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Shortcomings of OpenOffice and Working Around Them?
1mck asks: "Most free office software does the job, and after a hard drive failure, I decided to go MS Office free, so I'm trying out OpenOffice; however, I've noticed that there are a few deficiencies that I'm having a hard time getting around like the 'Shrink to fit' function, and also having PPS files open up directly in 'Presentation' mode rather than in the Edit' mode. Has any one else picked up on other deficiencies in OpenOffice? I realize that it is free, and it won't be as well featured as most purchased software, but when I went on the hunt for the workarounds at the OpenOffice forums, and on the web I've come up with very little to no information at all. Have I chosen the right free software, or would you suggest something else?" What minor irritations and shortcomings have you found in OpenOffice and how have you adjusted to (or worked around) them?
Is it possible that you've expected behavior from OO? I'm not certain that OO's credo is to "replace" M$ Office as an exact copy. However, they probably intend to include *equivalent* functionality in most cases. So, simply opening in a different state ("edit" vs. "Presentation" mode) is a case of you expecting an M$ Office behavior when working with an entirely separate, discrete, different, non-Microsoft Office piece of software.
Well, PPS files are supposed to open in show mode. PPT files get saved as a PPS file so you can give them out so everyone and their grandmother can view them without spending ten minutes finding the "View as Show" option. In MS Powerpoint, you have to open the program, then chose to open the file to open in edit mode. Perhaps you should try that.
How do I get it to show me the equation for the line?
Doing cross-references in OpenWriter is clunky and difficult. For each section heading or similar (e.g. Section 2.3.5.13), you need to manually create some kind of bookmark. It is not automatic like MS Word or Framemaker. This is definitely a showstopper for using OpenWriter with complex legal documents and their dozens or hundreds of cross-references.
OO is neat package, especially for Linux systems, but there's no denying it has some catching up to do to compete feature for feature with MS Office. One bug that's really annoyed me with the latest 2.0 release is that it crashes everytime I import a csv file into Calc, save it and then try to forward the file via my mail client. I haven't investigated it, so I don't know if it does with all open documents, or if it's specific to what I did above. I've filed a bug report, though.
Anyway, I'd suggest this url: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page to the submitter, but it does seem to be developer specific.
I realize that it is free, and it won't be as well featured as most purchased software Actually, I think OpenOffice is more "well-featured" than Microsoft Office or any other office suite I have ever used. For example, OOo styles work in many more places and are more general and flexible and OOo's mathematical formula support is better than what comes with MS Office. When I am forced to use MS Office, the limitations of MS Office drive me crazy. OOo is not stripped down bargain software, it's a heavy-duty office suite that happens to be open source. The equivalent of PPS in OOo is PDF--it generates stand-alone presentations that pretty much anybody can view--much better than PPS. I don't know of a "shrink to fit", but I find selecting the text and making the font smaller to be quick and easy.
This is mainly an interop issue because OOo does not behave in the same way as Excel, but there are some circumstances in which OOo does what many consider to be "the wrong thing".
Issue 5658
As a college student, learning EE, i need to add trendlines to my data charts and calculate the slopes and their standard errors. A thing you can not do with OO, but you can with Microsoft Office.
The MS suite is very very common indeed. After 20+ years of single choice market this is trivial.
But finally, is the MS suite fitting the real needs? How fast is it adapting to the new needs?
Or rather is it defining the needs?
All software has bugs, is error prone and shows deficiencies in some way. With no exception.
One point is whether the manufacturer can (try to) fix, adapt and evolve that software in a reasonable timeframe.
Another one is whether the suite can be used among different environments, namely Windows, Linux and OS X at least.
Inconsistencies among office suites are a big problem. But, is a file format ad related application behaviour well documented?
Of course if the "incumbent application" hides the information, there will always be incoherencies.
Think about the web. As far as the "common standards" are concerned (aka W3C), all browsers are more or less equivalent. Problems arise when you use proprietary technologies.
Why this? Because there are both a well defined standard definition and application behaviour, and because there is a third party tool to check compliancy.
Do the same for the office suite, and you'll get a solution. Or sort of.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
The biggest problem I have is compatibility with MS Office. I have been using Open/Star Office for some years, but I work with people who want to work with MS Office products, so this has been a major issue for me. I really need both way compatibility - my line manager likes me to be able to read his documents and vice versa.
