Page MenuHomePhabricator

Warn me that 'merge cells' means 'lose most of your content'
Closed, DeclinedPublic

Description

What I want to accomplish: I have table content currently spread into multiple cells. I want to merge it into a single block.

What I do: Select the cells and click "merge".

What happens: Most of my content is blanked.

How I try to recover: Hey, there's an 'unmerge' button. Oops, it restores the table structure, but my content is still missing. ("Undo" works, if it occurs to you and you haven't done anything else.)

Ugly workaround #1: Painfully select and cut the content from each separate cell and paste it to a new location.

Ugly workaround #2: Switch to wikitext and edit the table structure manually. (Doesn't wikitext table syntax flow easily from your fingers?)

Possible solutions:

  1. Merge my content along with the cells.
  2. Provide a warning that you're going to blank my content.
  3. Consider putting an extra copy of the 'undo' button next to 'unmerge' in that dialog (so long as undo would actually undo the merge cell action; it would have to go away after my next action).

Event Timeline

Restricted Application added subscribers: StudiesWorld, Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

For reference: Google Docs makes you click through a warning dialog that says that merging cells will delete the contents from all but the first cell. (Only if there actually is content that would be deleted; if all those cells are empty, there is no warning dialog.) I found that a bit annoying when I needed to do a bunch of cell merges, but it does certainly make clear what's about to happen.

Wiping a bunch of content is the only sensible thing that can happen when you merge cells, so I'm not sure when a user would expect something else to happen. Also you can just undo. If the user is already expecting this behaviour and it's easy to undo, then showing a message may be more annoying than helpful.

Jdforrester-WMF subscribed.

I think wiping out the content (and letting people undo) is significantly better for users than an irritating prompt each time, as done in Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel.