I've been following this thread, from the first very rude posting, which eventually led to some discussion about the issue at hand (if it indeed is an issue). My 2 cents, from someone who is a computer user as opposed to a computer hobbiest or computer guru, is that the OpenOffice community should do anything reasonable to make installation easy and painless for the average, possibly relatively computer illiterate, user who just wants a nice alternative to MS Office. I think there may be some people who have the opinion that OpenOffice was developed by computer geeks, more or less FOR computer geeks, and not for a fairly typical user who just wants the computer to be a handy tool, and not something that he/she needs to work hard at to understand the nuts and bolts of. When I installed OpenOffice on my computer around 3 years ago, it's because I didn't want to pay the price for MS Office. Since I didn't have MS Office on my computer, having OpenOffice be the default file association for .doc, .xls, etc. wasn't an issue. However, if I had had MS Office, I do think I would have been a bit miffed if this new program "took over" the file associations that had previously been MS Office ones. Even if it had been my ignorant mistake during the installation. If some reasonable minority of users "misses" the installation question about file associations, it does seem like it would be worthwhile to try to make this step a bit more obvious, and as others have said, to explain what file associations mean. In a message dated 9/13/2005 4:42:55 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>From my extensive magazine reading about UI's, I'd claim that blaming stupid users is stupid (or some sage advice like that from Mr. Gump). Nothing will be damn-fool-proof, and even fool-proof doesn't always work with me as a user. The goal should be reducing the amount of similar traffic on this forum.