It is getting better (OpenOffice 2.0 is a big leap forward), but I still find that there are issues. These seem to be far worse for spreadsheets and presentations than for word processed documents, and I have ended up using gnumeric for spreadsheets rather than OpenOffice Calc; I would be doing the same for presentations, but I've not got round to checking out some of the alternatives. It is mainly formatting that is a problem, with different page breaks on Word documents sent me by colleagues, occasionally text hidden behind graphics etc. Although the problem with presentations seems the same, my presentations tend to confuse Powerpoint's layout engine much more severely: one bullet point that goes over the page boundary, and all the fonts from then on get massively confused. (WMy manager and I recently co-authored a presentation for the Internet2 spring meeting, and ended up sending text files containing the bullet point text as well as the Powerpoint files in order to be able to work together.) Font compatibility is probably a major cause of these issues, so it's not all precisely OpenOffice's fault. However, it should be easier for a novice to create documents which are readable.
You can rent this space for $5 a week.
Abiword, Gnumeric and hopefully sometime this decade, Criawips.
I realize that
With OpenOffice I can easily "send as pdf-document" or export my presentation into flash animation and publish it on the Web.
With OpenOffice I can save my valuable data in standard format (OpenDocument) so that ten years from now it will still be readable with any standards compliant word processing software no matter what my operating system is.
From my perspective OpenOffice seems to be well featured software compared to the "most purchased software" :-)
The marketing department is forever complaining that the csv file I sent them has 500,000 rows and Excel can only see the first 60,000 lines. Open Office is just as bad, and older versions can only see 30,000 lines. If Open Office didn't have limit, 90% of the marketing department would switch from Excel tomorrow.
I have yet to figure out how to insert a video in a presentation.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
When we switched to OO from Microsoft Office, moving from our $399 Dell specials to nice $2,000 each systems with AMD FX-55's really made OO much easier to use. It's just too damn slow to use on a normal system. You really need some horsepower. Of course even with a top of the line system, things like doing an Edit -> Copy in Impress still take so long that you think the computer has locked-up. So, spend more on an upgrade than you would have on Office, and OO will be usable.
Of course the boss now wishes we had stuck with Office since it would have not required so much money spent in hardware to throw at it, and we wouldn't have had to do so much training.
The page flow logic (where to put page breaks automatically) has problems when tables imported from word come into play. But there are ocasions where documents with images and tables do not get their page flow ok automatically. Ussually some fiddling required to trigger the page flow algorithm to run is required.
If so, then why not hack the reg to give the file extensions the behaviors that you want them to perform? This is something that the registry was intended to do from the beginning (at least since the release of 95), and it is one of the few times that I will recommend that people freely edit the registry, versus using the gui interface that MS has provided, because the gui is a little more clunky than editing the tree directly. If you need direction on how to add this, let me know and I will give you the quick and dirty.
.pps doesn't open in show or whatever) and that maybe we on slashdot can identify as either something which it does but which you were not aware of or that maybe we here can help write up a spec so someone more intimate with that part of OOo can help to code in cleanly?
As far as other featureset requests, have you looked to see if someone else has already added that request to the OOo request list? Do you know exactly what sort of features you are having to do without? I notice that a fellow poster just above me has mentioned the lack of certain outline features that MS Word has, however, the thing is that Word didn't have those features back in version 6. If they did, I never knew about those sort of features until around office2k, but then I also never attempted to write a full scale manuscript in ver's 6 or less.
The thing is, without someone defining the sort of behavior that is needed, there can be no spec written. Without a spec, it's rather difficult to write the code to perform the function. So I ask again, what featureset are you looking for that is lacking that is not an environmental issue (such as
Hopefully this helps, else, I don't get what the deal is I guess.
2^3 * 31 * 647
Why are OOo's default borders different than MSFT Office's borders ?
.7/.7/.7/.7, while MSFT Office is at 1/1/1.25/1.25)
(OOo uses something like
If the goal is to transition people over, this little difference shouldn't exist!
Sunny Dubey
There are few thing that I have missed in the OpenOffice Calc. The chart creation is not as painless as it is with Excel. In addition, it seems that it's not possible to set error margins for XY plot chart with individual error margins for upper and lower margin. It's possible to set a constant error margin for all point and for both upper and lower magrin, but it's not possible to define an individual error margin for each point separately and define greater margin for positive error than negative error. So, the XY plot is not so flexible as it could be and I cannot come up any work-around for that. Well, at least this was situation with OOo version 2.0.0. I haven't yet checked the latest version.
So, you baught a pre-built box, then your harddisk went kaboom, and you don't have the recovery CD's for the computer, much less a recovery partition since the disk went boom, and don't want to spend $300 on a copy of office plus the a copy of windows which adds upto half a grand.
