[plug] JD stresses at OOo (was: AbiWord)

[James Devenish]

In message <200402200930.39322.leon at brooks.fdns.net>
on Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 09:30:39AM +0800, Leon Brooks wrote:
> On Wed, 18 Feb 2004 17:57, James Devenish wrote:
> > Because I get too distressed using OpenOffice
> 
> ...which I use daily without stress. I like editing with OOo in HTML, 
> except that there's no autosave in this mode, because it wraps all of 
> the fetures I generally use (even footnotes, TOCs etc) but is readable 
> by *anyone*.

I'm having an Onno moment -- I'm unable to glean any meaning from the
above paragraph :-)

> Too many lanbguage choices? (-:

Haven't had any trouble with the language choice so far -- perhaps they
are quite fine indeed.

> So what stresses you about it?

I'd have to start using it again in order to be able to list things
accurately. But here are the things I encountered during ten minutes'
use for your edification:

 - The 'Open' dialogue takes me somewhere other than the current working
   directory or my home directory (this might be acceptable, but it's
   not like any other apps I use). Also, it doesn't let me navigate to
   directories via text entry. This is normal for some operating
   systems, but a pretty obvious omission under Linux.
 - To 'import' or 'place' data into a spreadsheet, the thing that stood
   out in the menus was an 'External Data...' option in the 'Insert'
   menu. Fair enough. However, there was no tab-sep text option. I did
   find 'Text CSV', though (but I thought that meant 'comma-separated
   values'). After choosing CSV, I get some options (including using
   different separators -- yay). However, after getting all the
   delimiters set up and what not, the 'OK' button is dimmed. Argh! I
   tried using the 'Open' dialogue to import the values as a new
   spreadsheet, but I had to symlink all my files so that they had
   '.csv' on the end -- it wouldn't let me import them otherwise
   (although it would sometimes open the data in the word processor for
   me -- not quite what I wanted).

Now that I've finally opened some documents, I see:

 - the word-processor toolabar Font menu would be laughable if it
   weren't so sad -- it only shows six fonts at a time. I spent a while
   looking in the Preferences but could not find a relevant option to
   adjust this (actually, I spent a while looking for the Preferences.
   It turns out they are identified as 'Options', under the 'Tools' menu
   -- /Tools/? Really?) And the 'Character' window is not resizable, so
   its font menu doesn't get much larger either.
 - I'm using v1.1.0 and it tends to crash on pre-existing documents that
   I open. I suppose they might be dodgy (imported from other
   programmes) so it's forgivable, but merely doesn't reflect well.
 - Charting. AAARGH! Absolutely drives me crazy in OOo. Won't list the
   usability problems I'm having.
 - Printing: doesn't follow the motifs I expect. For example, there is a
   "Printer Settings..." option /below/ the "Print" option. My
   expectation is that there would be a "Page Setup..." option /above/
   the "Print" option. Tried Printer Settings. Talks about "Scale: 1%".
   Could probably find info in the help, but there was no help button
   immediately available.