>No, I didn't miss the point at all.

Sorry, Craig, I didn't mean to sound confrontational. Your message simply offered ways to implement what I felt was a useless and annoying dialog. You didn't say whether or why you thought such dialogs were good or bad so I assumed the worst. :)

>>The fact is, I give my users a choice to a number of things in the Options dialog. For example, one option is "See save messages"<<

That is of course the very best approach. What do you default it to? Do you find that most users are comfortable using Options to change things? I'd ask those users, too, why they chose to see that message. Is there something else about the application that makes them think that changes might not be saved after they click Save?

>>Another is "Prompt to Save". This applies when the user edits the record then moves to the next or closes the form. If the user chooses not to see these dialogs, then I force a save when the record pointer moves or the form closes. But, I leave it up to the user....much better solution than forcing one way or the other on them.<<

Not necessarily. :) See below.

>The timeout on the wait window does not force the user to click. They can continue on and keep working.

You're quite right, of course. Do users know this? Or do they have to learn it? If so, how?

>As for the Save button, it is there on my forms...users have gotten use to a save button. Not just my applications, but all apps.

That is one of Cooper's main points. Just because users have grown accustomed to being beaten doesn't mean we should continue to beat them. :) His ideas are revolutionary, and it's not good enough simply to say "that's what they're used to." Eventually, some brave soul will implement his ideas, and then users will be able to see if they like it. And remember that most users (over the course of time) are new users. They don't necessarily have the mental model of the file system in their heads, and they think the concept of saving is ridiculous: "I just spent three hours working on this letter. Of _course_ I want to save it, you moron!" :)

>>For example, I often fire up Word to crank out a quick letter, etc. I have no intention of saving it. How is Word supposed to know this? I would find it MUCH more annoying for Word to save everything I wrote, and then I have to delete it if I don't want to save it.<<

Depends how easy it was to do. We're so used to the file system that when we think of this, we imagine having to go out to Explorer afterwards, finding the file, and deleting it. It doesn't occur to us that Word could simply have a Don't Save menu item, that would do this work for us.

In the big, broad user community, what is more common: to write a document and save it, or throw it away? Cooper urges us not to confuse the possible with the probable. He says we shouldn't bother the user with obvious questions, but just to make sure that the unlikely choice is still possible. But make the most likely choice the easiest.

I agree with you that I don't agree with everything Cooper says (his statements about online help are ludicrous). But in this case, I think he has a point (though I'm not sure it applies to database, especially in a multiuser context).