Sounds reasonable to me, but you do realize you can order recovery CD's from the manufacturer and if they don't give them to you, you can sue under the EULA for false representation of a product, right? Nobody can sell you a lisence, then through copyright, ensure you're never able to use it.
Shortcoming: No decent reference/literature managment system available.
Workaround: Use MS Office+Reference Manager/Endnote, unfortunately.
This comment does not exist.
I really like open office, but there are 2 main problems for me with it; 1) it doesn't have a grammar checker, and knowing how bad I am at this stuff I would really like one; I know it won't be perfect but it might be nice. 2) word count. This is a really big one for me. The word count when i ran through exactly the same document in each was radically different (by about 100 words on 5000). Because the work was assessed I needed the word count to be exactly what they would get if they checked (so I had to use Word) - even if OO's way of counting is better a bit more agreement might be nice.
*''I can't believe it's not a hyperlink.''
I learned about OO just about year ago, around the time I upgraded to Win XP Pro. I hadn't yet re-installed MS Word at a point when a major new release of OO was announced (I think it was 1.7) on Slashdot.
Being enthusiastic about the concept behind open software, and wishing to support OO, I decided to install that instead. I stuck with it through the learning curve. I quickly found that it was more than adequate for most of my simple word processing needs - correspondence and documentation of the software I develop - except in one essential way: support for a second language.
Routinely I have to use two languages - English and Portuguese, sometimes mixing both languages in a single document. The support for switching from one language to another in OO was horrible - it involved several mouse clicks to go back and forth. Of course that may well be much improved in current versions, but there's another problem. The spelling checker for Portuguese was not very well developed at the time I experimented with it, lacking even the simple ability to recognize verbs any other form than their infinitive.
Beyond spell checking, I doubt very much the OO has grammar checking. Even if it does now, I can't imagine it is or ever will be on par with MS Word. The thing is, I imagine that multilingual word processing is an art unto itself. In MS Word, I can write in either language, and the software instantly recognizes which I am using, does spell checking and what's even more important to me, grammar checking for the Portuguese I only learned a half dozen years ago.
When I was using OO with it's poor multilingual support, it took me two or three times longer to prepare a document in Portuguese as I had to frequently look up words in the dictionary. Although I know how to spell most common Portuguese words, I am not always sure of their gender (in the case of nouns) and without that it's not possible to get the correct form of the adjective. MS Word automatically checks my "concordances" in an instant. I doubt that OO will ever come even close to MS Word in this one, for me - essential area.
In the end, I had to abandon OO for word processing.
My #1 complaint with OOffice, on Suse anyway, is the extremely long start times. Doesn't matter if its the distribution RPMs or upgraded ones direct from OOffice. It can take 30-60 seconds to get the application open. Once it's open, it is very responsive (This is on a 2GHz Athlon 64 system), but the start times are killer. I don't mind if I'm working on docs and keep a window up and open, but for starting and viewing documents from email for example, its brutal. I've started using KWord/KCalc, etc which are much worse compatability wise, but start so much faster I don't care if the formatting is a bit off.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Foremost, the number one feature I miss is grouping-symbol matching. Emacs has had this since RAM was measured in kilobytes, and it's one of the Most Useful Features Ever. (I also miss it in textarea fields in my web browser.) I think MS Office is also missing this important feature.
...). Setting up a database-in-a-file (using the built-in database engine) isn't very easy either.
There are a handful of edge cases in Writer (e.g., right before or after a table) where it's not always easy to insert or delete a paragraph. More than once I've ended up editing the XML by hand, and that should NOT be necessary (although it's a nice ability to have and creates a lot of flexibility for automatic document generation).
When you've got a chart in a Calc, it can be a pain to remember how many times to click, double-click, or right-click, and in what order, to get to a specific option (e.g., to modify the data range (select, right-click), or to switch to a logarithmic scale (select, double-click, then right-click)). Shouldn't it be possible to just right-click once, choose Properties from a context menu, and get a tabbed dialog box with *all* the available options that can be modified for the chart? The capabilities I need are available, but the UI needs work.
OOo Base is quite rough around the edges still. That's to be expected, as it's a relatively new addition, but it's very noticeable. Getting it configured to talk to a local RDBMS, for instance, is non-trivial and more than a little confusing. It _should_ be a small matter of selecting the type of database from a list and plugging in host, username, password, and database name. At least, it should be that easy for any of the major database systems (Postgres, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server,
But most of all, and I do mean most of all, I want grouping-symbol matching. Please.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
My biggest annoyance with OpenOffice is that on Solaris (my main work machine), the window titles are garbled. I'm not exactly sure what is going on, but instead of something like "Untitled1 - OpenOffice.org Calc", I see "Õîôéôìåä ÏðåîÏææéãå®ïòç ×òéôåò" (curtesy of xwininfo). I've looked around a little, but never found any information on this problem. I've only ever seen it on Solaris.
