[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
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.
I can think of two possibilities for the font size situation. One is
that the font used by Word was not available to Writer, so it chose a
font it thought was comparable. Since you didn't mention the font name
as being different, it is more likely that Writer applied its style
information, which differed from the style used by Word (perhaps because
the font size was applied directly rather than through styles). Writer
is strongly style-oriented, which most of us feel is a "good thing" --
you are, of course, welcome to disagree.
In any case, when you changed the point size, that was indeed a change
(why would you think it wasn't?), and Writer accordingly asked what it
was supposed to do when you later wanted to close the document. That
would be the appropriate response, and not at all undesirable. Nor is it
a fault attempting to recover a document that was being edited and was
not properly closed; that is generally a very desirable function. In
this situation, since your intention was to leave the document alone the
appropriate answer when closing was "Discard." Because you killed the
process instead, you could have canceled the recovery the first time it
was offered and you would not have seen it again. Certainly you need
have no fear that Writer will corrupt documents when you simply open
them to look and make no changes. The question asked on closing might
perhaps be more properly stated as "Do you want to save the changes,
discard them, or cancel the closing of the document?" -- but the
volunteers making changes to OOo are few and very busy, so this would be
a very low priority issue.
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.
That's very odd. The only times I know that this has been reported, the
problem was that MS Office, or viewers for the various MS Office
filetypes, had been installed after OOo and overrode the selection, or
the Open With had been used for a file to select the MS Office program
and the option for always using this program was selected (it often has
to be explicitly deselected).
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.
I believe the installer is being changed in the new version, you're far
from the only one to have this problem.
4. The installer does not allow choice of target directory for a full
install.
The choice was made to consider such a designation as being a custom
install; there seems to have been a general feeling that the default
installation path should ask as few questions as possible, which is
understandable. Once into the custom install path, this does become an
option. I haven't used the custom installer, but I think its defaults
would provide a "full install" to whatever directory was chosen.
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.
These sound like valid issues to me, and may already have been reported,
but again, would probably not be a high-priority change.
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.)
You're free to feel that this is not a sound and solid program, but
there are a *lot* of users who find it an excellent alternative, and
most people do not have a way to get the free/low-cost licenses for MS
Office that were apparently available to you. To have these capabilities
in their personal systems (on many operating systems), free and without
restriction, rather than paying hundreds of dollars (both initially and
periodically), may not matter to you -- but it certainly does to me and
a lot of others. And I don't understand your objection to the defaults;
you appear to think either that there should not be defaults, or that
these should not be the ones chosen; not a very common position. That's
not to say that particular options could not be moved out of the custom
install/ option configuration path to the default installation with
later configuration capability, but this really does not sound like a
killer issue affecting many people.
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
You might want to look at some of the other open source alternatives
(Abiword, for example) or at Google applications. The two alternatives
you're recommending are no longer supported, and I believe there are a
lot of known and possibly unknown security issues.
<snip>
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