Hi, OO.o has achieved a pretty high status and reputation as a good office suite. For the lesser experienced with office suites and the newbies in particular, there simply IMO is nothing better for them to get started with. They have no "bad habits" to unlearn, and better yet rather than serious "exptectations" come at the application more from an "adventurous" point of view than others. IMO those will be the happiest users of OO.o and rightfully so.
But(t) ... and there's always a butt around isn't there? IMO this is the time to put a stake in the ground for the intermediates and more advanced users, back out, and look at the application from all directions and assess its current shortcomings. There are a LOT of things that need to be cleaned up in OO.o before an excellent program becomes SO advanced that the easiest of tasks becomes a monumental effort to incorporate. I've looked at the code some, as a complete outsider and more or less in a vacuum I admit, but it appears to me there are already several places where even simple tasks will become monumental efforts already to change things. As it is right now it appears that very little is being done to address the underlying, basic problems in the app and the longer it goes, the harder they are going to be to repair. And in order for OO.o to progress much further, I think the under-pinnings need to be shored up and made more concrete. 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 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. 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: -- 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. -- 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` --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: discuss-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: discuss-h...@openoffice.org