Update: after looking at the hex values of each of the characters, I discovered that the text I see is the ASCII values OR'd with 0x80. It's at least consistent, but really weird (and hard to read).
"Save the whales, feed the hungry, free the mallocs" -- author unknown
Another issue is its formula handling. All spreadsheets since Visicalc recongize any of the numeric operations (+ - / *) as the beginning of a formula -- Calc doesn't (it only recongizes the = sign).
Just tried it under Mandriva/KDE on a 2.13 GHz Centrino laptop - just short of 8 seconds from click to completely open with a blank document.
OLE and other types of inserted data works very, very poorly when you're importing documents in from Word. I found this out the hard way when I was trying to get the thing to work on a rather large document (my Master's Project). Don't rely on it for anything of this type - it always did something wrong with a picture, or an inserted chart, etc. etc. unless you're able to do a LOT of manual editing. From what I can gather, which is far less extensive for components other than those that are word processing oriented, this problem is found throughout the suite.
OO.org is pretty cool, and the developers have obviously worked hard, but it's got a long way to go to be truly compatable with Microsoft outside of the bare essentials and some of the extra features (i.e. table of contents).
I am migrating our small business (25 users) to OO from MS. I recently switched our power user, who is open-minded and a quick study. She has been pulling her hair out over what would seem to be a couple of trivial details. She even came in to work early the other day because she was behind on some commission spreadsheets due the switch to OO. The rest of the users are doing OK with the switch. I'm afraid the owners are going to scuttle my migration to OO, even though I have shown a $10K savings. It's not that OO is less capable than MS, the problem is that it is different in subtle but apparantly very annoying ways to experienced MS users. For anyone doing a switch, prepare your power users in advance to expect short-term grief from the small things as they recondition.
For the record, the "biggest" problem my power user faces is how the Enter key behaves after entering data across several horizontal cells. In MS, Enter will move the cursor down on row and back to the first column that data was entered. For example, B3 -> B4 -> B5 Enter C3. OO does not have this behavior. The Enter key can be customized, but only to go one cell down (default), up, left, or right. Searching the forums confirmed that other MS users are also frustrated by this missing behavior. I tried a quick macro, but no luck.
Keyboard usability
Problem: There is no straightforward way to set keyboard shortcuts for assigning/removing styles, inserting specific special characters, etc. For non-trivial documents, this means repeated use of the mouse/toolbars/insert character dialog are required.
Workaround: Macros can be used, though this is slow and awkward.
Typographical weaknesses
Problem: Support for high-quality typography is poor. In particular, support for professional-grade OpenType fonts is weak, with some of the best (the Zapfino Extra family is a clear example) not rendering properly at all on screen and even being substituted with completely different fonts in PDF output. No advantage is taken of features like ligatures, true small caps, different figure styles, stylistic and contextual alternates, and similar refinements. More generally, the layout algorithms (e.g., for H&J) are poor.
Workaround: There isn't really one: these are straight-up missing features or outright bugs. However, DTP packages already provide this sort of feature routinely, and more significantly, new versions of MS Office are likely to take advantage of the OpenType rendering support in Windows. OpenOffice's cross-platform nature may be a liability here.
Poor support for formal, structured documents
Problem: There is very limited support for things like structured headings and matching tables of contents (try generating two tables, one with only chapter titles+subtitles and one with chapter titles+all subheadings, or formatting a table of contents significantly differently from the default styles). There is no direct support for bibliographies. The UI for bullets, numbering and list styles is poor.
Workaround: Short of typing things in manually (or editing the auto-generated version every time) there's not much you can do. Cross-references can do a limited amount to support bibliographies within a single document.
Poor support for complex page layouts
Problem: Features like frames don't always work as expected. There seem to be several obscure bugs where multiple frames are concerned. Features like overlapping frames and transparency aren't supported.
Workaround: Usually patience or ingenuity, IME.
Start-up times are very long
Problem: It takes forever to load Writer the frst time.
Workaround: Get a faster machine? :-)
Mail merge support is very poor
Problem: Various. The UI is confusing. Output options are limited. (Can you merge to a single file in the latest version? You couldn't the last time I tried it.) The data source system is bug-ridden to the point that it's easier to start again and set up a new source if the slightest thing goes wrong.
