Hi, I was encouraged to leave my aoo forum post directly in the dev mailing list so that you all can read what I wanted to express. I am not a software developper in any sense--only a user. Dear developers, there may be little positive feedback for your work, I guess. So I created an account for the forum (and now subscribed temporarily to dev@aoo) to leave a big THANK YOU!
The first version I used must have been something like StarOffice 4.3, the first I owned was SO 5.2, and then I shifted to OpenOffice(.org) when it introduced the XML file formats. So I am a convinced and longterm user since then and hardly ever regretted my decision. OpenOffice gave me the possibility to mostly do what I wanted to (with writer, base, calc, impress and draw - in that historic order) in an efficient way, and the only thing I don't like is, that it always tends towards following MS Office although it already was better in many ways. I understand that it is crucial to get as many users as possible, so I acknowledge the decisions towards MS Office. What I like most is the long term usability and stability, and I do not only keep my office files from more than 10 years ago, I also use and re-use them. And if one crashed in the past, I nearly always could recover them by opening the zip bundle with an (hex) editor. By that, I enjoyed the progress in LibreOffice, but didn't really need it. Although I switched to LibreOffice on some machines, I am always glad that there is OpenOffice, too. In my eyes, it is the more stable and efficient branch of the project. This year it was my fallback tool and salvation in a book project that I started with LO Writer; I first invested hours to get my pictures back to the place they belonged to when they got more and more (as others did decades before with MS Word) and then had to give up as it didn't open the file anymore without crashing. Apache OpenOffice (standard and portable) solved the problem. It got a nice book, by the way, for our church jubilee. So if you get the software maintained, I will probably continue to use OpenOffice for another 20 years. And I won't switch to DTP software (Scribus) for the next book project neither like I regularly do for magazines, brochures etc. OpenOffice is a great, great software, even if it didn't evolve much in the last years! (maybe even: because..) Powerful enough for both private and standard business use. Keep patience and persistance! A very satisfied and content user --- Die Bundesliga hat begonnen! Alle Tore, alle Ergebnisse, alle News: Pocket Liga jetzt im AppStore oder Google Play Store herunterladen - kostenlos!
