I have been watching the development of OOo over the past year, and I am very impressed. Since I teach a writing intensive course, I point my students toward this product if they do not have or they cannot afford a commercial office suite. In the coming year, I will expand the scope of one upper division course to include spreadsheet and presentation assignments. OOo will help my students immensely. I think the OOo community is certainly on the right track.
As I tinker with the OOo Writer, I have a couple of quick suggestions: First, it would be really nice to have a special "symbol font" button to post on the toolbar next to the super- and subscript buttons (as in the MS Word package). As a scientist, I find myself often needing to insert a Greek symbol, and the hassle of changing fonts is annoying if you have several symbols to insert. If it exists in OOo, I have yet to find it. Second, a "strikethrough" button would also be useful on the formatting toolbar. Wishlist for sometime down the road: As OOo continues to grow, I look forward to the presentation of an enhanced HTML editor module with idiot-proof capabilities. A true WYSIWYG web page builder would really be a killer app. I just can't seem to make my test pages look right when viewed with IE. Now for some glowing reviews: As a long-time MS Office user, I have no difficulty with the OOo interface layout. It's pretty much intuitive, and the look is very appealing. The rudimentary page layout/DTP capability of this package is very welcome and the PDF export capability is going to come in very handy for an upcoming project! Thanks for all of the great work. Darrell L. Ray, Ph.D. Department of Biological Sciences 314 Brehm Hall The University of Tennessee at Martin Martin, TN 38238