Workaround: I've never found one for most of this, although some limitations can be overcome by merging-to-print and using a cheat printer driver that outputs to PostScript/PDF or similar.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Based admittedly on OOo v1:
Generally the "problems" are because you've only known the MS way. Most (but not all) are behavior I slightly prefer...
The printing is definitely different, and we had training problems getting people to convert. Calc printing had some issues with printing a ton of blank pages, but so does Excel. Generally I think it was superior to MS's tendency to reformat everything...
The problem that literally got it uninstalled and MS purchased on one machine was the lack of a comma button. That is, a button on the toolbar that automatically added or removed the comma formatting from numbers in Calc. (The formatting options were there, but not the button. I was tempted to try to write one, but I didn't have time at the time...)
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Essential commands are not working. I mean, try ^[:wq or even ^[ZZ to write and quit. I tell ya, worthless junk!
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
First, you need not generate a chart in any popular spreadsheet program to generate fits and errors. You may, of course, want to see your trendlines visually, though. This IS possible in OO.o.
Make a chart, click on it & select Insert->statistics. Choose the trendline you want & any statistical information you want to use.
For most power users, it is more difficult to work around the deficiencies in plotting in any spreadsheet softwre & they'd be better off with a stand-alone program to do it. I personally like grace, though others use Origin, Kaleidagraph, etc. Many of these also do statistics and fits better than the spreadsheet programs.
If you have to report errors in your fits, be aware that MS Excel has historically had a deficiency in the calculation of error from datasets that had error bars. I don't know if this has ever been fixed. If you start doing research, your colleagues will probably try to ween you from Excel to something which does the jobs that academic scientists and engineers need to do better than the "do-it-all, but not as well" solution.
When you add an image from a file, it is in line with the text, but when you copy the image that you've already imported to paste again in elsewhere in the document it acts differently. This makes editing the text difficult as OOo will move the image out of place from the text that goes with it.
Different word count than MS Word doesn't mean the wrong word count. It used to be that one reason people used WordPerfect was because it returned what was more widely considered to be the correct count & MS Word was wrong. Has Word's counting changed, or has it only become the "de facto standard?"
I had the hardest time in OpenOffice Calc printing the gridlines.
(Found out: it's on Format -> page, but that's not possible with a read-only file, since Format->Page is greyed out!)
Also, setting the print area, and it was hard to figure out how to get a randomly sized spreadsheet to print in a scale of (1 page tall by x wide) or (1 page wide by x tall) (found out: it's also in Format-> Page, likewise with the read-only).
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Bullet points and indentation are screwy. These are two things used by common people, not some set of rarely-used features.
Bullet points can get really messed up when importing from Word -- even documents that don't have macros.
Indentation is also set at too large an interval. Why not default to 1/4 inch (US Letter), like most everyone else's word processor?
Just like Word, at times the auto formatting gets in the way. This is especially true of bullets and indentation.
Other than that, I have few disagreements with OpenOffice Writer. The two items, above, though are used by me on almost every document I produce. So, if I have Word and Writer on the same machine, I may actually use Word, to avoid this....
The biggest reason that I cannot switch to OO is that there is no bilbiographic (reference) software worth using with it. I use Endnote extensively and have no desire to go back to the days when I had to deal with formatting references in publications by hand without a database.
I had a very hard time deciding what to do with the $350 I saved by not buying MS Office.
The only problem I've ever had with OpenOffice (and the only reason I have to keep MS Office or Wordperfect around) is that the system for putting in address labels is so badly broken that it's useless. I have two files of about 250 addresses each, listed out as plain text, which I can load into MS Office or Wordperfect, set my paper type to labels, and *POOF*! Each address is on it's own label, no extra fighting needed. When I try to do that in OpenOffice, I either get the same (first) address on all of the labels, or I get only one label filled out (again the first one.)
If I want to actually get the separate addresses to show up on each individual label, I have to manually type the stupid things into a database first, and _THEN_ it will let me put them onto the labels. Major pain in then neck, and entirely not worth it, when it'll take less time to fire up my copy of wordperfect and just print the damn list. (The time required to manually enter 500+ addresses is _NOT_ worth it.)
Labels & mail merge are two functions (used individually or together) that have caused me endless grief. I've read the online docs, and tried reading the forums, plus google, and have not found any good answers yet. If someone has figured this out, feel free to call me a moron as long as you tell me where I can find the info.
