I wished to do some work on a few chapters of my book, and wanted to use a paragraph style available in the main document. So I Saved a Copy of the main document to a new file, then opened the new file and tried to delete all the unwanted chapters before the chapters of interest, by selecting from there to the start of the document and hitting Delete. Instead of the expected deletion, I got the error message "write-protected content cannot be changed". It took some time to determine that this was because near the beginning of my book I have a write-protected table of contents. That this element prevented the deletion of everything else in the selection seems very counter-intuitive to me. Also, as I understand it, the write-protection option on the ToC is to prevent you editing the contents of the ToC. But the expectations, when selecting the entire table (and more besides) is clearly not /editing/ the table but deleting it. And since it /is/ possible to delete the Toc by clicking on it and choosing "Delete", clearly deletion is allowed. But let's ignore that possibility for the sake of simplicity. The situation would not have been so confusing if the error message had been more specific, and stated "The selection includes a write-protected element and therefore cannot be changed", at a minimum. Slightly better still would be "The write-protected element on page <N> prevents changing the selection which includes it". Personally, I think the user intention is perfectly clear when a write-protected element is included in a larger selection: at a minimum, the user would expect everything except the write-protected element(s) to be changed as per the operation they then performed - leaving the write-protected elements unchanged. But please at least change the error message so that it is clearer.
Hi Luke, Thanks for the prose .. report ;) Can you please attach a simple test document? Cheers - Cor
Created attachment 123347 [details] Sample document
Any document with a ToC would suffice. Just remember to select all, then hit Delete.
(In reply to Luke Kendall from comment #3) > Any document with a ToC would suffice. > Just remember to select all, then hit Delete. Thanks, that helps. So to summarize: if there is a selection with any protected element in it, and one hits DEL, the text "write-protected content cannot be changed" does not always give good guidance of what is going on. Is that correct? Cheers, Cor
Yes, precisely: and the longer the document (the smaller the part the write-protected element is), the more unexpected the message is.
I just discovered the problem is worse than what I thought. I have a file where I compose tweets, sometimes paste tweets into it. The other day I replied to a tweet on Twitter and copied and pasted the tweet into the LO document. I didn't notice that it also copied 24 pages of hypertext after the tweet. I carried on adding an occasional tweet at what I thought was the end of the document. Why is this relevant? Well, when I selected all the unwanted HTML and tried to delete it: I couldn't. Once again I got the message "Write-protected content cannot be changed. No modifications will be accepted." So my problem is: how do I delete the unwanted matter? It looks to me like I'll have to create a new file, copy the material I want from around the unwanted addition, and then abandon the file. Not being permitted to delete an object seems an awful usability error to me. Perhaps there is some specific thing inside the 24 pages which I could delete - but as already noted, the error message is so vague as to be almost completely unhelpful. By pure luck I found that If I selected the entirem insertion, and chose Format Section, I found a Write Protection option (turned on) and so managed to turn it off. I thought that might allow me to delete it: it didn't. So I got more aggressive: in the Sections, I selected every section and chose the Remove option. That had some effect on the appearance; and after doing that, I was finally able to select the 24-page accidental insertion and delete it. This behaviour is currently a usability nightmare, if I'm being frank.
UX Team -- please take a look at this - maybe message can contain more informations.
We're replacing our use of the 'ux-advise' component with a keyword: Component -> LibreOffice Add Keyword: needsUXEval [NinjaEdit]
Basically this is a duplicate of Bug 62879 if we understand that one is about custom message. *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 62879 ***