Comming a bit late to the discussion…
I think the current implementation of the attachments button is very good: users see the icon, click on it for the first time, they have an “Add” button and once added, they go back to the same button and they can see the attachment it is there.
And that is exactly what Maxime proposes for exports, and again I think it is intuitive for the user because once they’ve saved an export, they will find it in the same button they used to create it. There’s nothing to explain to the user really.
But, actually adding the saved export in the Printer button is completely random and needs training the user. The first time the user will save an export and the next time they want to use the export they will go to the same menu they used the first time, so they will not realize it’s available under the Printer icon.
The only reason for not adding the export icon is that the number of icons is already large but then, that is the issue to address - decide which icons are really necessary in the toolbar.
What I can see is that the GTK client (used for the screenshots) actually has 3 more icons than SAO:
- Direct print
- Send by e-mail a report
- Get the URL
I’m going to talk for most our users here, I think all those 3 icons could be removed from the the GTK toolbar. I personally prefer to remove those three and add the specific export icon.
- Direct print, can be configured in report actions
- Send by e-mail does not work for any user using gmail and probably other webmail applications as the attachment can’t be sent to the application. So that considerably reduces the number of users -> Many users will never use that icon.
- Get the URL, I can just say that we never used it in the GTK client. Your mileage may vary here but I’m pretty sure it’s not so frequently used it justifies being in the toolbar.
Another way of reducing the number of icons would be showing only the ones that are necessary under each circumstance. For example, it makes no sense to show the link or action button for a new record that has not been saved yet. Indeed, almost no icons should be available in that case except for the save one, and another for discarding changes (reload maybe). On the other hand, when a record has not been modified there’s no need for the save button, so it could be hidden, etc.
GMail is a good example of how icons are shown or hidden if one element is selected or not.
On a side note, also, probably the interface could be made a little bit simpler if the toolbox menu only had the actions that don’t already have an icon in the toolbar. That will make those “extra” options (delete, duplicate, record information, export and import) more accessible. An extra icon with the popoup menu like the screenshot below is probably what would be most intuitive as it follows the design of other apps such as Gmail (and many others):
Just my 2 cents…