Labels:
Try making anything other than a full sheet of a single label. For example, take a sheet of return address labels (20 x 4, or 80 labels). I don't need 80 labels with one address, but I'd like to have 20 labels for each of four addresses. How can I do this other than copy followed by paste 80 times? And I haven't found a keyboard shortcut to move to the next label, so it's really paste, mouse click, paste... Why can't I highlight a block of labels and copy/paste that? Or apply formatting to a block of labels (bold, font changes, etc)?
Admittedly, the labels can be done, but in a sub-optimal way. So on to something that can't be done...
Mail merge:
Has anyone ever successfully taken a field from a spreadsheet file and merged it into a label? I wanted to make file folder labels (yeah, mail merge and labels -- I like hurting myself) for my bills. Top line is the bill (phone, cable, gas, electric, etc) as listed in a spreadsheet file, bottom line is "2006". I find I have to predefine the spreadsheet as a persistent "data source" and then have to try linking it somehow. Of course, the variable text and constant text cannot seem to coexist on label, and it's just downhill from there. I gave up after three hours!
I realize that OOo is free, and that many people are working hard on it without pay, so I am trying to go the distance as much as possible. If anyone reading this has worked on OOo, thank you! I appreciate what you've accomplished, and realize that it will get better. Already, it's great for a lot of things.
But the labels and mail merge stuff is killing me. Seriously. I can't follow the logic. Please just rip off MS in terms of the job steps, and be done with it.
Go buy MS Office already, you fucking losers, and stop trying to re-invent the wheel.
Mouse scrolling is by line not screen, cut&paste of cells is not intuitive and
available special options are reliant upon the phase of the moon and a PRNG.
And while I'm not sure if they actually do anything with them, it is interesting
to note that OOo's bug tracker lets anyone cast a few votes on what they consider
to be major bugs.
Were that I say, pancakes?
Their stupid media player program, which is written in Java, requires a whole bloody media framework package installed
And Microsoft Office on Microsoft Windows doesn't? What happens when you try to play an embedded .wmv file without the DirectShow framework installed, such as on Windows XP N?
If only Calc had built-in histogram capability. I was able to find a macro to do the job), but it becomes a little clunky when one has reams and reams of data (as bioinformatics are likely to produce). Certainly I realize that OOo isn't meant for hard-core statistics. But it's often nice to do these kinds of little tests to know if a trend is worth rigorously following up.
4-star general in a one-man army.
If I open my CV which was originally created in Word XP in OpenOffice, and then save it and then open it again in Word 2003, the bullets are screwed and the formatting runs all over the place.
If I create a new document in OpenOffice and put in bullets and then save it and open it in Word 2003, the bullets are screwed.
If I create a new document in Word 2003, put bullets in it and then save it and open it in OpenOffice the bullets are screwed.
This means that I am stuck modifying my CV and customer facing documents in MS Office on my laptop as I can't guarantee that things are going to come out the same on the other side.
Curiosity was framed; ignorance killed the cat. -- Author unknown
The one and only missing feature, the reason my company just cut a check for thousands of dollars in MS office licenses? Outlook calendar and reminders.
Does anyone have a free product that will replace this? I kid you not - but everyone who will not switch to open office where i work cite this as their ONLY complaint. Reminders, collaboration (the ability to send reminders on the calendar to other outlook users) and the horrible program that is outlook is why i cannot switch them.
Can anyone recomend something that does calendaring, reminders and outlook like functions?
I'll just use my special getting high powers one more time...
Sadly, in an environment with significant parts Windows, Mac, Linux, and other, the lack of a decent Mac version of OpenOffice is an issue. Sure there is the NeoOffice/J which is fine, if a bit slow, for OpenOffice 1.x, but nothing for OpenOffice 2.x. Mind you, MS Office is no better, with Office running only under WINE for Linux. Lets hope standards support becomes a must have, soon and we can get some real tool independence.
It's biggest shortcoming is also it's greatest strength: viz., MS Word work-alike-ness.
It's great because it makes a fairly easy drop-in replacement for MS Word. It's bad because MS Word is a terrible, terrible product.
Why doesn't anyone ever try to write a Open-Source version of a decent Word Processor, like WordPerfect or ClarisWorks?
I was using OO as an Office replacement for a while. As a word processor, I actually prefer OO, but as a spreadsheet, there was only one crucial function that caused me to switch back, namely, Data>Text to Columns. I can work around it using sed scripts to parse the file before opening it in OO, but the extra step is enough of a hassle to interfere with my workflow. I also don't think it's likely that the casual user is going to want to deal with sed and regexp's. I also realize that if I really wanted the feature, I should buckle down and implement it myself, but frankly I don't have the time or the skill. TC
Sure it won't be integrated like Outlook is in office, but that lovely combo of Thunderbird and Calendar will fill most of the same roles that Outlook does. E-mail, calendar, notes (hopefully), etc.
