Twayne wrote:
Hi,
The number of problems (bugs or features?) in OO.o has to number in
the thousands. A major subset of those should be collected from user
input and addressed. Regardless of the origin of such items, their
usefulness should be evaluated and incorporated into OO.o well BEFORE it
reaches version 4! It's entirely possible that future development may
already be hindered by making changes to basic, "established" code, but
if OO.o is to take its place in the leaders of the industry, I think
that's what's needed.
I totally agree. All the open bugs need to be addressed by some sort of
team. There are bugs and RFE's that have been ignored for much too
long. They need to be addressed and either fixed or closed. There are
many that are needed to make OOo the best application in the whole word
processing empire.
I don't think OO.o should be "just like" Word, or WP, or any other
product. BUT(t), regardless of where the idea comes from, if it's
better than OO.o's implementation it needs to be worked on. Subjective
as hell sometimes, I know, but the right set of people could assemble
the needed task list for a jumping off point.
Again, I agree. We need OOo to be better than both of these and that
will only occur if users from both of these applications can move to OOo
and function better than in their preferred apps. OOo is better than
Word in many cases already but it could be better. There has been a
total lack of will to go after the WP users. Even in our MS dominated
corp., we have many that refuse to use anything but WP.
OK, here's the meat of a few "problems" as I see them. The following is
a short-list of mine that prevents me from throwing MS Office into the
bit bin and most would exist whether I had the MSO experience or not.
The ONLY connection of MSO for me is to be able to say, "Here, I know
this can be done, because I've seen it done.". I know, that's a little
niave but it's typical of the human mind. The not all-inclusive
short-list:
Do you have RFE's or Bug numbers for reference? If they are not
reported, they cannot/will not be fixed.
-- OO.o is browser dependent for any Copy/Paste from a browser to
Writer, and it has to work better than it does in Writer
. Right now it only works right if I use a text-only browser or one of
a certain group of open source browsers. FireFox for instance will
allow copy/paste of a browser window to Writer fairly well. IE and
others I've tested but don't recall the exact ones so I'll resist the
urge to name them here, do not allow that.
OTOH, MS Word handles the situation smoothly, quicker and easily most
of the time. I've been told but don't know for a fact that abi and WP
also manage it well. When I do come across a page that Word can't
handle, neither can OO.o.
So all in all, Writer falls short in this area every time. Even using
say FireFox, which does allow for a better copy/paste into Writer, it
still falls behind the ability of Word. There is no way I can find to
look at Writer and say that it meets or exceeds my expectations for
copying a portio nof a web page and pasting it to Writer. I do a LOT of
online research and I think others would find this repair to be a great
enhancement too.
-- Printing envelopes capabilities are mediocre at best and seem
completely un-intuitive when adjustments to a template or a new template
must be created for them. That should be almost a "minor detail" to
adjust or create a new envelope template. As it is, if your situation
doesn't meet the defaults provided in the templates that do exist,
people are pretty much out of luck. I'm constantly jumping back to Word
when I have to create an envelope. And Word's templates of course do
not work with OO.o.
-- Image stability is still lacking. Or maybe the defaults are just
incorrect, I don't know for sure. All I know is if I'm going to Insert
an image into a Writer document I have to be sure to adjust the anchor
properly, because in ways not always intuitive, the current anchor
settings aren't right for the image. It strikes me as though the
defaults weren't set to cover the majority of cases so that adjusting
them is the exception, not the norm.
I have seen these problems in Word as well. FWIW, there are more
controls in OOo than in Word for anchoring images. The default needs to
be changed in your case.
-- Tables with images is, well, something, I'm not sure what, is wrong.
It's more than an achoring issue but I don't know what else. Image
positions are unstable and even at times won't even remain in the
tables. Whether it's defaults or what, I don't know but tables always
give me problems unless they are pure text in every cell.
I have more, but that's an example of the sorts of things I'm talking
about. As long as it wasn't all wrapped up in that "issue" system, I'd
be glad to help too, but entering data, verifying data, whatever else I
could do. I've tried the bug tracking abilities here before and IMO
they aren't intended for the quantity of issues they contain.
For what it's worth. I fully realize I've not mentioned some of the
great strides OO.o has made like functional Master Document methods and
so on, but that's because they are outside the area I wish to address,
which are those where OO.o is falling short of what is possible to do.
I also believe that should this come to fruition ever, the modules
within OO.o be addressed separately. In other words, collections should
be done for Writer and be kept separate from the others, another for
Calc, and kept separate from the others, and so on, with possibly one
top-level area for things that affect them all, or subsets of them.
Anyway, I've gotten it off my chest now<g>. Much as I love OO.o for
what it is and how much good will I feel for it, it simply cannot become
my de-facto office suite and allow me to let go of MS's teats.
Twayne`
I hope that you take the time to submitted or comment on these issues as
bug reports or RFE's. It would be much more productive to the whole
community.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/project_issues.html
--
Robin Laing
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