John King wrote:
[cut]
That's very useful. I hadn't tested the mailmerge since I was
primarily interested in label creation, and only raised issue 61021
when I saw that the blank address fields issue had been closed
(http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=36696).
I don't know what the communication difficulty is, but clearly the
developers live on a different planet if they think 36696 is fixed in 2.0.1.
The problem seems to me to be the fact that OpenOffice.org is "free" and
you get what you pay for. It is difficult to complain about product
deficiencies if one hasn't paid a fee for it. At the very least it would
seem churlish, when the product does offer tremendous value to many
thousands of private individuals who can live with the limitations.
As for using OOo commercially, is that what Sun really want? Without
understanding their strategy in releasing OOo AND Star Office,
notionally based on the same source code, it is very difficult to see
their imperative to provide professional repairs to basic functionality
in OOo, such as the Mail Merge/Label deficiencies. After all, it can be
fixed in Star Office and they get paid for it!
If, as I suspect, OpenOffice.org is intended as a "spoiler" in
Microsoft's market place, and to build a base for Open Document format,
then the motivation to fix design weaknesses in OOo, so as to offer
fully functional competition to Microsoft, may not be there.
Perhaps you could add your comments to both issues in order to ensure
that your concerns are taken into account. As you will see from the
comments in issue 36696, we've been waiting for a decent resolution
to this problem for a couple of years now.
I'm not sure of the point, given my comments above and the already
extant wealth of pertinent commentary in 36696. Anything I could say has
already been said, several times over and yet the bug is "fixed!
I still have to go back to my old copy of Word to produce decent
labels with minimal hassle.
I haven't weakened that far, but the combination of Outlook and Word
does illustrate how this issue could be resolved.
Peter HB
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