There seems to be a mix of some pretty legitimate problems, which I've
heard reported before, and some that seem a bit contrived ... or maybe
just due to a misunderstanding of how applications work. Comments in
line ...
[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."
This certainly doesn't seem right; I'm not sure what could be driving
this, possibly others might. Although this wouldn't explain your
situation, in Calc, if there is a field that re-calculates
automatically, like the TODAY function, whenever one opens the file and
goes to close it without saving, it will say that the document has been
modified (because there has been a change in the cell with the TODAY
function). Possibly there is something similar going on in your text
document? Others are no doubt more knowledgeable than I am about this.
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"
This is fairly typical of the dialog that appears when asked if you want
to save changes. I can't remember exactly what MS Office says, but I
think it's something similar. Just a little bit of logic should lead to
the following definitions of these choices:
Save -- means to save whatever changes were made (in your case, no
obvious ones, but in most cases, there have been changes)
Discard -- means to close the document without saving the changes (in
other words, discard the changes; not discard the document)
Cancel -- means to not close the file; go back to it, as if you never
chose to close it.
I did not want to choose any of these: I made no changes to save and I
did not want to discard anything.
If you made no changes to save, you could choose Discard; it would close
the file without saving any mysterious changes that it thought were made.
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.
If you force OO to close, and there is a document with unsaved changes,
this is exactly what the document recovery is supposed to do -- allow
you to capture those changes. This is working exactly how it should be
working. If you don't want this to happen, then don't force OO to close;
just choose Discard (or Save for that matter) when closing the document.
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.
Well, when you change the font from 10 point to 14 point, that IS a
modification of the document, isn't it? So of course, it's going to ask
you if you want to save the change.
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.
Not sure why this would happen -- does sound like a problem, although
this doesn't seem to be a frequently occurring one (at least there
haven't been many questions related to it).
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.
THIS is a very frustrating thing. Most Windows applications give the
choice of putting an icon for the application on the desktop during
installation. I strongly feel that OpenOffice should do this as well. It
would eliminate the many questions along the lines of "I installed
OpenOffice but can't find it anywhere!"
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.
I've never done a custom install so I can't comment on this observation.
Likewise, I don't have enough background to comment on any of the other
observations/comments reported.
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
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