Christopher S. 'coldacid' Charabaruk -- coldacid.net
People have been asking for improvements to the keybinding support for years and have apparently been ignored. Why must everyone roll their own keybindings from scratch? Why does the keybinding interface change for every release? Why do they expect people to learn their keybindings?
Here is a prob that I ran into.
t er/
Using PHP and the following headers works fine if you want to generate a HTML table and dump it into Excel.
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
Using the following to open the table in OOo doesn't work. (It didn't for me at least)
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.sun.xml.calc");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
Luckily there is a nice PEAR package that takes care of this problem --> http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Wri
A clever person solves a problem. A wise person avoids it. -- Einstein
I find graphing in OOO to be completely unacceptable.
I am a scientist, and I generate dozens of what Excel likes to call "x-y scatter plots" every day. They tend to be mildly complicated, but thats OK. I like tricks like multiple axes, ease of changing scales and labels and legends, and also the ability to make each graph its own sheet in the workbook.
I have spent time trying, but I have to conclude that OOO is just bad at all of this.
On the other hand, I have been quite pleased with Gnumeric for my spreadsheet needs.
And I also recognize that I am a specialist with a niche need, so I'm not expecting to have my requests fulfilled anytime soon. I realize that the more picky, demanding, and unusual you are the less likely that there is an open source option waiting for you.
My $0.02.
I was struggling a couple of weeks ago to get MS Word to number my damn outline sections properly and was getting nowhere. So I downloaded OpenOffice and guess what? It not only opened the document fine but my numbering problem went away! I was impressed with just how many features there are in Open Write. Most are as good or better than Word. I was really surprised how easy it was to switch. I'm a believer!
The spreadsheet looks just as promising. Of course any Office Basic Application macros won't run, but I was surprised how well it did with existing Excel docs.
It even inspired me to switch from Outlook to Thunderbird...
Wanted: witty unique signature. Must be willing to relocate.
The 2 biggest issues I have had with OO, is 1) graphing; 2) I have no idea what each program is from their name ( except writer ). Maybe this is just a fedora 4 menu name thing.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
What exactly do you mean by this?
If you mean that images are often inserted smaller than their real size (not sure if this is the case, it's been awhile since I've used OO), I do know that an OO document stores all its images, full size, in their original format if you inserted them from a file, and probably PNG if you cut'n'pasted. Remember, each document is saved as a zipfile, so entire files can be saved inside it.
I discovered this making my presentation (Impress) files absolutely huge when I used large images. I actually appreciated this feature -- I have enough space, and it makes the presentation scalable -- if someone has an HDTV projector, my images will look that much less pixellated when I use it.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
This always makes me laugh. Someone downloads and uses free/opensource software then complains like they didn't get their moneys worth. If you don't like the product then don't pay for it! If you want to improve the product then tell the developers. If the "problem" is a preference then ask for a way to change it.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
so... you can change the source. They don't need to cater to what a user might want, because the user can alter the software.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
I am struggling to complete my thesis right now, in Writer/Calc/Graph of course, and there is one key functionality that is limited to the point of being crippled. Search. While it should theoretically support RegEx syntax, in fact it is far more limited than Word's. You can't even search for manual line breaks, multi-line patterns or formatting like hidden text. This has been much whined about on OOo forums and reportedly some work is being devoted there, but at the moment it IS a royal pain.
...is laughable at present. In MS Office recording a macro is usually a good starting point for writting your own procedures, because you get the function calls with all the necessary arguments nicely written down. The OOo recorder uses references to UI elements instead of actual Basic functions, though, so it is more of a UI operations recorder and the resulting code is far less useful...
OOo 2.0 improved MS compatability substantially, but there's still a handful of problems that are irritating. I deal primarily with PowerPoint==>Impress, so these all relate to PPT import:
1) OOo does not support half as sophisticated gradient model as PowerPoint.
2) OOo does not support half as sophisticated shadow model as PowerPoint.
3) Though much improved in 2.0, WordArt compatability is still not complete.
4) This can drive you crazy: different white space handling. In PowerPoint, white spice tends to be ignored, whereas in OOo it can cause lines to wrap or empty bullet points to appear.
5) Though improved in 2.0, there are still some line spacing elements of PPT that OOo can't handle.
