Well, what can I say... after spending almost four weeks on and off with LO I finally have decided that, alas, it's not for me.
For a start, it's too slow: all three LO applications I've worked with (Writer, Calc and Draw) are feeling sluggish on my PCs whereas MSO seems quite nimble. Incidentally, I had a very similar impression quite a few years ago when I installed, tested and removed a version of StarOffice: this was virtually unusable on an admittedly underpowered netbook which nevertheless ran old MSO XP (2002) just fine. I get spurious error messages about Java RE not being installed whenever I try to run a macro and (although I'm not using Base or any of the Wizards) there are other places where this message unexpectedly pops up. I believe users who deliberately keep away from those bits which explicitly require Java should never see this sort of message. As it is, any use of macros "almost" requires Java. Almost, because it's possible simply to click away this annoying message: the fact is that Java is NOT AT ALL required for executing LO Basic macros... perhaps somebody should forward this tidbit to the developers;-). Many of the help pages and manuals I found online seem to be more or less out of date. There are too many obscure half-bugs (or else stuff where I need obscure workarounds). Last but not least, LO is simply too inconvenient, unpolished in actual day-by-day use; this is very hard to describe in a few words but LO somehow feels wooden, even "pedestrian" at times. There are some very good things, sure, but simply not enough to warrant the change and all the accompanying loss of productivity and bother when modifying a long-running, well-oiled set of tools. As Pip Coburn writes about change in the tech industry: "The industry acts as if change is easy when it's actually quite difficult. Users will change their habits when the pain of their current situation is greater than their perceived pain of adopting a possible solution." Precisely so. Additionally, I found community support not to be a strong point of LO, at least on this list. (There was another user recently who complained about that and I have to agree.) There may be forums out there on the web but I can't say anything about those. I had really, really high hopes for LO, because I'm sick and tired of MS. Alas, LO, at least for me, just ain't ready for prime time. Perhaps I should come back in another few years when LO has hopefully been stripped of some of the layers that have built up over the decades... Bye for now Jon -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: [email protected] Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
