I would briefly like to discuss some of the changes for 2.0 that I find horrendous. Thus far, I have found very few of the changes better. I guess it looks nicer, but I haven't really found any neat new features. I guess there is a word count in there which will be nice and you can assign keyboard shortcuts to styles, but all of that could be accomplished before with macros.
Overall there are several changes that have been implemented with the motivation being that users get confused so we should changes it. Or users are used to MS Office so we should change it.
This is sad to me. There are many regression because we assume that are users are dumb. OOo was cool because it was innovative and gave users control of how the program was going to operate.
_Change #1_
You used to be able to return to your previous editing position when you reopened a writer document. In fact in OOo 1.1.x you had a choice, when you opened a document you could either restore the editing position or you could not restore it. So, it you wanted to save the cursor position, you you restore the view, if you wanted to go to the top, you didn't restore it.
Now, you have no option to restore it. There check box is still there in 1.9.69 but it does nothing. There will allegedly be shortcut key added later to return to the last cursor position, but who knows when. Why are we making this change? Well the motivation can be found here:
<http://specs.openoffice.org/appwide/open_doc_behavior/OpenDocumentBehavior.sxw>
To save time, I will quote it the user scenario that leads to the motivation:
"Peter and Mary are exchanging documents fairly often by email. Mary rates it a lazy attitude of Peter that he does not send his documents in a cleaned up fashion. She always has to scroll to the top before she can start editing her part of the document.
Peter himself likes the property that a document remembers the position where he was last editing."
So, v2 caters to the Mary's of the world instead of catering to both users like v1.1.x does. Why? To me, this is *embarrassing* that this is being changed based on this scenario.
This is issue #39486 if you want to comment or vote for it.
_Change #2_
I have already discussed my thoughts on the quick starter here, but it too is a feature that is being removed to placate the supposed confused user or to meet some phantom misread guideline.
It is issue #33624.
_Change #3_
We also can't display the file name in the Title Bar anymore. Now we have to use the file name only. No choice like there kind of was before. Why is this? Because users might get confused.
I guess now I have to read an ugly confusing file name with an extension because some mythical user will be confused by an easy to read title.
Part of the rationale is that most OS's support long filenames with which you can have spaces and stuff, but if you are editing a document you will be posting to a website (which many of us do) then you can have spaces in there very easily, plus I don't want to see a file extension.
Another part of the reasoning was that this is what MS Office does, so new users won't be confused. OOo is better than and differently from MS Office, I don't care what they do.
This is issue #41116 is anyone cares.
_End_
There may be more I haven't run across yet, but these are annoying enough. The worst part, is that I feel like even when I file issues that the people don't really care. I guess if I was using MS Office, I would have no voice at all, but this is supposed to be a different place. This is supposed to be a community where we share our issues and can have a voice.
OOo is supposed to be innovative and unique and that is something I am going to miss.
Thanks for your time.
-- Peter Kupfer OOo user since 'OO4 http://peschtra.tripod.com/open_office/ooo_front.htm
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