[Gretl-users] Menu re-structuring

[Cristian Rigamonti]

On Fri, Jul 14, 2006 at 09:07:10AM -0400, Allin Cottrell wrote:
> 
> * This could be got around if we had a separate menu tree 
> dedicated to "descriptive statistics and graphs", but people 
> seemed to like the idea of reducing the number of menu trees, 
> and I'm not sure what a snappy title for the notional added tree 
> would be ("View"?).

Well, "View" seems a reasonable choice, it parallels the "Add" menu tree.

If the number of top-level menus is really a problem (personally, I don't think
so), another option could be to transform the "Add" and "View" branches into
submenus of the "Data" menu, as in:

Data
  Add
    (current content of "Add")
  View
    Graph specified vars
    --------------------
    Multiple graphs
    --------------------
    Summary statistics
    --------------------
    Correlation matrix
    --------------------
    Multivariate statistics
  -------------------------
  Display values
  Edit values
  Add observations
  Remove extra observations
  -------------------------
  Read info
  Edit info
  Print description
  Add case markers
  Remove case markers
  -------------------------

But IMHO this solution would have an excessive degree of nesting (which I
dislike more than the overall number of toplevel menus).

My preferred solution would be the following:

Data
  Display values
  Edit values
  Add observations
  Remove extra observations
  -------------------------
  Read info
  Edit info
  Print description
  Add case markers
  Remove case markers
  ---------------------
  Dataset structure        \
  Compact data              | Items moved here from "Sample"
  Expand data               |
  Transpose data           /
  
Add
  (current content)  

View
  Graph specified vars       \
  --------------------        |
  Multiple graphs             |
  --------------------        | Items moved here from "Data"
  Summary statistics          |
  --------------------        |
  Correlation matrix          |
  --------------------       /
  Multivariate statistics


Sample
  Set range
  Restore full range
  ------------------
  Define based on dummy
  Restrict based on criterion
  Random subsample
  -----------------
  Drop all obs with missing values
  Count missing values
  Set missing value code


Notes:

- We'd have 8 top level menus instead of 7 (doesn't seem a big problem to me,
  given that the overall structure is way more intuitive)

  File | Tools | Data | Add | View | Sample | Variable | Model

  (by the way, is this the "right" order? or it may be improved?)

- The "Data" menu would not be overcrowded (13 items instead of 14)

- All the commands that modify the dataset would be under "Data", not under
  "Sample" (I guess you know I'm obsessioned by that! :)

Opinions?

Cri

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