I have a few observations to make, as to future changes/improvements.
I for one am very reluctant to frequently upgrade any major software
application that must be downloaded and replaced in its entirety,
particularly if there is not a published list of the improvements in
the new release. This is why I do not upgrade my copy of Apple
iTunes, particularly when it is an incremental upgrade, for example
version 5.3.7 to 5.3.8 as opposed to major upgrades like from 5.x to
6.x. This is particularly true when there are components you could
loose like the personal dictionary that goes with the spell checker.
Yesterday I finally decided to replace OpenOffice.org on my laptop with
LibreOffice, even if I had to rebuild my personal spelling dictionary by
spell checking 3 huge documents. I did as recommended and started by
deleting OOo first, then downloaded and installed LO. What I was
surprised to discover was that I never lost my personal spelling
dictionary or the huge body of enhancements I had added to the Auto
Correct applet.
So why am I telling everybody on the Discuss list this? Because I think
it might be a good idea to put a note on the Download page explaining
that anyone thinking of upgrading is not risking all their personally
added enhancements by replacing OOo with LO. Apparently these things
are stored somewhere where they are safe from deletion when you remove
OOo, and LO then will incorporate them, for full usability. It would
have been nice to know that, I probably would have upgraded long ago.
I really think that it should be made a priority at some point to get
LO to where "Incremental Upgrades" are possible, that is only the
parts of the entire office suite that are actually being changed would
be downloaded and installed, not the entire thing, and personal
modifications, like settings and personal dictionaries would be left
undisturbed.
I see now, that those personal modifications are in fact left
undisturbed, still, it would be nice to be able to download only those
lines of code that are actually changed, or at least just a single file
for each change, so that a change from one release to the next would be
a download of at most a couple of megabytes, rather than over 200.
I think that it would be a good idea at some point to do a survey of
users to find out how many of them actually use only one of the
modules of the suite, example Writer, Calc, Math, Base, and which one
that is. For example, I use only Writer, I never use any of the other
modules. So that if we were to find that a large percentage of users
only use Writer, or Calc for instance, it might make sense to break
those modules out and offer them as a separate program without any of
the other modules. I know that this was frequently discussed on the
OOo Discuss list, and the OOo suite was too highly integrated for this
to be practical, but perhaps at some point this might become feasible
with LO.
Finally, I would like to be able to help with semi-technical
improvements to LO Writer, like getting a better word list into the
Spell Checker, or adding more functionality to the Auto-correct
function, like having it automatically capitalize all the days of the
week, and the months of the year, as well as many other automatic
corrections. I know that it only takes a couple of hours of adding
things to the Auto-correct to turn it into a fair grammar correction
function. It would be nice if ordinary users like me could be able to
help with this kind of thing.
I have done this with my Auto-Correct, and would like to be able to
share such enhancements with others.
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