4 Responses

1. Andrew Brown

   14|Dec|2005 1

   I don’t know what you use, John, but I think the problem with OOo goes deeper than my article suggested. Most of the bugs that really irritate me are regressions, and quite a lot of them diminish the book-writing functionality of the program compared to v 1.1.

   A short list:

   Movement and deletion by sentence was the first thing that attracted me to OOo 1.x as against MS Word. It has been broken in 2.0 and the preceding beta builds for the last year, in at least two ways. This is not going to be fixed in the foreseeable future. OK, I can write a macro to get round some of these flaws. But I could write (in about three minutes, rather than three hours) a macro in MS Office to let me move or delete by sentence using the keyboard.

   The “Navigator” feature lets you access the headings and bookmarks of one document while working in another. It is what you have to use instead of word’s utlineing features, and it’s ability easily to show two documents in two uncluttered windows. In 2.0, though, this is broken in three ways. The outline levels for text are all screwed up; copying bookmarked text removes the original bookmark; quite often the copied text is left on the clipboard, and the next chunk simply appended to it. Those are all regressions; there are also a lot of unfixed bugs from 1.0, chief among them the fact that text in the navigator window doesn’t wrap, which makes even Sun’s internal specifications hard to read.

   Meanwhile, the new bibliography remains vapourware after three years; the new database crashes whenever I try to use it and the latest release candidate for 2.01, which fixes ~700 bugs found in 2.0, won’t actually install on top of 2.0.

   It’s a shambles.

2. quentinsf

   14|Dec|2005 2

   I’ve written a few quite large documents on OOo v1, and, as Andrew hinted, for long documents it really does score over Word. In fact, I turn to OOo when I get too frustrated with Word’s repeated crashing on my Mac. But it sounds as if version 2 may have a way to go yet.

   Actually, the thing that frustrates me about OOo is the lack of a decent outline mode, and what (to me) is a very counter-intuitive paragraph numbering system. When I’m not using those features, I’ve been very happy with it.

3. Will Eberle

   14|Dec|2005 3

   I am a user of Dragon Naturally Speaking (Professional Edition), a speech recognition program which allows me to dictate editable text into, among other programs, a word processor. I was quite delighted to find, on my very first attempt, that dictation into Open Office was VERY accurate. There were absolutely no errors in the several paragraphs I initially dictated. MS Word, on the other hand, often has a maddeningly high error rate, even after having used MS Word for this purpose for quite some time and having optimized both the dictation program and Word to my particular usage.

   Wizwill

4. dave murphy

   14|Dec|2005 4

   I liked the feel of OO, but its seriously buggy. It managed to corrupt a document I had imprted frm MSword. I had done many edits in OO and faced having to go back a long way to save the document OO could not open it at all.

   I managed to open it in MSword and all was fine with it thereafter. I can’t use the OO proprietary format as I have to be able to use Word as well. i have found numerous minor bugs and irritatiosn, ad there is little usable documentation on many of the features. I am hoping it will improve because I would really like to make it my main tool, but that is not going to happen yet for a while. At the moment I am only willing to use it with MSWrod format docs, and with MSWord availabel to save anything that goes wrong.