[plug] Openoffice chart production

[Leon Brooks]

On Sat, 11 Oct 2003 17:07, Brad Campbell wrote:
> 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've had exactly the opposite experience. My OOWriter-produced documents 
have never caused a problem, and I've been able to repair quite a few 
broken MS-Word documents for people who don't dare install anything 
worth less than $200 on their computers.

My experience with OOImpress has been similarly excellent, my only 
hiccup to date being transition effects which OOI knows about but 
MS-PowerPoint doesn't (and vice versa).

I haven't used OOCalc very much. The one annoyance I have seen is one 
supplier who seems to centre their business around a massive Excel 
spreadsheet, which has more rows than OOCalc can handle 
(providentially, none of the overshot rows have anything I need on them 
yet).

A tangential comment on this: the version of Gnumeric (1.2.0) that ships 
with Mandrake 9.2 handles this sheet fast and flawlessly, whereas the 
previous Gnumerices would drop most of the images and butcher the 
formatting horribly. And slowly.

> OOo is the first office productivity package that makes me feel
> computer illiterate.

"You must be new here" (-:

Seriously, quite a few office productivity packages have made me feel 
like a computer illiterate. Not the mainstream stuff like how to apply 
bold to text or align a table cell, but the fringe stuff is often 
weirdly different everywhere. I'm still not comfortable with MS-Word 
exiling the page formatting to the File menu, Macintosh-style (even 
though it seems inevitable, given Bill's slavish devotion to the Mac 
interface at the time).

The Achilles' Heel of OOo in this field would have to be the help. It's 
made leaps and bounds with OOo 1.1, yet still you often find things 
like help topics indexed under only one keyword, or things you'd expect 
to be documented either aren't, or are so lightly addressed that you 
still don't understand what you need to do after having read all of the 
the help (a common feature of help content provided by people who are 
very good at using the product, rather than by people who are very good 
at documenting).

Curing this will just be a matter of time. Microsoft could just go out 
and hire 200 usability experts (-: and get 20 usable ones :-) to throw 
at the problem, the OOo crew can't. However, a lot of the stuff in OOo 
is rational, orthogonal and systematic, so it's more common to be able 
to interpolate the correct action than it ever was with MS-Word.

The OOo crew also have a few fabulous "working examples" on their site 
which are often worth their weight in informational gold.

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

That's the Open Source approach, yes.

Cheers; Leon

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