John Manoochehri wrote:
Peter,
Thanks for your comments. My points not from a complete dope, I know MS
Word backwards, but sorry for their being too short for comprehension.
The essential point, which you may contest, is that most people you want
to bring onto OOo are hardened MS Word users, so the more that the
functionality can at least use that as a jump-off point the better.
I agree to an extent.
1) I think OOo 2.0 mirrors MSO in a lot of ways, in some that I don't
like, especially compared to 1.1.4. OOC, have you looked at 1.1.4? Would
you agree that 2.0 is a lot more MSO like?
2) We can mirror the things that MSO does right, but we should try to
improve upon things they do wrong. For instance, you say the styles in
MSO are intuitive. I never really even knew you could use styles in MSO
other than when it automatically assigned a style in a place I didn't
want it. I found MSO, in many ways, to be totally counter intuitive. So,
I think they best strategy is to use the functionality that MSO does
write, copy functionality from other suites as well, and then improve
upon what we can.
How much OOo should mirror MSO is always a hotly contested issue.
Styles: it is not consistent to have numbering and bullets as separate
items in the general formatting options, but then to put bullets under
numbering in the style dialogue.
I am not sure where they are separate that you are referring to.
Even so, I am not sure that there is a
way of putting a bulletted style under the numbering option in the style
dialogue. Maybe there is. But it's not obvious nor clear. I overall
found it hard to make a style bulleted, which should, one would think,
be wasy. The MS Word control over styles is more complete and more
intuitive.
Numbering & bulleting styles are both considered numbering styles.
Perhaps we should call them list styles.
As for search, I would like, as per MS Word to search and replace for
formatting only, above all styles: but this was not so easy. You say
it's in 'more options', I had thought I looked there, but evidently not.
Again, not quite so easy as MS Word in my view.
That's odd, in MSO you have to also click a second button in the Find &
Replace dialog to search for styles.
I have now fatefully switched to Apple Mac, so for now, I think these
questions are a bit abstract (the version of the OOo for Mac is the old
one, methinks); but I will soon dual-boot to Linux, and get the new OOo
back.
Good luck. I think there will be a Mac version of 2.0, but I don't know
for sure.
Have a good one,
--
Peter Kupfer -- Using OOo since 'OO4 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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