I have to agree with Jim. IMHO, the fewer choices you present the user the fewer opportunities for disaster. Because humans are in-exact by nature, the more specific you make your user be about his selection the less likely he is to make a change to the wrong record. Somewhere along the line the user has to take some responsibilty. I can't prevent every user from making any possible mistake. It's really hard to make your software idiot-proof when there is always a better idiot lurking just around the corner. :-)

Bob

>Acutally, I think asking the user if they wish to save changes is a better interface than providing two close options. It's very important for the user to be sure that they are possibly going to overwrite any previous document. Allowing two close options doesn't give enough security, imho.
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>The problem with only providing the user with one record, even if they need only one, is that humans are by nature in-exact. They may know they need only one record, but they can't quite recall which one it is. A grid showing all the records filtered for what they could remember is much better than trying to foce them to remember exactly.
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>>A good example of poor interface that is difficult to change is in Alan Cooper's book. Most word processors stop and ask if you want to save when you close them. Alan suggests that this is a unnecessary question as the act of closing implicitly suggests saving and the user should not be troubles with questions about what is implicit.
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>>However, because word processors have worked this way for so long, people have become accustomed to discarding their changes by closing the document and saying NO to the question. Mr. Cooper suggests that a better interface would be to have two close options, one for close and save and one for close and discard.
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>>The statistics he quotes indicate that the most coommon answer to the save question is Yes (I don't recall the exact stat but it was certainly in the high 80-90 % range).
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>>The same lesson can be extrapolated to the use of multirecord displays in forms where the user is only interested in one record. Providing a search capability for finding the one record desired would be much more helpful to the user than having them scroll through a bunch of records in which they have no interest.