ALL my recent files inside any module of LO

UX-team, what's your opinion?
Comment 2 V Stuart Foote 2020-02-07 17:33:50 UTC
a duplicate, and alternative of bug 84169 to indicate the app (by icon) that would open--for "visual" filtering.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 56696 ***