On Wed, 28 Sep 2005 20:08:53 -0400, G. Roderick Singleton wrote:

>> This is not directed at you. I appreciate your trying to help.
>> But I'm finding that almost every time I try to dive into
>> something with OO I get stymied. It's fine for basic functions,
>> but for advanced things it's logic is very much unintuitive. I
>> was up and running with mail merge in Word in ten minutes; it
>> took me about 2 hours in OO. Macros I still haven't gotten to
>> first base with. Frames are not documented.
> 
> May I suggest that you have a look at the 1.1.x User Guide
> ( http://tinyurl.com/8zlay ) and/or the 2.0 User Guide
> (http://tinyurl.com/bwfrp) both have lots on frames. Plus on
> http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/index.html there are also
> all the OOoAuthors guides. Bound to be something on frames in these too.
> Lots on macros too.

The 2.0 UGs have nothing on frames yet. It's promised. Guess I
need to check out the 1.1s. Maybe it's me, but I find the macro
language impossible, much more difficult than vba.
 
> Then there are the other repositories at
> http://documentation.openoffice.org/ like the HOW-TOs and so on.  I
> think by using these you might be able to get your head around frames.
> As to mail merge, I believe this is also documented in the guides while
> the on-line help could be considered a bit techie it is there too. 2.0
> is still a work in progress so I do not know how mail merge will  work
> at release time. However, I do know there is work being done to also
> have mail merge in 2.x work directly with email.

I've been in them this week, and they were indeed helpful for the
likes of mail merge. It's just that I continually find myself in
conflict with the logic of OO's organization, its functions and
wizards, and that necessitates studying every step of the way for
each function, rather than a more smooth reliance on intuition.
 
>> I'm not complaining, I'm stating. I need to get a handle on this
>> situation. I believe in OO. I would like to make MS irrelevant. I
>> would even pay for OO if it did the job.
> 
> It does and that search on the main site doesn't work well enough to
> bring up what is on docs doesn't help you or others either.
> ( http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=52046 )

"It does"? Not following the logic of your answer here.

>> This leaves me in a difficult situation. At present it's very
>> hard for me to grow into OO. But I do not want to go back to MS.
>> 
> 
> I have recognized that getting to existing docs can be a huge problem.
> That is one of the reasons I answer here even when I should be working
> on the 2.0 guide and setup guide and doc project admin stuff :-) so
> people can find something to help them get going. I would ask anyone who
> can to get on board docs and contribute where possible.

I appreciate your work here and that of others. I think, however,
that I'm up against a very basic conflict with the writers of OO
about how to go about doing things. I hate to say it, but I
gravitate more toward the way Word97 is thought out. When I spend
half an hour trying to figure out how to automate mass changes to
a spelling list, and get nowhere using with spelling options, the
search and replace function, or macros, but then can figure out
how to do it intuitively in Word in 4 minutes - and when that is
typical of my attempts to get familiar with the somewhat more
advanced functions in OO - I've got a problem.

p.
-- 
Using OOo 1.9.125 on Win XP sp2.


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