OpenOffice Gripes
...The Following List:
It’s paper-writing time again, which means I’ve spent many long hours lately with OpenOffice Writer (for now, I’m still using version 2.4). Writer is a great application and a useful tool for getting work done. But there are some components that I continue to find endlessly frustrating, namely…
…The Following List:
- Page numbering. I defy a single person with no OpenOffice experience to figure out how to add page numbers to a document without consulting documentation. First you have to know how to insert a header–not too hard, but most people aren’t going to guess that headers are a prerequisite to page numbering. Then you have to figure out that page numbers are considered a ‘field’. And if you wanted your numbering to start on the second page or to use Roman instead of Arabic numerals, good luck with that…
- Default document settings. Changing the default settings of a new document in OpenOffice is similarly unintuitive. It might make sense to programmers to store default settings in a document that users are supposed to edit if they want to change the default template, but non-geeks deserve a more intuitive process.
- Margins. Speaking of default settings, why are the margins so small in the default document template? 0.79 inches? Who made up that number? If it’s a common margin size outside of the United States–and those non-Americans out there will please let me know if it is–then why doesn’t OpenOffice recognize that my system language is English-U.S. and choose a more appropriate page layout?
- Page refresh. Writer has a tendency to forget to redraw parts of the screen while I’m scrolling through a document. This isn’t a serious impediment to productivity, but it’s annoying.
- Changing language settings. The Tools>Options menu isn’t exactly the most intuitive place to put the utility where you switch between languages. It’s also a clunky way to access it if you need to change languages frequently. I would much prefer to have a drop-down box in the panel where I could switch between different spellcheck dictionaries and character sets quickly and with fewer clicks.
- Thesaurus. I abandoned the OpenOffice thesaurus in favor of kthesaurus long ago. kthesaurus proves that there are better language tools available to the free-software community; why doesn’t OpenOffice integrate them?
Lest I sound too negative, I should point out that OpenOffice does have some very useful features. I especially like the ability to export to PDF in one click, and the HTML editor is pretty decent for simple tasks. The number of languages supported is also impressive.
Most of the issues outlined above, moreover, are easy enough to overcome by reading the help files for a few minutes. And that other office suite certainly has its own set of deficiencies, not least of which is a crippling price tag. Even if Microsoft started giving Word away for free, I can’t imagine any compelling reason to switch.
But OpenOffice remains a bit raw in some respects, and more attention to the needs of the general public–as opposed to the programmers writing the application–would go a long way in making word processing on Ubuntu even easier.
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Margins. Speaking of default settings, why are the margins so small in the default document template? 0.79 inches? Who made up that number? If it’s a common margin size outside of the United States–and those non-Americans out there will please let me know if it is–then why doesn’t OpenOffice recognize that my system language is English-U.S. and choose a more appropriate page layout?
SOUNDS LIKE these are the printer default settings? HP perhaps? Not gone into Open Office too much but does it have “printer default settings” AND plain old “default settings”?
Ignore the above comment, it is probably because it has just changed from millimetres to inches, and has not rounded up to an inch. A good point it seems. Sorry, as I do know how annoying this can be – he says, remembering the late seventies and early eighties when all American software only catered for the American date format.
I switched to Buzzword (https://buzzword.acrobat.com/) for editing now. It shows when an application is designed with user-friendliness and intuitiveness in mind – along with good quality.
Page Numbering is available in the Extensions:
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/
I believe languages are available there too.
It has come a long way since the old star office. I used to have major gripes with open office. Now I don’t have any issues with it. It still has a lot of rawness but so do most open source software. Programmers are not usually into the whole usability part.
This is where the artistic and accessibility experts are needed. I think most people don’t contribute to projects because they don’t know how to program or debug. If we could somehow get those individuals to get involved.. open source would be much better than it is currently (Which isn’t bad. I used the best from both world however)
Just my opinions.
I worte my Master’s thesis on OpenOffice and I admit, at first was hard but then I really did it with no more problems.
But I would update to OpenOffice 3, it’s better is several aspects and with Bibus as the bibliography manager you can write everything you want.
Page numbering is hard, though the extension makes it easier. We needed to start Page 1 on the third page of a 10 page document – could not accomplish that one, but the price is write.
I agree completely. I mean, I can use OpenOffice when forced at gunpoint, but it seems that they’re hellbent on duplicating every single UI mistake Microsoft made six years ago. I’ve actually become kind of fond of Koffice 2, warts, weird layout and all. It’s got some ground to make up yet, but at least I can respect the philosophy of it a little more, and it’s not such a walled-off corporate project. OpenOffice doesn’t feel terribly open to me.
happy new year!
p.daniels
Anybody spend any significant time using IBM Lotus Symphony? I don’t use office suites much, but I did play with Symphony a while back and it seemed a little more polished than OpenOffice.
OOo 3.0 has introduced a major issue on Linux whereby if you have an SMB server share (e.g. on SAMBA or Windows), OOo opens files from share READONLY. Not found a workaround for this yet; affects all distros AFAIK.
I could use NFS on Linux I guess, but have some Windows servers that need native SMB support.
