Re: [Gretl-devel] GUI problem with "save as"
On Sat, 1 Oct 2011, Sven Schreiber wrote:
Am 10/01/2011 08:17 AM, schrieb Riccardo (Jack) Lucchetti:
> On Fri, 30 Sep 2011, Allin Cottrell wrote:
>
>>> Actually, let me go one step back and ask a basic question: why have the
>>> variable-selection option at all when the user chooses "save as"?
>>
>> You just beat me to the punch! After thinking about it some more,
>> that's what occurred to me. We're just making life difficult for
>> ourselves (and potentially confusing to the user) by offering that
>> option.
>
> True. The removal of that intermediate step is a good thing IMO.
> However, this makes it much harder than it was to create a dataset
> containing a subset of the variables of an existing one via the GUI. If
> I'm not mistaken, the only way to achieve this is to delete what you
> don't want (which may be sometimes annoyingly difficult, if you have
> lots of saved models) and then save. Maybe we could add a "Save subset"
> menu entry?
>
I'm not enthusiastic about new menu entries in general, but what about
adding an entry to the *context* menu that you get when you right-click
on one (or more) selected variable? ("save selected to new file") That
would be very intuitive IMHO.
Maybe, but if you want to save a fairly substantial and possibly
non-contiguous subset of the current series, I think it's easier to
make the selection using the sort of dialog you get under the
"export" options than by ctrl-click in the main window.
We could implement Jack's suggestion by adding an item to the
"Export data" menu; I don't think this would over-burden things.
Or maybe this would help: instead of having a list of formats in the
"Export data" submenu, we call the series selection dialog directly,
but this dialog is modified to include a drop down list of formats
(with CSV as the default?).
Allin