1. My reply to Mike Scott addresses this point. The font is Times New Roman which I believe is common to both ooo and msw. Permissible responses to questions in dialogue should always be appropriate, directly corresponding to the question. Programmers need to understand this. There should not be a need to go back and fix this kind of thing.
2. The installer failed to establish the requested file type associations and nothing was done with those file associations to cause this. 3. I'm glad there is a prospect for change. 4. "The choice was made to consider such a designation as being a custom install; there seems to have been a general feeling that the default installation path should ask as few questions as possible, which is understandable." That would be ok if the custom install were normal and easy to use. On the other hand, allowing an option to change the install path in the full install does not make the process more complicated for those who stay with the default path. A full install to a directory of the user's choice is still a full install. 5: A point I forgot to mention is that the size estimates given for custom install are too small by an order of magnitude. This is another factor that confused me. 6: Acknowledged. 7. You are correct that there should be a default path. "Program Files" and "My Documents" are the fault of MS, not ooo. Point taken. I would have chosen C:\Open Office.org as the initial default path. For documents, Word retains the path to which the last document was saved. I think this is the best option. I don't know whether ooo does this too. In checking out ooo, I was hoping for something actually better than mso, not just something cheaper. Office 2000 is already ridiculously bloated and complex. 2003 (and presumably 2007 and everything else to follow) is completely unacceptable. Also, it is usually pretty easy to get older versions of ms programs very cheap, at least in the US, for example through Amazon. Maybe this is more difficult in other parts of the world. My hope was that the developers of ooo would do away with bloated code and instead write a lean and mean office suite. Maybe someone will eventually do that. I plan to unsubscribe from this list, probably tonight or tomorrow morning, so anyone who has a comment for me should send it today, or to my own email address if later than that. Best wishes, Sandy On Sat, 28 Jun 2008 10:36:47 -0500 Barbara Duprey <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: "[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Here are some problems with Open Office: > > 1. If I open a document with Open Office Writer just to look at it and > make no changes, Open Office will not allow me to close the document. > Open Office insists that I have changed the document and refuses to close > it unless I answer the dialogue box which says > > "The document "(name of document)" has been modified." > > and asks: > > Do you want to save your changes? > > The choices allowed are not answers to this "Yes - No" question (namely, > "Yes" and "No"). They are: > > "Save", "Discard", "Cancel" > > I did not want to choose any of these: I made no changes to save and I > did not want to discard anything. I also did not want to forget about > closing Open Office Writer. I therefore used the task manager to force > Open Office Writer to close. I then tried to open Open Office Writer > again and it failed to open and instead presented me with "Open Office > Document Recovery" which asked permission to recover the document --- a > document I had not edited or changed in any way. > > Subsequently, every time I tried to open the program it refused to open > until I respond to the "Open Office Document Recovery" dialogue box. > > My fear of this behavior was that Open Office Writer may actually corrupt > my documents just by being allowed to open them. > > I finally pushed "Discard" and was able to start the program. Experiments > with a sample document showed the following: the document, which had been > saved in Word with a 14 point font, opened in Open Office Writer with a > 10 point font. When I restored it to the original 14 point font, Open > Office Writer saw that as a modification of the document. > > This episode indicates to me that Open Office Writer is altogether > unacceptable as an alternative to Word. > I can think of two possibilities for the font size situation. One is that the font used by Word was not available to Writer, so it chose a font it thought was comparable. Since you didn't mention the font name as being different, it is more likely that Writer applied its style information, which differed from the style used by Word (perhaps because the font size was applied directly rather than through styles). Writer is strongly style-oriented, which most of us feel is a "good thing" -- you are, of course, welcome to disagree. In any case, when you changed the point size, that was indeed a change (why would you think it wasn't?), and Writer accordingly asked what it was supposed to do when you later wanted to close the document. That would be the appropriate response, and not at all undesirable. Nor is it a fault attempting to recover a document that was being edited and was not properly closed; that is generally a very desirable function. In this situation, since your intention was to leave the document alone the appropriate answer when closing was "Discard." Because you killed the process instead, you could have canceled the recovery the first time it was offered and you would not have seen it again. Certainly you need have no fear that Writer will corrupt documents when you simply open them to look and make no changes. The question asked on closing might perhaps be more properly stated as "Do you want to save the