Re: Family tech support

[Nick FitzGerald <nick () virus-l demon co uk>]

Gregory Hicks to me:

> I really hate to say this but I've got OO running on an Ultra-1 and 5
> PCs.  (I've also had it running on other versions of SPARC boxen...)
> I've been using OO for, I guess, about 5 years...  The only version of
> MS Word that I have NOT been able to import from is the 2007 version.
>
> Fortunately, that version can save in different formats that OO CAN
> import.
>
> I've been passing documents back and forth between OO and MS Word at
> home and at $WORK w/o problem.  I also have to admit that the number of
> 'problems' went down with OOv1.7 and really went down w/v2.0...  I also
> have to say that these documents were just plain, vanilla documents w/o
> any special formatting (my daughters doing school documents...)

Hate away, but I'm talking about fairly current versions of OOO (like 
the latest or one or two minor sub-versions behind) and over the last 
approximately 12 months, _AND_ doing real-world document editing of 
real-world documents.  Notice also, that I mentioned round-tripping -- 
that is, real-world work situations where someone sends you a document, 
you have to edit it, send it back, have them massage it further, send 
it back, rinse, lather, repeat ad nauseum.  It's bad enough that OOO 
won't correctly open and edit its own documents and ones that it 
previously opened in another format, then apparently allowed successful 
editing and saving of, so I guess I shouldn't expect it to inter-
operate with other apps and the same format...

Track-changes is a joke.  Modestly complex tables (like more than than 
nine cells total) -- a joke.  More than two font families or more than 
one font size in a paragraph -- expect trouble.  Indenting -- who the 
f*k in the real world would use that?  Surely no-one making real-world 
documents -- if you use OOO...

It is quite a bit less flakey with its own documents so long as you 
don't try to edit them on any other version of OOO, but try to make any 
modestly complex document (more than two fonts and more than two sizes, 
indents, etc) and I can't believe anyone actually uses it.

Earlier I didn't mention it's arbitrary and random font resizing 
_within words_, within lines and within documents, some of which (but 
not usually the ones you see rendered wrong on screen) are also 
rendered incorrectly at print time.  You can always pick the OOO user 
at a conference from this weird font-missizing onscreen during their 
presentations in [un]Impress without ever having to see the program 
startup and get into presentation mode.

And don't get me started on that miserable excuse of a spreadsheet app 
included with it!

Other than all that though, it's a _fine_ piece of software...



Regards,

Nick FitzGerald


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