Created attachment 51328 [details] Screenshot showing overwhelming Filter Selection dialog If you open a file of a format that LibreOffice doesn't recognize, a "Filter Selection" dialog appears asking the user to choose from a list of file formats. This list contains about 180 entries in no particular order; it's madness asking users to find the correct entry from it. Please add some structure to this list: for example, the formats could be grouped firstly by application type (e.g., word processor, spreadsheet, graphics/drawing, presentation, etc.), and then within each type they should be sorted alphabetically. Also, it's not particularly user-friendly to drop the user immediately into this dialog without first giving some explanation of the problem. It would have been helpful if the dialog could include some text to this effect, such as "LibreOffice cannot determine the type of this file. Please select it from this list." Steps to reproduce: 1. $ libreoffice3.4 foo.bar (where foo.bar is a file of unknown type) Observed behaviour: 2. Overwhelming "Filter Selection" dialog appears Expected behaviour 2. A user-friendly dialog appears which a) states the problem LibreOffice had opening the file, and b) provides an organized list from which the user can select the appropriate file format.
Problem also exists in LibreOffice 3.4.3.
That is some OOo heritage. Indeed, sort order is without any cognizable order and too long. There should be sort order and a preselector "show only xyz documents" for particular file types leaving an option to see the complete list. @christoph: Have there ever been thoughts concerning this dialog?
Created attachment 51412 [details] Mock-up of proposal. I made a little mock-up after Tristan's description. So, hopefully, if any dev comes along now, s/he can go right ahead...
@Aaron Strontsman: Yes, that looks good. Unfortunately I do not know which developer might proceed that.
Since all new unconfirmed bugs start in state UNCONFIRMED now and old unconfirmed bugs were moved to NEEDINFO with a explanatory comment, all bugs promoted above those bug states to NEW and later are automatically confirmed making the CONFIRMED whiteboard status redundant. Thus it will be removed.
*** Bug 34483 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
I can't reproduce this behaviour with LibreOffice 3.6.0.4. Almost every unknown file type I open throws up a Calc import dialog, which IMHO is even worse behaviour.
Tristan, would you mind opening a new bug for the new behaviour?
@Tristan Miller Indeed, this morning I found no way to bring up the dialog with Server Installation of "LibreOffice 3.6.0.4 German UI/Locale [Build-ID: 932b512] on German WIN7 Home Premium (64bit) I submitted a new "Bug 53570 - FILEOPEN unknown file type brings up Spreadsheet CSV import dialog instead of filter list" for this new problem, can you please try to confirm it?
@Ivan: Please set Status to ASSIGNED and add yourself to "Assigned To" if you accept this Bug or forward the Bug if it's not your turf.
As I mentioned, the new problem occurs with "almost every unknown file type". See Bug 53553 and Bug 53554 for two unknown file types which produce different (but also wrong) behaviour.
Nice idea and mock-up, I like it. Well, assigned, though this will require some documentation/code reading, I currently know nothing about filters, how to categorize them, where to get strings for the category names etc... So I don't promise a quick result. :)
Pleasant anticipation also is some nice feeling :-) Thx. for taking this one!
We still have several cases (see Bug 47808) where the filter comes up, so this one should be fixed. May I suggest to add file name extensions to the file type list as we see them in the file type selector in file dialog?
Set to NEW, because I don't contribute to LibreOffice anymore.
AFAIK This dialog will never show with recent versions, because PlainTextFilterDetect should catch all files.