Kip wrote: >But it was Crash City on all our Dell desktops
That might be Dell. My experience is that Windows XP SP2, with MSO XP (or whatever it is called) is too unstable to be trusted to create anything more complex than a one page memo, that uses one language. Add a second language, or a second page, and it is as likely to crash, as not. One can totally forget about creating a document that contains 25 000 graphics, 100 tables, 15 000 pages, and 20 languages. [This, BTW, is something I easily did with Win2K and OOo 1.01.] >secondly, sure--OO runs fine on my computer too-until i start getting into 50 - 60 pages of a book with a dozen styles and a bunch of screen captures. Odd. For the documentation I am currently working on: 4 page styles 2 list styles 2 frame styles 16 character styles 46 paragraph styles As displayed in the "Applied Styles" selection. 36 page styles 785 paragraph styles 99 character styles 11 frame styles 51 list styles As displayed in the "All Styles" selection. I haven't run into any problems, due to the number of styles. That specific section contains 42 pages. I'm rewriting a section that contains 241 pages, 92 graphics, 17 tables, 63 frames. If software developers did not release updates, with more features, I wouldn't be rewriting that section. >its good for a proposal or a white paper, but not the creation of a book, which Word does somewhat clumsily but without crashing. That is the antithesis of my experience. I consider myself lucky, when I do _not_ get The Blue of Screen of Death, when using _any_ version of MSO, or _any_ version of Windows. >finally, W2K? what color is the sky on your planet? Win2K was the last version of Windows to be released, that did not require a system to be connected to the Internet. In plain English, that means that it is the most recent version of windows that can be installed, on an island system. If you are interested in system security, island systems are mandatory. > i have another wrinkle to add--we do information mapping--LOTS of tables. What do you call "lots of tables"? I currently am writing documentation for another project. One of the sections contains 108 tables, in 31 different languages. [275 pages]. No problems. The tables typically contain either 66 lines, 73 lines, or a multiple of one of those numbers. I moved the table that went on for 250 pages, to another document --- at the request of the people that use that documentation. Both documents are stable. The biggest issues I have with those tables: i) Finding a font for Burmese; ii) Creating a dictionary for each of those languages; iii) The lack of Table styles in OOo; BTW, WinXP with whatever version of Word comes with MSO XP (or whatever they call it) gives me the Blue Screen of Death, when opening that document. Trying to recreate it from scratch, using Microsoft products only, gave me a very consistent result --- The Blue Screen of Death. [IOW, from my POV, Microsoft still is far from being ready for prime time, and is utterly unusable for any serious document creation.] >i repeat, NEVER crash with word. sed "g/OOo/MSO/g" kips_experience > jonathons_experiences Daniel wrote: >And we haven't had this problem. So I don't know what to suggest. I'd suggest that one difference is that OOoAuthor's know how to use an office suite. >The main snag is that if you keep "tracking changes" on for several iterations of the review process, there is a noticeable slowdown. Unfortunately, this is true. :( >OOo has a lot of drawbacks, but large documents like books is one of the things it actually does very well. The first document I created with OOo, was one that can not be created with MSO. [The document I describe in my first paragraph in this message.] >Ours don't have many. Might that be the source of the problem? OOo wasn't happy with the table I created, that spanned 12 000 pages --- roughly 780 000 lines. However, it didn't crash. Just took an age and forever to edit a table entry. >Maybe a bug with OOo's implementation of tables? My biggest issue with OOo is that it does not implement Table Styles. xan jonathon -- Ethical conduct is a vice. Corrupt conduct is a virtue. Motto of Nacarima.
