[plug] [OT] Office XP 30 day evil

[Craig Ringer]

> Some people are stubborn, they want their MS Office.  The same people 
> that then whinge and bitch about how the software doesn't do this or 
> crashes or stuffs up their layout etc.
>
> Seriously, sometimes you just can't win. 

I know :-(

I'm having some significant problems with OO.o here. We're using it on 
our new linux thin client network (literally anything is better then MS 
Works 2.0 on a Win95 486 w 16mb RAM), and overall its working very well. 
Even over remote X11 to a P100 thin client.

 The number 1 issue is word-doc import formatting though - the drooling 
idiots that are some of our less mentally talented advertisers /will/ 
design their ads in MS Word, no matter what we say. Accepted formats 
list be damnned! *sigh*. The staff used to just say its a ".doc file" 
and "we can't open them" but now they can with OO.o.... alas with borked 
formatting, misaligned pix and boxes, etc. In a way its worse than 
before because they expect that having a capability means having it work 
/perfectly/. So I can empathise with what you're saying there - you 
really just can't win.

OTOH, its amusing how fast our sales staff have taken to using OO.o for 
anything and everything. I'll be delighted if the ODBC interface to 
PostgreSQL improves enough (mainly auto-increment problems) to be 
seriously useable with OO.o forms - can you say customer database and 
selective form letter? (we've been stuck in the dark ages for a long time).

I've been using OO.o on my debian box at home for ages, but I'm already 
being shown stuff by the sales folk as if its blindingly obvious. All 
hail user-accessable online help!

On a wee [somewhat ot] tangent, does anybody here know if there's a way 
to export a pic from an oo.o (or imported powerpoint) presentation in 
its original form? I can dump entire slides, but the quality is very 
inferior when all we want is the pic. Its possible (if clunky) with 
Writer using save-as-webpage but Impress doesn't seem to do anything 
similar (that leaves original images). Ideally it'd be some kind of 
"right-click->export-image" function.

BTW, does StarOffice have better Word import filters? if so, it might be 
time to have a play.