Twayne wrote:
"Harold Fuchs" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]
Nom Mitchell wrote:
How do I address an envelope?
See
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/OOo3_User_Guides/Writer_Guide/Print_envelopes_from_db
http://searchenterpriselinux.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid39_gci1146815,00.html
http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2005/12/printing_envelo.html
among many others.
Harold, I hold you in the highest esteem, and thank you for posting
these links. There are many good ones around, the best of course,
written by me< G >! But with all due respect to you and anyone OO.o
related in this area:
WHY does the OO.o method remain so crude?!?! At the risk of sounding
like I'm shooting the messenger, which I specifically am NOT doing, I
feel forced to state the following to anyone that will listen:
One of the reasons I keep Word 2002 around is for envelopes. Although I
can now create envelopes in Writer that are good, and functional, it
just is NOT worth my time to do that much fiddling when I know other
applications make it look like child's play. If I'm on a roll (and on
the clock) I'll be darned if I want to stop and go through all that
rigamorole when I know that for a few seconds worth of defining the size
of the envelope and and adding the return address/address to it are all
that's needed in a different application.
And since I already have that application, just why should I then be
bothering with OO.o? I'm a secretary doing a mailing for my boss. OO.o
just wasted a lot of my time trying to figure out how to do an envelope
just because it doesn't feed into the tray like Help demonstrates. Hmm,
WordPerfect handled that well; I'll just take all this back over to
WordPerfect and do it from there. OO.o doesn't look very good to me.
Even though I've gone no further than write a letter and needed to feed
a #10 envelope differently than the demo shows. Back to WP or Word, or
whatever.
How many people have "tried it out", only to go away because they
couldn't do something so apparently simple as create a proper envelope?
Most all OO.o newbies come from applications that did so smoothly and
quickly and without requiring a lot of work.
I hope you're taking me seriously and not just as a PITA because this is
a perfect example of an area where OO.o, or ANY word processing program
worth its salt, should shine. Envelopes go hand in hand with writing
letters, resumes, orders, acknowledgements, any area of the business
world requiring someting to be mailed.
Yet, OO.o, after all these years, cannot simplify the process of
creating an envelope of any sort that isn't already in the template
provided. If you so much as have to send an envelope into a printer
differently than the template, you have to go and figure out all the
oddball dimensions when it just shouldn't be so.
Envelope generation should have been one of the first things done to
OO.o after it became ready for production. For years people have been
asking how to do envelopes and looking for the 'best' way, which of
course doesn't exist because of people's opinions when more than a
couple steps are required to do anything.
Seriously, envelopes has to be one of the most basic, obvious and
disappointing discoveries by new users, that any application comes up
against. WHY is it allowed to exist? WHY is it not targetted to be
fixed? WHY wasnt' it fixed already, years ago. Doesn't anyone realize
that this is one of the first things about any secretary or mailing
person is going to come across?
In one of the links you gave, someone said the problem with envelopes
was printers. To that I have to say bull hockey! Printer drivers are
there to accept information from one source and send it to another;
program to printer. GIGO applies there. Feed it the right information
and it'll work fine. Microsoft knows it. WordPerfect, I forget who
owns it right now, knows it. Albi and several other applications know
it. WHY does not OO.o? Why does OO.o reference things to the BOTTOM of
a page, when usign the top of the page would mean similarity for so many
more envelopes? And why the changeable right side instead of the left,
where it all originates? Half an inch down from the top of the page is
simple, regardless of the page length. But 9.5" UP from the bottom, at
this one particular page size, works only for this one particular page
size. HUH? And so forth.
Harold, you're about the best participant there is for these groups.
But ... why aren't people getting more behind fixing the "minor" stuff
that chases people away? Like envelopes. And quite a few other things,
too.
As I get more and more frustrated by OO.o and the small things it should
have done all along that there are apperently no plans to ever address,
including things like a link in an image placeholder instead of the
photo and many others, I get closer and closer to trashing it and just
going back to my Word 2002 for however long I can keep it running. I
don't need 2003, don't want 2007 or anything close to it, and thought
OO.o was going to be the leader in the areas of common sense and good
sense. But I'm becoming leery of the future. Even if I had the power
of a Cray before me, if all I wanted to do was make an envelope, the
Cray would be pretty useless to me.
Time for people to dig some trenches and stop the turnover! Growth of
OO.o has slowed, returning users are becoming less in numbers if I'm to
believe the statistics I'm seeing, and I firmly believe a lot of that is
because people are putting up with mediocre pieces of software code
built into some really stellar code, but none the less, not the basics
that the people need. Give me the basics; then maybe I can build a
better appreciation for the stellar code.
</political rant> Sorry; just felt I had to vent it here.
Twayne`
Twayne,
I can't comment on how easy or otherwise it is to make envelopes in Word
as (a) I've never done it and (b) I don't have Word installed or
available to install. The only real difficulty I've had with envelopes
in OOo was figuring out which way to put them in my printer. Once I
cracked that, the rest was fairly straightforward. I seriously think
that if you have issues in this area you ought to raise them with the
developers (I'm not one) either by sending a description of what you
think is wrong & how to fix it to [email protected] or, probably more
appropriately, by submitting one or several bug reports and/or RFEs
(Request For Enhancement) to the QA system by following the advice &
links at <http://qa.openoffice.org>. I haven't looked but there may well
be relevant stuff there already, perhaps even with release/fix dates.
--
Harold Fuchs
London, England
Please reply *only* to [email protected]
