On Thursday 03 February 2005 07:17 pm, Jonathon Coombes wrote: > On Thu, 2005-02-03 at 08:40 -0600, James Thompson wrote: > > These two behaviors were the reasons that prevented the office from > > switching to OpenOffice.org over Word Perfect at my old job at a > > university. We were wanting to upgrade older Word Perfect 6 installs to > > more modern software. Our data entry people were not that great and > > getting proper information into the proper fields. The secretaries > > wanted to quickly scan over the list of labels prior to printing so they > > didn't waste expensive labels with mailing names like James James instead > > of James Thompson. > > The argument put forward here seems a little silly. The only reason > for having this "multiple page" label idea, is so that that you can > scan the labels with the completed data. However, this data is already > visible to you in the datasource? Why can you not check to see if the > name is James James or James Thompson in the datasource before printing? > > > The mail merge again, is not designed to be used with actual files, > but instead with the "template" and datasource. I can, however, > understand them wanting to have some snapshot of who was in the > merge when it went out. This may be something to request as a > feature - such as an audit report of records used, dates etc. >
Don't misinterpret my statements as arguments for doing data validation that way. I would have preferred seeing proper validation done at data entry time instead of every time a mailing was done. I was simply pointing out "it was what the user wanted and could get from Word Perfect". People don't always choose the most efficient ways to get a job done. A fair bit of people also don't like change, or being told their solution is inefficient or wrong. Politics often play as large a role in decision making as technology. And in this case the opinions of the people *actually doing the work* had, rightly so, more clout than the IT guy(me) pushing for OpenOffice. So, in the end, OpenOffice didn't offer what that office felt they needed. Instead of having more happy OO.org users, we have an office full of people that were quite vocal about the inferiority of OO.org. I worked with this staff for 7 years so know them well enough to say these impressions will last for years, and OO.org has no chance of adoption there for years to come. Politics and impressions are so important to OpenOffice adoption. I'm now working for a full time for a company that hired me as a consultant about five years ago. At that time they had 5 employees and 1 old windows 95 machine used to access the web. Now we're a few months away from our 3rd move in 5 years, to our new building with 50 person call center. Almost everyone here, including the owner, uses an LTSP terminal. Apache, zope, postgresql, KDE, OpenOffice, etc, etc...the business has been built on Free and OpenSource software. We know "free" works. When I first introduced OpenOffice here (pre 1.0 IIRC) the staff argued against it (these are the same people sitting in front of LTSP terminals). People wanted MS Office. The owner told people he wasn't going to pay for it when a perfectly usable free alternative was available. Story over right? Not quite. It's still a battle here against bringing in MS Office. OO Writer, adopted. OO Calc, adopted. OO Impress, no go. Marketing (also in front of LTSP terminals at work) constantly does presentations in copies of PowerPoint they purchased with their own money for their home computers. My assistant routinely takes the original PowerPoint presentations, loads them into Impress and verifies they work on the company's laptops used on the road. We've yet to hit any real conversion issue. There is no technical reason for them to use PowerPoint. None. But look at the efforts people will go to in order to stick with what they know...buying their own software, doing the presentations at home after hours. We're slowly gaining the trust of Marketing with every successful conversion and I hope to win them over eventually. Thankfully Impress has not thrown up any perceived roadblocks like Writer did at my old job. So sure a person's reasons for wanting something can be silly. Their way of doing something can be backwards, inefficient, and slow. But we shouldn't dismiss their opinions so quickly. In the end, their impressions are just as important as any list of technical specifications. Take Care, James --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
