On Nov 8, 2008, at 11:51 AM, Twayne wrote:
I suspect you may be looking at it from a view point that is slightly
askew, IMO, from the intent of OO.o. Either are fully collaborative
and
useful, but the target isn't for development types, I'm sure.
Again I was unclear, I shall have to spank my pen for getting me into
such trouble, but I digress. I wasn't suggesting redirecting OOo at
the premier tool for development types (except maybe the documentation
and QA/QC people working on the project). What I was trying to say was
that code development is largely text and that teams of people working
on code/text found that an editor wasn't enough so they added a module
RCS the morphed into CSV, that has spawned several other packages that
control documents that are being worked on by a team. It was the
features of those packages that made code development work better for
teams and IMO it is those features that make teams more effective.
Certainly the ability to lock, unlock, check out, track changes,
create versions, etc are not unique to text documents but also of
value to people working in finance on spreadsheets for the management
of macros, individual worksheets, parts of worksheets, and collections
of worksheets (ods docs). Fred Brooks, 'Mythical Man Month' said that,
"When a project is late adding people make it later." A project with a
single worker doesn't require much in the way of tools, but add a
second worker and the project needs tools to coordinate an communicate
between them. Add more people and the coordination and communication
becomes exponentially more complex. CSV et al help in that regard as
do forums, lists, email, chats, etc.
What I am blathering about is this rather than consider the addition
of each of these as a module to OOo IMO consideration of the functions
all these tools and others bring to the table is in order followed by
the development to include those functions from them that would make a
team most efficient. Should these functions be part of some new module
or integrated into the major elements of OOo? I dunno the question
hasn't had much thought addressed to it yet. Lots of eyes on the
question will bring the right answer I expect.
I have found Word/Outlook to be useful in a development environ, but
not where
you get into the nitpicking necessities of that kind of control.
You're
looking at it from an entirely different perspective IMO.
Yep I think so. Is what I wrote above more helpful in explaining that
perspective?
Your comment is interesting too because it doesn't match my own
experience. It may have to do with content I suppose. Either seems
quite competent with a strictly or almost all text document, I agree
with that. A few hundred pages of text works quite well for the most
part.
But when I used OO.o for some technical documents, it toppled under
the weight of the several tables and images.
I found cross referencing when to hell in a hand basket but the point
is the same not all the functions of the tool scaled well. And let me
add there are two vectors that need to scale in my opinion. There is
the need for the tool to handle all the features it offers reliably
and stably no matter how big the resulting product AND the tool to be
a team tool needs to scale equally well from two users to any number
of users or at least a stated number of users. The problem remains (as
I wrote earlier) that people get the features they need to work on a
couple pages and assume they will work no matter how large the product
in addition the single users will assume that teams of users will find
the same ease as they do and this is not necessarily true either.
Part of my problem at
first was learning how to properly anchor the images and another minor
point or two, but OO.o just wasn't able to handle book-length
documents
with a mix of text, images and images in tables. Fortunately when I
looked into OO.o' s Master Document mode, it was different from MSO's,
so that problem was eventually overcome too by using it and breaking
"chapters" into smaller chunks; it just took a little empirical work
to
figure out WHEN the problems would start to occur, and stay within
those
limits. Ymmv I'm sure, but it's still the same today in version 3.
And
of course, don't even think about using Word's Master Document mode
unless you know exactly how to avoid its problems or are very, very
fanatical about backing up<g>.
I would love to work with stuff that has no limitations failing in
that I would like to have to avoid working around limitations. <g>
I would also like to have the developers identify limitations. If the
largest number of (pages, paragraphs, tables, ...) per file is n then
tell me up front what n is. If they don't know but they have tested up
to m then tell me they don't know but they tested up to m.
Version 3 is definitley a winner but in my case I can't quite
roundfile the Office Suite yet, which is my real target. It's far
enough now I'll finally make a decent combination to them because now
it's value is a lot more than just the new PC user; it's also for the
pros in quite a few areas now and support is better.
In any case I strongly suggest doing what works. Although in my case I
have doggedly continued to fight with stuff that didn't. <g>
--
St. Doug, Tigger and Puppy in our memory.
Tir na nOg
Wilton, NH USA
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