A friend noted that OO is looking for beta testers, which is not totally
my cup of tea, but I noticed the feedback request link and thought I
might chime in.
I am a *huge* fan of Open Office and a very heavy user of Writer (the
other apps, like their MS counterparts, are okay, but not useful to me)
I turned to OO because Microsoft screwed up a good thing when they went
beyond Office 2003. The features of particular interest are:
a) the ability to customize the toolbar, eliminating never-used stuff
and lining up important commands
b) the ability to easily write and tweak macros AND make toolbar buttons
to run them
Like MS Word, I know you can "save" a file as html -- and like Word, OO
will create html to make an exact replica of the page. But I do a lot of
web work and like nice, clean, pure code. So to create custom styles
(P, TD, DD, DT, LI, H1, etc.) and then write a macro for Word to read
those styles and insert appropriate html tags was golden. Ditto going
from tagged copy into, say, InDesign and picking up book styles.
Open Office is wonderful for creating macros, but I have to use an
add-on (Alt Find & Replace) to interpret styles. It took a bit of doing
to figure out "regular expressions" but I was able to do it -- and much
more efficiently than in Word. With pre-designed web templates, complex
pages can be composed in a familiar and easy to use word processor, but
instantly converted into perfectly pure, clean code.
So a genuine plus for OO would be the ability to search for
text/paragraph styles and replace with whatever option via a macro.
A second plus for OO is the ability to import an odt document into
Calibre and convert it into an e-book (including pdf), either
maintaining original format or adapting to classic ebook styles. This is
not possible to do with Word.
Finally, I also like that OO can read and save as Word formats --
helpful when dealing with the unfortunates of the world who still rely
on Word.
There are a few quirks with OO, but not anywhere near the quirks with
Word, so it's an excellent application to work with. Keep it simple,
let users modify it for specialized use, don't try to go one-on-one with
Word -- not worth the trouble!
best wishes for continued success!
geoff mehl
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