6) This is annoying because OOo actually supports this feature, but just doesn't import it from PPT: bullet point renumbering. Ie, taking the second bullet point and telling it to display as #5, making the third #6 and so on.
7) This is incredibly minor, but in PowerPoint, if you put shadows on text, the bullet point also gets a shadow.
8) In PowerPoint, you can set a shape's (like a rectangle etc) background to be "Background" by which it means the slide's background.
9) OOo doesn't yet offer a way of editing custom animation paths, although it imports them correctly.
10) I don't remember all the details off the top of my head anymore, but there are still a few animation properties that don't have quite the same range of options.
And yes, there are bug reports for some of these, and the devs are aware of the others. I'm actually a (minor) contributor to OOo and have a working relationship with the team.
have you considered to learn grammar better as a solution?
Not everybody lives in an area where he or she can practice spoken English all the time.
Well I found OO is unable to emulate MS Word's intermittent inability to read it's own format. For instance, I had someone ask me to open a document saved on the Mac version of Word, which they could not open on a Windows version of Word. They asked because I have a Powerbook. However, I did not bother trying it there, OO was able to read it. I've heard of this "major shortcoming" in the design of OO, but I had not seen it demonstrated.
Who ever heard of a piece of "free" [gasp] software that could handle proprietary formats (which it probably guesses at) better than the software that generates the file?
Another stupid thing it does is convert .doc files to pdf. I heard that's obsolete in Word and don't even try the old postscript print to file -> ps2pdf workaround, I think that door is closed now.
Autonomous Retard -- Is your camp safe? UnsafeCamp.com
+5+22+R50C3 should be a valid formula without touching the = key. The reason for this is that it allows you to use the numeric keypad -- and the = button isn't part of it.
Honestly, it was a very small thing that kept me from using OpenOffice: I couldn't print envelopes. No matter what I did, it would not print anything the envelope when I sent it through my printer. MS Office worked just fine, so I went back to that.
Maybe it's been fixed by now. It was a known, listed bug and scheduled to be fixed in the next major revision. I couldn't wait around for that to happen. I run a small business, so I didn't have time to go fix it myself. I had already sunk money into MS Office, so I didn't feel like paying someone to go fix it. In the end, it was just easier to go back to what I knew instead of beating my head against something that didn't work.
It's nice to have alternatives, but if they don't do what you need then there's really no point.
Brian "Psychochild" Green
MMO developer's blog
* Lack of properly implemented comment function (called Notes in Writer). This is essential for teamwork.
* Inconsistent visual model of paragraphs, which doesn't separate them properly as objects from each other. This is most clearly demonstrated on indented paras. To select a para with its associated formatting (which I need to do very often), you have to also select the indent of the following para! This is completely illogical, and you have to fine-tune your movement in order not to select text from second para by mistake. The quadruple-click method they suggest only selects the text content of the para.
* Manual breaks aren't shown as formatting characters. They are shown only in Print Layout mode and only when text margin are displayed. My main working mode, however, would be Web Layout, which allows me to concentrate on content, not formatting, and have continuous flow of text of arbitrary zoom wrapped to the window.
* Macro Recorder spews out something incomprehensive. VBA is much more readable.
* There's no quick and easy way to assign a key to a style or a symbol, besides recording a macro. This feature is a huge timesaver.
* An awkward system if dealing with bulleted and numbered lists with 2 levels of styles. This could be handy in principle, but needs to be unfucked up. Besides, I even can't visually set the indent of the para text from a bullet or number - have to enter a number into a text box. Still more, bullets and numbers tend to get screwed on round-trips between Writer and Word.
I think the list is not complete, but this is what has come to my mind so far and all those are pretty seriuos issues for me as a professional translator. That said, OOo is handy to have as an addition to MS Office - recently it saved me a couple of hunderds of pages screwed by Word 2000.
I don't think it means, what you think it means.
I feel a bit obvious going to the trouble of pointing this out, but OpenOffice Calc is Open Source. You can patch the source code to allow whatever you need or want.
Presuming that your patch(es) (is/are) competent and functional, your CV will get a significant boost and your name will go down in this piece of unique history as well. Double bonus, no extra fee. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Rack as many days up against that as you like. I was comatose for 30 of them and in hospital for another 30 (out of about 200 days' use, due to some malevolent ####### deliberately opening his car door directly in front of my pushbike), but the summary is zero OOo crashes at all in about 140 days.
Perhaps NOT having MS-Windoze on the laptop in question helps much more than I expect?
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing