Clarke Rice wrote:
On 2 Nov 2008 at 10:56, Ian Lynch wrote:
On Fri, 2008-10-31 at 23:41 -0400, Huan Mo wrote:
Hi!
I am a graduate student on biology/biomedicine/bioinformatic field.
Since I am using a Ubuntu (linux) system, openoffice.org 2.4 is the only
productive software in my system. I very appreciate robust function of
Openoffice.org, but there is still some inconvenient aspects where
should be improved in my opinion.
1. There are no basic image edit tools in Writer and Impress, such as
cropping the picture,
Ubuntu comes with GIMP. That has extensive graphic editing including
cropping pictures. Prepare your images in GIMP and simply import them to
OOo. Also I tend to use Inkscape (Use add remove programs from Ubuntu
file menu to get and install it) for vector diagrams these days so you
don't really need any drawing tools at all in Writer and Impress. Better
and more comprehensive tools are available for free from Ubuntu.
Hi Ian, Huan,
I think the above point is fair. If I am using MS Office 2000+ I do find it handy to be able to
import an image, resize/crop it and then compress the image Word is saving so that the .doc
file is no larger than it needs to me.
I'm of the generation where you used an image editing program and then imported to your
word-processor/DTP, so it's not a major hassle for me to revert to this way of working. A lot
of my (High School) students who have tried OOo do point out that it "doesn't work" - as in,
it doesn't have all the features they expect. There's tons of features in Word I (and they)
don't care about, but handy time-saving features like image compression are missed when
they aren't there.
A typical experience they have is putting together a nice report with lots of images and
realising they can't email it (because our internal mail limits attachment size to 2 MB).
Right-click, format image, delete cropped areas, compress all images - it's a lot easier than
putting all the images into Photoshop and reformatting them.
Yep, useful tool.
Maybe open GIMP or another editor like some programs do.
4. In MS Office 2007, the reference function (for citation in academic
writing) is very very helpful for students, faculties and scientists,
especially that it can automatically converting different styles of
citation. I HIGHLY recommend Openoffice.org can integrate such
functions in the future releases.
I've heard this one mentioned before. MS give their products to schools/colleges at reduced
prices to make sure the next generation are hooked. If OOo is to keep making inroads in
these areas the usual excuse of "This key feature in Word just ain't in OOo" has to be
rendered useless.
OOo is great for 95% of what I do - there are a few wee things where I think MS Office has
the edge. I can live with them missing from OOo -some people can't - for them, the issue is
whether the product does what they need, regardless of price, source, etc.
The school my kids go to just purchased new Mac computers. They only
came with Apple Pages which by everyone's comments is just crap. The
school was looking at MS Office but it would have cost $12 per seat. I
gave them a copy of OOo 2.4 (3.0 wasn't out yet) and they tested it.
When 3.0 came out, I gave them copies. Now they are going to OOo as the
price works better in their budget.
There is the added benefit of being able to give all their students
copies to take home for use at home. Try that with MS Office. :)
--
Robin Laing
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