Short of renaming that button label, maybe one alternative would be to provide more choices in that dropdown so that the Section dialog can actually be reached from there?

IMHO this is NOTABUG.

It is not misnamed. It indeed does INSERT, and what it inserts is a SECTION. (It just happens that the only sensible way to insert columns is to use a section to do it.)

Note that one of the "columns" you can insert is a single "column". That is what you as a human might consider a "section" instead of a "column".

Admittedly, a tooltip that uses the word "columns" would make sense. Something like "Insert section (with columns)" or "Insert section or columns" (although the second isn't technically as accurate it sounds a bit more natural for the typical user).  So then I guess "Insert section/columns" could be ambiguous enough to be neither technically wrong, nor misleading.

The section dialog can easily be reached by right-clicking somewhere in the newly-created section.

Perhaps we can turn this into an easy-hack to improve the tooltip.

I see what you mean, retitled a bit to somewhat more accurately reflect the situation.

The notion of section seems really foreign to me when I'm actively looking for something to set columns on a portion of the page (and unfortunately the "Page columns" button in the "Layout" tab doesn't do that, it ignores sections and affects the whole page no matter what the selection is) and the button that only apparently contains columns is not labelled columns.

It would at least make more sense to me if that dropdown had things other than just columns, otherwise it seems like columns is what it's all about. Yeah, you can argue that "a column is a section" in theory but that just seems like playing with semantics and obscuring what the user would be looking for, particularly when other office suites typically call that "Columns" outright.

I checked now to be sure I was not misremembering what I saw out there years ago, and Google Docs and MS Word's workflow still is: you select the range of contents you want to transform into columns, and then click the "Columns" dropdown menubutton in the "Layout" (or "Format" or "Page layout") tab/menu/etc., and then pick the number of columns in a similar way to this "Section" dropdown menubutton here. In those commonly encountered UIs, they make Columns a first class UI element to look for.

You expect the large button to be named "Columns"?

(In reply to Justin L from comment #2)
> IMHO this is NOTABUG.

Well... it's at least a conundrum.

And the fact we have a conceptual/semantic inconsistency between the Menu+Toolbar UI mode and the Tabbed UI mode _is_ a bug, although not exactly the bug Jeff was complaining about.

In the Format > Columns... dialog, you can either change the number of columns of a page style (which is itself conceptually broken; it should have been DF of the page sequence; see bug 161078), or you choose to apply to "current selection", and what that does is:

1. Create a new section
2. Place the selected text in that section
3. Introduce a kind-of-anonymous section style with columns, and apply it to the new section (can we call this DF'ing the section? Maybe)

which is quite different than the the page style functionality. Users are definitely surprised if they set N columns once one way, then again M columns other way, they get M columns in the section within one of the N columns on the page - quite surpising. And that itself may merit a bug report about UI inconsistency.


> It is not misnamed. It indeed does INSERT, and what it inserts is a SECTION.
> (It just happens that the only sensible way to insert columns is to use a
> section to do it.)

I'm afraid I have to agree. I don't like that I have to agree, because when I hear the word "section", I don't think "oh, a change in the number of columns". A section is a poorly-fleshed-out concept in LO vis-a-vis the user; and many users would think of MS Word sections, which have their own page styles. In MSO, the page-level columns and section-level columns are the same thing.

> Admittedly, a tooltip that uses the word "columns" would make sense.
> Something like "Insert section (with columns)" or "Insert section or
> columns" (although the second isn't technically as accurate it sounds a bit
> more natural for the typical user).

Indeed, the choice of widgets for that minidialog is a bit questionable. OTOH, the Table mini-dialog doesn't have the words "Rows" and "Columns".

> The section dialog can easily be reached by right-clicking somewhere in the
> newly-created section.

Easy but not easily discoverable. It's not so easy to guess that's how you're supposed to get to it.

And - if is problematic, UX-wise, that there are no toolbar/tab bar buttons for controlling the number of  columns in the current section, while we do have such a button for number of page-style columns.

Heiko Tietze committed a patch related to this issue.
It has been pushed to "master":

https://git.libreoffice.org/core/commit/e2d7bc21ea537cf07dd80482039879e5957bb6d3

Resolves tdf#169975 - Show "Column" instead "Section" on Tool- and Notebookbar

It will be available in 26.8.0.

The patch should be included in the daily builds available at
https://dev-builds.libreoffice.org/daily/ in the next 24-48 hours. More
information about daily builds can be found at:
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Testing_Daily_Builds

Affected users are encouraged to test the fix and report feedback.

We discussed this topic in the design meeting. Potential solution is to label the command as "Columns", which is used on the Notebookbar, and show contextually "Sections..." for the main menu. If the command is used on a classic toolbar it shows the tooltip "Insert section with columns". The Tabbed Notebookbar UI has the "Sections..." command in the dropdown menu on the Insert menu allowing to add sections with more fine-tuning.