@Girvin, The important thing is to get the work done; the tool is secondary. I agree with your decision, and you are correct: I once used NeoOffice to construct an entire six-page form (FNMA1004) for real estate appraisals that has a couple of hundred blanks to fill and boxes to check, one page with an imbedded spreadsheet. It worked fine, blood loss was manageable and the scars are almost invisible now :-)
@Julian, I thought about using that iWork suite, and I have it. About all the activity it gets is regular updates in the background. The problem is that I write appraisal reports that run 100-200 pages long. They’re heavily cross-referenced, which can be done with ease in AOO and LO, but not easily if at all in Pages. The rest would work OK, but Pages lacks user fields, so when I type something that appears at several places in the report (e.g., report date), I type that one time and it propagates to the other fields in the report. Clients aren’t ever satisfied, and always want this or that included or left out, necessitating a change in report date. In Neo, I just enter the new date and I *know* it’s changed properly in all the places it is used. The user field issue might be worked around by dropping in single cells from a spreadsheet, but like Girvin, I have a work flow that I’m happy with and would be loath to change. Jim Plante > On Feb 6, 2017, at 4:50 PM, Girvin Herr <ghe...@fastmail.com> wrote: > > > > On 02/06/2017 01:56 PM, James Plante wrote: >> On Feb 6, 2017, at 2:42 PM, Girvin Herr <ghe...@fastmail.com >> <mailto:ghe...@fastmail.com>> wrote >>> >>> 2. AOO does not include a database report generator, which is crucial >>> to my work. You can create the database, but there is no way in AOO >>> to print it out nicely. LO does include a report generator and it >>> works fine. >> Are you sure it needs a report generator? Can you not open your database as >> a data source in Writer to produce reports? A report is really just a big, >> complex form letter. > Jim, > Umm. I guess I will have to amend my "no way" to "no easy way". The report > generator does use either Writer or Calc to do the formatting/printing. > However, I have spent a good amount of time formatting my reports the way I > want them. To throw that out and start over is not acceptable. It is much > easier to use LO when I need to print a report. I think I tried manually > using writer for a report once and the results were not pretty. I admit I am > not experienced in this process but it seems it would take a lot of recurring > work to format the data in Writer for each table, of which I have many, and > each update, which are ongoing. The Report Generator just makes it so much > easier. It is like a wizard for the data. Would you like to use writer to > create and maintain your forms? You can, but that doesn't mean you should, > unless you are into pain. >>> >>> 3. LO does not restore a session properly, where AOO does. >>> I like to keep several oft-used files open all the time. I do not >>> close these files before I shut down. I expect these files to be >>> reopened at startup the next time I use the system, so I don't have >>> to manually open them all. AOO does this properly. LO, from version >>> 4.x on, does not. >> Thank you, Girvin. You just gave me a useful idea. >> >> Jim Plante > You're welcome. > Girvin > --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: users-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: users-h...@openoffice.apache.org