changes, discard them, or cancel the closing of the document?" -- but the volunteers making changes to OOo are few and very busy, so this would be a very low priority issue. > Here are other problems I have had: > > 2. The installer for Open Office Writer asked whether I wanted Open > Office Writer to open MS Word documents. I chose this option, but the > requested file associations were not established. > That's very odd. The only times I know that this has been reported, the problem was that MS Office, or viewers for the various MS Office filetypes, had been installed after OOo and overrode the selection, or the Open With had been used for a file to select the MS Office program and the option for always using this program was selected (it often has to be explicitly deselected). > 3. The installer did not prompt me to create desktop or start menu icons. > Instead, it created start menu icons, but not desktop icons, and it gave > no indication of what it was doing. The result of this was that I was > unable to find the programs until a member of this group suggested > looking for start menu icons. > I believe the installer is being changed in the new version, you're far from the only one to have this problem. > 4. The installer does not allow choice of target directory for a full > install. > The choice was made to consider such a designation as being a custom install; there seems to have been a general feeling that the default installation path should ask as few questions as possible, which is understandable. Once into the custom install path, this does become an option. I haven't used the custom installer, but I think its defaults would provide a "full install" to whatever directory was chosen. > 5. For custom install, the installer has a bizarre dialogue labelled > "custom setup" with a tree structure to the left showing disk-drive icons > with labels like > "OpenOffice.org Writer" and to the right a box with some explanation of > each feature. One can expand the tree by clicking on the [+] symbols; > clicking on > the /name/ will show a brief explanation of what's selected; clicking on > the icon will show a drop-down menu allowing a choice of "don't install > this", "install this", "install this and all sub-features". Unlike every > other tree selection menu of this kind, there are no check boxes showing > what has been selected, to that the user is essentially left flying > blind. > 6. The website links to a setup guide for version 1 which does not apply > to version 2. Somebody on this list sent me a webpage containing a link > to the setup guide for version 2. That guide gives instructions for all > the obvious things for which one does not need a guide, but does not > explain the weird setup for custom install described in (5.) above. > These sound like valid issues to me, and may already have been reported, but again, would probably not be a high-priority change. > 7. Finally, a general comment. It appears that the developers of this > program have focused on fancy bells and whistles and have neglected the > need to construct a sound and solid basic program, to which bells and > whistles could be added later. I also see no evidence that the developers > have made any effort to eliminate the problems typical for Microsoft > programs. Some of these problems are: default placement of the program > under the C:\Program Files directory and default placement of working > files in "My Documents". Thus, this program appears to have all the usual > problems associated with Microsoft and additional problems due to > careless design and construction. I see no reason to change from MS > Office 2000 to OpenOffice.org. Furthermore, I got MS Office 2000 for free > or nearly free from my educational institution and I could have gotten > MS Office 2003 for free from my place of employment at that time (I chose > not to go with MS Office 2003 because experimenting with it convinced me > that it is total garbage.) > You're free to feel that this is not a sound and solid program, but there are a *lot* of users who find it an excellent alternative, and most people do not have a way to get the free/low-cost licenses for MS Office that were apparently available to you. To have these capabilities in their personal systems (on many operating systems), free and without restriction, rather than paying hundreds of dollars (both initially and periodically), may not matter to you -- but it certainly does to me and a lot of others. And I don't understand your objection to the defaults; you appear to think either that there should not be defaults, or that these should not be the ones chosen; not a very common position. That's not to say that particular options could not be moved out of the custom install/ option configuration path to the default installation with later configuration capability, but this really does not sound like a killer issue affecting many people. > I hope developers take my comments seriously under advisement and I plan > to try OpenOffice.org again in a few years to see whether anything has > changed. Meantime, I recommend MS Office 2000 or MS Office 1997 to anyone > who wants a halfway reliable halfway unbloated office suite. > > Best regards to all, Sandy > You might want to look at some of the other open source alternatives (Abiword, for example) or at Google applications. The two alternatives you're recommending are no longer supported, and I believe there are a lot of known and possibly unknown security issues. <snip>" ____________________________________________________________ Internet Security Software - Click here. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2141/fc/Ioyw6i3mEWrcAD04jck7WBp82g9nCcO7zo9EBT2VkQHuH45HNFXekk/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
