Here are some problems with Open Office: 1. If I open a document with Open Office Writer just to look at it and make no changes, Open Office will not allow me to close the document. Open Office insists that I have changed the document and refuses to close it unless I answer the dialogue box which says
"The document "(name of document)" has been modified." and asks: Do you want to save your changes? The choices allowed are not answers to this "Yes - No" question (namely, "Yes" and "No"). They are: "Save", "Discard", "Cancel" I did not want to choose any of these: I made no changes to save and I did not want to discard anything. I also did not want to forget about closing Open Office Writer. I therefore used the task manager to force Open Office Writer to close. I then tried to open Open Office Writer again and it failed to open and instead presented me with "Open Office Document Recovery" which asked permission to recover the document --- a document I had not edited or changed in any way. Subsequently, every time I tried to open the program it refused to open until I respond to the "Open Office Document Recovery" dialogue box. My fear of this behavior was that Open Office Writer may actually corrupt my documents just by being allowed to open them. I finally pushed "Discard" and was able to start the program. Experiments with a sample document showed the following: the document, which had been saved in Word with a 14 point font, opened in Open Office Writer with a 10 point font. When I restored it to the original 14 point font, Open Office Writer saw that as a modification of the document. This episode indicates to me that Open Office Writer is altogether unacceptable as an alternative to Word. Here are other problems I have had: 2. The installer for Open Office Writer asked whether I wanted Open Office Writer to open MS Word documents. I chose this option, but the requested file associations were not established. 3. The installer did not prompt me to create desktop or start menu icons. Instead, it created start menu icons, but not desktop icons, and it gave no indication of what it was doing. The result of this was that I was unable to find the programs until a member of this group suggested looking for start menu icons. 4. The installer does not allow choice of target directory for a full install. 5. For custom install, the installer has a bizarre dialogue labelled "custom setup" with a tree structure to the left showing disk-drive icons with labels like "OpenOffice.org Writer" and to the right a box with some explanation of each feature. One can expand the tree by clicking on the [+] symbols; clicking on the /name/ will show a brief explanation of what's selected; clicking on the icon will show a drop-down menu allowing a choice of "don't install this", "install this", "install this and all sub-features". Unlike every other tree selection menu of this kind, there are no check boxes showing what has been selected, to that the user is essentially left flying blind. 6. The website links to a setup guide for version 1 which does not apply to version 2. Somebody on this list sent me a webpage containing a link to the setup guide for version 2. That guide gives instructions for all the obvious things for which one does not need a guide, but does not explain the weird setup for custom install described in (5.) above. 7. Finally, a general comment. It appears that the developers of this program have focused on fancy bells and whistles and have neglected the need to construct a sound and solid basic program, to which bells and whistles could be added later. I also see no evidence that the developers have made any effort to eliminate the problems typical for Microsoft programs. Some of these problems are: default placement of the program under the C:\Program Files directory and default placement of working files in "My Documents". Thus, this program appears to have all the usual problems associated with Microsoft and additional problems due to careless design and construction. I see no reason to change from MS Office 2000 to OpenOffice.org. Furthermore, I got MS Office 2000 for free or nearly free from my educational institution and I could have gotten MS Office 2003 for free from my place of employment at that time (I chose not to go with MS Office 2003 because experimenting with it convinced me that it is total garbage.) I hope developers take my comments seriously under advisement and I plan to try OpenOffice.org again in a few years to see whether anything has changed. Meantime, I recommend MS Office 2000 or MS Office 1997 to anyone who wants a halfway reliable halfway unbloated office suite. Best regards to all, Sandy On Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:53:15 -0700 Ganesha Bhaskara <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > <SNIP> > > I am very sorry to say that my initial impression is very > negative. If > > the installation is this bad, I am skeptical about the quality of > the ooo > > suite itself. > > > This works very well if you are interacting with an entity with > commercial interest. (My package did not arrive on time ...... > so, amazon sucks, is understandable when made to a customer > service agent working for amazon). Such a statement when > made on a forum staffed by volunteers is a big turnoff and will > hurt your changes of getting useful answers to your questions. > > Constructive criticism is always welcome. We are just trying to > help out OO users and make OO better by providing feedback > to developers. If you feel that the installation process could be > improved, filing a feature request would be most helpful. > > <SNIP> > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > ____________________________________________________________ Looking for information to start your Human Resources career? 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