Why I Hate Tabbed Dialogs

Dialog boxes are great way of grouping together program options that are related in some way. But at some point a few years ago, programs started sprouting so many options that they couldn't all fit on one dialog box conveniently. Thus was born the "tabbed dialog box", which anyone that's looked at Word's Options... dialog has seen:

A reasonable concept has been stretched to make a mess! Why are options having to do with WordPerfect here on the General tab instead of on the Compatibility tab? Why are the "Web Options" and "Email Options" hidden here instead of being separate tabs?

I'm willing to concede that Word has a great many options, and organizing them sensibly is not a simple task. But even with relatively simple dialogs, it's easy to get lazy and not think things through.

One of the things that you can do in Microsoft's high end database, SQLServer, is generate scripts to recreate a given database. You do this using a dialog box with just three tabs: General, Formatting, and Options.

So, which tab do you use when you need to set specific scripting options? Why, the Formatting, tab, of course!

And when you want to select the file format to use, needless to say you want the Options tab:

Is it too much to ask for a bit more thought to be put into these interfaces?

Dave Townsend / townsend@patriot.net / 06 Feb 04

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