NoOp wrote:
On 01/27/2009 07:14 AM, Jim Allan wrote:
NoOp wrote:
As much as I hate to say this, I'd be *very* cautious about promoting
OOo in those environments. And certainly not before understanding what
is already in place in the way of forms used by those departments. Most
municipalities, in particular fire, police, etc., have custom, or
bought, designed forms in MS Word or other, that, at this time simply
cannot be transfered over, or even reasonably used with OOo. A prime
example is:
See:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=79720
[Protect Document but allow input field entry - MS Word to OOo]
and it gets worse, as that leads to the long outstanding:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=33737
[Allow for in-place editing of input field (turn off pop-up)]
So, as much as I promote OOo, I can pretty well guarantee that you'll
quickly lose the municipality form shoot out. Even if you were to
completely redesign at form in OOo you'd lose; no clerk, police office,
fireman et al would stand for not being able to simply click the box, or
select from a dropdown,without the ability of having protected form
sections, and the ability to tab between the form fields.
There is NO problem with such features at all. This is pure FUDD.
The problems mentioned only occur with attempts to use a Microsoft Word
form in OpenOffice.org Writer. The translation form will THEN use input
fields in translation and they are indeed clumsy. So don’t use these
input fields, except when for some reason you need a clumsy translation
between products.
I see... Perhaps you missed the entire point about
departments/municipalities that already have MS Word designed forms. Had
you read the post and the bug reports you would have clearly seen that
this is what the post and bugs are about.
It's also obvious that you've gone considerably above and beyond the
standard 'fill in the form'. Well done.
However, my point is that these municipalities/departments (most already
facing financial issues) have predesigned forms in use.
Had you bothered to read the bugs you will have found this link (from
this mailing list as a matter of fact):
http://www.nabble.com/Fill-in-fields-to11552629.html#a11552629
<quote>
Our Police Department has over 200 templates done in Word. A template
consists of headers and footers, some text and many fields that the user
fills in. The document is protected, except for the fields that can be
filled in by tabbing from field to field. They like the ability to tab
from field to
field to fill out the form easily.
</quote>
That poster's police department is still using MS Word because of the
bugs mentioned.
We've been using forms in OpenOffice.org at work now since version 1.1,
with none of the popups mentioned. We've been selecting from boxes, with
dropdowns. We have protected form sections. (Actually we just have a
normal protected backgrounds with active form objects sitting on top.)
We have the ability to tab between form fields.
It is all there and it keeps being improved.
Just select View → Form Controls. Clicking the icon in the upper
righthand corner turns the Design mode off and on. When Design mode is
on, the other objects become colored. Select one, and then draw it on
the screen in the method of all visually-oriented object languages. It
creates instances of the object selected which can be then modified.
See the manual at
http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/userguide3/index.html and
check out chapter 15.
Note that our forms are fully intelligent, using an external language
(Foxpro) to guide them. But it could be any computer language. Or I
might have been able to do it all through macros. But I had already set
up a system to do what I wanted using Visual FoxPro with Microsoft Word,
and I just replicated it when first working with OpenOffice.org Writer.
For example, our production runsheets are 8½" × 11" sheets with a form
comprising 34 boxes in all, and containing check boxes, list boxes,
combo boxes, text boxes, and so forth. The file in current use is
automatically used as a source for the data, showing details from the
first and last record. Data is also extracted automatically from the
print program, provided there is a single print program in the current
folder. Information on the client is included based on what Docket the
current folder is under, and the data is extracted from our company
database. The form user is allowed to overwrite most fields or to select
from a number of options.
Try creating and using forms in OpenOffice.org Writer before you
complain about defects that exists only if you restrict yourself to
clumsy imput fields instead of the proper form objects with which
OpenOffice.org provides you.
Jim Allan
Try convincing a police department to toss out their 200 MS Word
templates and forms & hire you to come in and recreate all of their forms...
I really started something here when I asked for help into looking for
the free stuff
that my local City could use to cut costs.
On my part, I would never "toss out" the large amount of templates
currently being used.
Plus my local city does not have the money to hire anyone. Plus getting
grants to fund
a rebuilding of their system is harder and harder to find. The do have a
dedicated grant
writer person, because of the complexity of writing and getting grants
these days.
Personally, I would create forms and systems that are "web based" and
can run using
a browser. That way you can run the system on IE, Firefox, etc., on
Windows, Mac, or
Linux machine. Then use their local network to host the programs (HTML,
Java, Javascripts,
etc.) and be run as a client based system, not server based. Only have
server based
shared data. That way all the heavy processing would be off the server
and onto the client
machines. More and more doctor's offices are using a intra-net "web
based" software and
bring in laptops to the exams and using the browser forms to do the
tasks in their nearly
paperless office.
I am still in favor of doing whatever I can to get people, businesses,
and local governments
to switch to OpenOffice.org and other open source software.
I have not done much work/writing at all with macros or Writer and
database based forms.
I use to do it with dBase III many, many years ago. I stick with simple
stuff for now, since
I lost a great deal of programming skills/memory when I had my first
stroke. Maybe it is
time I started re-learning programming - using the OOo environment as a
start.
Thanks again people with you suggestions.
Tim L.
retired and tired of MS
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