Brian Barker wrote:
At 01:56 16/02/2010 +0900, Thomas Blasejewicz wrote:
... as far as I could figure out so far, there is only ONE choice for
a path to your private files ("my documents"). So, I made a
directory for "OO files".
And you created "Writer" and "Calc" subdirectories in that directory?
Or even something like "# Writer" and "# Calc" - so that they appear
first in an alphabetical sort?
At 11:04 16/02/2010 +0900, Thomas Blasejewicz wrote:
I want to set a "default folder" for Writer/Calc.
Er, that's what you have. But I know you mean separate default
folders for Writer and Calc.
That means. whenever I open or save a file, Writer/Calc would look in
that particular folder for files (unless specified otherwise).
You cannot ask Writer or Calc to do this, since they don't really
exist. Instead, OpenOffice is an integrated program: the only sense
in which Writer, Calc, and so on exist is that OpenOffice is capable
of creating and editing different types of document. When you go, in
particular, to open a file in OpenOffice, it cannot know what type of
file - text, spreadsheet, presentation - you might have in mind.
I can do that with Word, Lotus (very old!), Wordperfect, text editors
etc. etc., just about every software I possess.
That's because all those products are individual programs: there is no
way the problem could arise. Despite the fact that Word, Excel, etc.
are marketed as Microsoft Office, they are still separate programs.
Try using File | Open in Word to open an Excel spreadsheet. Then try
using File | Open in OpenOffice - whilst editing a text ("Writer")
document - to open a spreadsheet.
I fancy this doesn't help: sorry.
Brian Barker
This is one of the areas where I think OOo could do a whole lot better.
Like Brian wrote, OOo thinks of itself as one program, and gives no
thought to the idea that users might put different types of files in
different places. What's worse, that "path" Thomas mentioned (under |
Tools | Options | OpenOffice.org | Paths | ) really appears to be quite
useless. If the last thing I opened happened to be in the "spreadsheet"
folder, then when I go to open a document in Writer, OOo is going to
look in that "spreadsheet" folder.
The fact that OOo is one program is no excuse. It's still several very
different TOOLS, and each tool's | File | Open | menu ought to be able
to look to its own default directory (as defined in the | Tools |
Options | menu. Either that, or each tool ought to remember the path to
the last file it (the TOOL, not the PROGRAM) opened, and start out by
looking there. As it is, if I start a new document in Writer, but the
last thing I worked on was a spreadsheet, OOo will try to save that new
Writer document in the same folder where that spreadsheet was saved.
Even Base follows the same pattern; it doesn't know where to look for
it's own registered databases. And nobody who's halfway organized is
likely to save all those different kinds of files in the same folder.
End of rant. (But hopefully it'll catch the eye of someone who can make
a difference with such things.)
-- Tim Deaton
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