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An Early Look At New Features In OpenOffice.org 3.1
ahziem writes "With the final release two months away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy, better charts, replying to notes in the margin, overlining, macros in Base, RTL improvements for Arabic and Hebrew, and (believe it or not) better sorting. Download and report any bugs you find."
I'll switch to OO.o writer when it can actually put together a decent legal-brief table of authorities. It's not like the M$ one is great, but it IS there.
Yes, I know there's a feature request, yes I know I should go code it myself. I really don't want to hear that. (I'm not a programmer)
A HUGE segment (don't we need MORE lawyers :) ) of the professional writing population can't use your software without having to manually compile a table of authorities; it needs to add in this functionality. This is literally a deal breaker feature for any large or small law firm that does any sort of litigation, trial or appellate work. I.e. firms won't even consider it until it has a ToA feature and not just a quirky workaround.
So I labor on with Word or WP, until OO.o or Pages comes up with something better.
BTW - calc totally rocks, and since I dont need any VB macros, I've ditched excel.
I think you need to work on reading comprehension, he stated exactly what's wrong: It's slower than molasses, and I agree with him.
/Doesn't really have a dog in this fight
//LaTeX > *
Start OO writer. Mash the keyboard, perhaps inputting FGSFDS. Hit save, enter "fgsfds.odt" as the filename. Press enter. Why does it take a significant fraction of a second to save this? Kword and Abiword both save and are ready to type again in about the time I can blink twice. Last time I tried with OOo I seem to recall being able to follow a progress bar in the lower status display.
This is supposed to be one of the flagship FOSS programs, and it's so slow to save things it's embarassing.
Now obviously such .doc files aren't that common, but when you absolutely positively need to read a .doc file the way it was meant to be seen, using MS Office is pretty much the only choice. It's not 100% guaranteed to show things perfectly (as people have already mentioned), but it's still the best chance, particularly for esoteric forms like I had.
In most environments however, they are rare enough that while you need a copy of Office 2007, you don't need a copy of Office 2007 for everyone. At one of the sites I work with the 10 executives have Office, and the 2 IT people have MS Office, and one guy who does brochures and ad work has it. The other 120+ staff have OOo. The execs get it mostly because they want it, and they legitimately deal with enough powerpoint and exchange docs with other companies enough that its worth it for most of them.
The IT people have it primarily so that if someone gets a document that doesn't work, they send it to IT to deal with it for them; usually to simply convert it to PDF. So, they have 13 copies of Office instead of ~130, that represents quite a savings. The amount of time IT has spent dealing with incompatible documents over the last 5 years is almost nil, maybe a dozen documents a year need attention, and as I said most of them can be resolved simply by converting to pdf and forwarding it back.
They've saved thousands by not buying copies of office XP, Office 2003, Office 2007 for everyone.
Its frankly pretty much impossible to wean the average business 100% off Office. But you can usually easily move 90% off Office.