Mathias Bauer <nospamforMBA <at> gmx.de> writes: > > Kelvin Eldridge wrote: > <snip>
> > I can't help feeling this is one of those cases where a user like myself could > > probably put up their hand to help the project and the potential users. > > > > 1. I could watch/review the mailing lists for people who use the package to > > start getting a base of users as an identifiable group. > > > > Would this help? > > Honestly speaking I'm not sure and I don't want anybody to do work that > is a potential waste of time. I'm currently thinking that we should try > to get direct user feedback from all users downloading OOo. I think > answering a few questions is bearable if they can help developing the > future of the program they are using. Thank you. I'm not to fond of wasting time either;-) I think your existing active users (the users mailing list and those raising issues) may be easier to survey. I feel that most people don't think to create web pages because they think it is beyond them. So if you ask users if they want the feature, the likely answer will be it is not something the think they could use. All I am suggesting here is to take care with the sample audience. For most people I don't think Writer/Web will be of interest, because they won't see its value. I don't recall what drew me to OpenOffice.org. If I was to guess it would have been Writer and Calc. But once using OpenOffice.org, Draw and Html Editor (Writer/Web) gave me the most added value. Writer/Web is a unique feature in an Office Suite. I think it offers an advantage to OpenOffice.org. Once gone or more integrated into Writer, it will be harder to raise points of differentiation. > > > If you want to see an overview of the course go to www.JustLocal.com.au. Click > > on the MyAds image towards the right. > > > > If you think anything else in this vein would help let me know. > > I will try do find some time. Sounds interesting. > > > Now I hadn't previously managed to find the "HTML (Writer)" option. That works > > much better. > > > > If I didn't find this option in 3-4 years, I suspect it isn't going to be > > obvious to others. > > > > The current situation is a problem for users that have changed from > other applications (not only Word) to Writer. If you load an HTML > document into e.g. Word you can do all with the document you can do with > Word documents also, e.g. embedding graphics and save them in the > standard format of the application. Both of them is *not* possible in > Writer/Web by intent (for roundtrip reasons) so people think something > is wrong. If we opened HTML files in Writer by default it would be as > they expecting it. I understand if I look at this from the perspective of people using Word or Writer to produce web pages. I don't do this because I don't like the result either product produces. (This is not meant to be a slight against either package, just my preference.) So from this and the paragraph below I feel you are thinking towards merging the modules. When users see a product which looks like a word processor they will expect exactly what you say. What if you went the other way and differentiated the modules even more. (Although don't over sell, or people will expect a powerful html editor.) Creating Html pages is different to documents and some different knowledge is generally required. Even something as simple as how paragraphs and line breaks are handled needs to be explained. I felt hiding Writer/Web makes OpenOffice.org more like MS Office. To me it is the differences that interests me in OpenOffice.org. The Drawing module and the Html Editor is where I gained the greatest value. (I still do my business cards using Draw and maintain www.OnlineConnections.com.au using Writer/Web.) (I do appreciate that Writer and Calc are the core modules.) > > The best idea I had so far is to make Writer/Web a special mode of > Writer that can be switched on or off. Unfortunately that isn't possible > ATM. I like the idea. > > > - The graphic issue when saving is no longer an issue. > > - The prompt when saving is something I don't particularly like. > > - I don't see any option to see the source code. (This in theory should not be > > required, but in practice it is very important.) > > That confuses me a bit - I thought that the users of Writer/Web aren't > interested in the source code. But yes, that would be something to change. As I said in theory it should not be required. To be fair the only example from my course is the following. "Now delete the text STYLE="page-break-before: always" including the leading space, so that you just have <P><BR><BR> left." If this "page-break-before" was fixed then for my course the user need not see the source code. I can imagine times when html code for a specific feature might be handy if it could be posted directly into the source. Although I would not necessarily advise this because it could break the page. So really the only example I can provide is the page breaking issue which causes a blank page to print. This could be fixed and then this would no longer be necessary. <snip> > > The menu was overcrowded. Math was also removed and nobody will ever > think about removing Math from OOo. Math still appears in the Windows XP menus in OOo 2.02. But I do see it has been removed from the menus within OpenOffice.org. > > > If Writer/Web was to be dropped, what is the worst possible timing that would > > occur in very rough terms. Would it be 6, 12, 18, 24 months? > > I'm sure it won't be dropped in 2007. And there are no concrete plans to > do it even in the following time. That is excellent to hear. That gives me 12 months at least and people can always keep the existing version of OpenOffice.org if this is an issue for them. That feedback is much appreciated. Again thanks for your time. Regards, Kelvin Eldridge --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
