NoOp wrote:
I see... Perhaps you missed the entire point about
departments/municipalities that already have MS Word designed forms.
No, but I think you overemphasize it.
Had
you read the post and the bug reports you would have clearly seen that
this is what the post and bugs are about.
I do not see this.
However, my point is that these municipalities/departments (most already
facing financial issues) have predesigned forms in use.
Which they have designed on a product they have paid for, or had
designed for them for money on product they paid for.
OpenOffice.org is a free product.
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>
I do agree that people far prefer to tab when using forms. And they can
do so, in OpenOffice.org, out of the box, if they create their own forms
as described.
But they cannot do so if they currently use Microsoft Word forms in
OpenOffice.org Writer. So don’t use Microsoft Word forms in
OpenOffice.org Writer.
When I first adapted our forms from Microsoft Word to OpenOffice.org
Writer, the main issue, (which was far more troublesome to me) was to
rewrite all our routines using OpenOffice.org BASIC in place of
Microsoft Basic for Applications. These languages are very different in
the way they do things within loops. But I did get OpenOffice.org BASIC
working and after getting the most complicated forms working with with
the popup input fields that were provided when I translated the forms, I
then replaced the input fields manually with the proper objects. That
was almost nothing in comparison.
If the police department is only concerned with replacing the objects in
the forms, not writing macros or using an external languages, then
presuming two people working on the forms for twenty working days, they
would only need to convert 5 forms per day each.
Too much?
Then how much is not too much to enable use of a free product?
Note also, that many of these forms will be the same or very similar to
forms used in other police departments.
Is a different way of handling a form object a bug?
Then a macro language that isn’t identical to that already in Microsoft
Word is also a bug. And presumably any other difference between the two
products is a bug, because the users has already decided that Microsoft
is always right and OpenOffice.org is always wrong when there is any
difference between the applications.
Applications differ, and it confuses to refer to the results of such
differences as bugs.
That poster's police department is still using MS Word because of the
bugs mentioned.
The poster’s police department is still using MS word because they won't
put ANY effort into a conversion.
Perhaps this is currently justified. Perhaps it isn’t. Perhaps it is
dubious. One forgets that about thirty years ago the same police office
was likely to have about the same number of form templates, but in Word
Perfect.
How did they change then?
Someone decided it was worth while to change and, lo, it was done.
Yes, it would be nice if the OpenOffice.org interface were rewritten so
that it converted between Microsoft Word input fields to OpenOffice.org
Writer objects and vice-versa. And it would also be nice if
OpenOffice.org emulated Visual Basic for Applications as a language. And
it would be nice if OpenOffice.org tried not to be a bloated
application... Oops!, that contradicts the first additions.
Maybe the change is too much, but don't present the issue as a perfectly
functioning system versus a buggy system. OpenOffice.org does forms
fine, and does them more simply than Microsoft Word.
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 would have those forms converted in under a week, if all they want are
form conversions. It’s really not a big deal at all. But if they first
of all tossed out their old form templates, that would be rather silly.
One converts such forms, one doesn’t “recreate” them. Don’t exaggerate.
(In fact, the forms would still be there, in every document that
embodied them.)
Conversion of forms is very minor item in reality.
Jim Allan
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