[plug] Openoffice chart production

[Brad Campbell]

Derek Fountain wrote:
> 
> So much effort seems to have been put into making OOo read Office files they 
> appear to have forgotten to make it easy to use. At least their compatibility 
> efforts have made it easy to get your documents into a state where you can 
> finish the job in Office.
> 
> I've formally given up with OOo. I'll try again in a year or two when they've 
> had a chance to react to feedback and make it usable. In the meantime MS 
> Office remains the productivity suite of choice, even for a Linux zealot like 
> me.
> 

It's a shame. The company I now work for is an Office 2000 shop.
OOo breaks word documents with regards to styles and indexes to a point 
word can't repair them.
I have had to stoop to having a copy of Word 97 on my machine running 
under wine so I can interoperate with the rest of the company.

I thought I could just knock-up/modify documents in OOo and then give 
them to the typist to clean up and make company compliant on her Windows 
box, but noooooo. OOo can't quite get there.

At my last company we were completely an OOo shop. (Well we started with 
SO 5.1 and upgraded every time there was a new beta/RC). We had no 
problems and all was sweet.

I have not had any problems with OOo and simple word documents with no 
templates, tables, index's, styles or anything else you could not do in 
vi. But anything more complex and the documents get badly broken.

<sigh>. Plus I can't make it do what I want it to do. OOo is the first 
office productivity package that makes me feel computer illiterate.
I figure it should not be harder to get OOo to produce a graph than it 
is with gnuplot. But with gnuplot and a manpage I managed to get it to 
do what I wanted it to in an hour. (It did take me the full hour).
In an hour with OOo I just wanted to scream. <sob>

I guess I need to produce some damaged documents and start filing OOo 
bug reports.

Brad

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