CG7001-Introduction Reviewed and in Feedback NextCloud

I have finished the first review of CG7001-Introduction-SF-GB-30Jul2020,
and it is in the Feedback folder now.

Gordon Bates
berrykevin321@gmaill.com
github.com/jdoes

I also changed the date formatting of the Return Date columns H and J, in
Guide Staus CG.ods, so that the date formatting matches the date format in
the file names, and the date formatting in columns D and E.

Gordon Bates
berrykevin321@gmaill.com
github.com/jdoes

Hi Gordon,

Many thanks for your thorough first review of this chapter. I'm a little embarrassed that I didn't spot the erroneous description of the characters that can be used in sheet names!

I have processed all comments and the chapter is now back in the Draft folder with no tracked changes, ready for second review.

A few matters arising from your queries and suggestions:
With regards to adding the URL of the Getting Started Guide. As far as I’m aware we don’t tend to include cross-links like this in any of the guides. Bear in mind that Calc Guide, Chapter 0 includes a link to the English Documentation page of the LO website, where copies of all the guides can be found. If we include the URL for the Getting Started Guide in this chapter then we’d have to be consistent and include URLs in any of the chapters that reference other guides. There’s a lot of these references and I don’t think it would be advantageous to introduce this extra clutter.
With regards to the differences between the Save As dialog on Windows, Linux and macOS. I don’t think we need to expand on this because Chapter 0 states that there will be some differences - “Therefore, some illustrations will not look exactly like what you see on your computer display”.
With regards to providing other links about regular expressions. I think we have now expanded this topic so that it is covered adequately in the guide. For me, the purpose of our guides is not to provide exhaustive sets of links to other sites. I don’t think it’s a copyright issue but we do need to be aware that providing a link can be interpreted as somehow implying a recommendation. I hope we’ve now provided enough information for our users to get started with regex and hence don’t see the need for providing additional links; those interested can probably discover 100s of links via Google. This is covered by the existing text “There are numerous websites that include examples of regular expressions and these provide an endless source of inspiration and ideas to help improve your data analysis skills”.
With regards to your idea about embedding spreadsheets in the Writer file for this chapter. In principle of course this is possible but wouldn’t be very helpful for anybody using a printed copy of the guide! And I’m not certain how useful it would be in PDF versions of the document. But beyond that, I am against the idea because of the work involved in doing it consistently. The examples you’ve cited happen to be in an area of new text, written for this update. However throughout that Calc Guide there are many spreadsheets and spreadsheet fragments; I don’t think it is a worthwhile investment of our time to go through all chapters replacing relevant images with embedded spreadsheets, for very little gain. I also feel that the associated explanatory text (“Double click on the first box below, highlight, copy, and paste into your own spreadsheet to follow the example”) is unnecessary clutter because it isn’t hard to follow the examples just by reading what’s already written. I understand that some readers might like to try it themselves but we’re writing a guide, not a workbook.

Regards,

Steve

Okay, all very good points. Im still new to this, so thank you for the in
depth remarks regarding the changes that I suggested.

Gordon Bates
berrykevin321@gmaill.com
github.com/jdoes

Hej Steve,

When reviewing the whole book of Calc Guide 6.4, I had some general remarks about the figures but due to time constraint I did not pass them on as it could have delayed the guide too much, but now I would like to comment as follows:
- the figures have sometimes no border, a green border, a blue border, a black or grey border. I think we should look for consistency for a nicer appearance.
- sometimes the text in the screenshot cannot be read as texts are too small; this can be because the figure is too small and can be enlarged (beware of the resolution) or the object is too big and does not fit on a page and therefore the screenshot is made smaller. One could consider in splitting the picture or partly removing unnecessary parts.

Keep up the good work and we will be happy to translate it! FYI 13 chapters of the Calc Guide 6.4 have already been published in Dutch!

Leo
Awarded with an Open Badge for translating LibreOffice by The Document Foundation

Hi Leo,

Congratulations on your much-deserved badge and thanks for the thoughts below.

I am already trying to improve many of the figures as I go through the document. However, the objective of "look and feel" consistency is nice to have but difficult to achieve in a multi-author environment, when all the authors are using different computer configurations. I do not have an objective of achieving that level of consistency across the whole Calc Guide - it would be too difficult to attain and then maintain. And, in my view, it's unnecessary.

If you, or anybody else, can give me specific examples of unreadable text on figures in the Calc Guide, then I'll be happy to try and fix those.

Regards,

Steve