0.79 inches is 2 centimetres, a very sensible margin size (if a little narrow) for the rest of the world outside the USA.
I took your challenge. It took me 5 minutes to figure out how to do page numbering. I had some experience in MS Word, so I understood the concepts. But you are right — it is not obvious. I wish I could have right-clicked in the footer and seen an “Insert Page Number” item, or had that option soewhere on the “Footer” tab when I created the footer.
I’m a writer. NOVELS. Open office was a major pita until I created a template with all the settings I needed. Now when I start a new document, I open with the template and then save it as another name. No more issues.
Page numbering (to figure out) was a hassle at first, but setting up a template solves a lot of repetitive grief. The margins, while easy to change, was a bit of a surprise as well.
(Novel/book manuscripts by and large are required to have 1 inch margins.)
Using OO 3.0
Talk about a PITA.. try doing a mailmerge with multiple fields on a form from a simple spreadsheet. It’s not intuitive at all. Convert spreadsheet to database, marry database to form, check formatting after merge, repeat until you get it right.
On the spreadsheet side… well.. can I say EASY macro support. Seems that the macro recorder was designed for Write not Sheet. So that leaves most trying to actually write the macro code instead of playing “follow the leader” with a recorder.
I would add two more things to this list of gripes:
1- When using numbering the I often find that OpenOffice will change some of the number to bold format. Sometime this can be fixed sometime not. This bug has existed for years.
2- The Linux version of OOo 2.4 also does not communicate to an SMB file server properly resulting in lack of proper file locks. This is a significant problem in an office environment.
I’m a OOo power user, let’s take a look to your gripes.
1. Page numbering: you are right, you need a minimum of exprience. The main problem is that you are using Writer like M$Word. Writer is DIFFERENT and has it’s own logic mostly based on styles. Read a book about Writer, or even read the Help (F1). Thinking styles first is easy and SOOOO powerfull!
Yes, page numbering is a field and the best place to insert such a field is a header or a footer. Right click on the word Standard in the status bar (at the bottom, second fiels from the left), you will find different page styles. (By the way, right click or doubleclick the other words in the status bar for usefull tools). You simply have to create a different page style beginnig where you want your new numbering. Then Insert -gt; Fields -gt; Other and choose a page field and apply a correction (such as -2 to decrease of 2).
2. Default document settings: Read to do your own template.
3. Margins: US and Canada (I live in Québec) are almost alone in the world with letter/legal paper using inches, the world is metric and the default margin is 2 cm.
4. Page refresh: Your graphic card? The speed of your PC? There may be so many reasons…
5. Changing language settings: Right click in the third field of the status bar (in OOo 3.0), you can instantly change the language for another one already installed.
6. Thesaurus: well, good idea. But I think Ubuntu’s version of OOo doesn’t use OOo’s thesaurus. I replaced Ubuntu’s OOo by the official Sun 64bits Linux version.
There are so many differences between Writer and M$Word. Just for fun try this one: write any long sentence in whatever font. Select it and go in your menu Insert -gt; Frame. Then right click on the frame for dozens of options. A frame may float on a page or be in the background, it may contain anything from text in colomn to graphics to table, and a frame can be linked to another so that the text flows from one frame to the other. Can you imagine the power of frames? M$Word can’t do that…
Try also master document for a long text, impressive and powerfull.
You get it now? 😉
Enjoy your work differently with OOo!
— 0.79 inches? Who made up that number? If it’s a common margin size outside of the United States–and those non-Americans out there will please let me know if it is…
20 mm is a nice round number that leaves the area available for text 170 mm wide. Some strange programs seem to prefer 25.4 mm. Who made up that number?
I have added page numbers and had no problems. I do have a gripe, is there any way to edit an envelope after you create it? Yes I did find it strange that to create an envelope you need to left click in the bottem of the window.
Happy New Year
Cliff
The most annoying thing from my point of view is that OpenOffice was designed to try and imitate Microsoft Office because obviously people won’t use anything other than Microsoft Office.
Developers competing in the same markets as Microsoft need to show a bigger pair of balls. If it works, it’s easier to use than the competition and offers better features, at a higher quality at the right price it will catch on.
Sticking to the Microsoft model of productivity is what is holding OpenOffice.org back. It’s time they broke the mould.
I don’t use OO.o that often, but I wrote several hundred pages on 2.4 a year or two ago. I never had a problem with inserting page numbers, even without consulting documentation. You know that you want page numbers at the top or bottom of the page — i.e. the header or footer. Inserting that in Writer is a lot more intuitive than in MS Word. I always assumed that page numbers would be a field. I just looked at “Insert” and immediately figured it out. I don’t get why page numbers would be hard unless you’re locked into some other way from some other piece of software.
Getting page numbers to skip the title page, run Roman numerals on the front matter, and print Arabic numerals on the main matter took some work for me, but I can’t say that it sucked. Using page styles makes sense after you read about how to do it.
Anyway, I use Google Docs for most of my light writing these days. I’ve even tried to go application-free for a month and managed it. http://theosisdead.blogspot.com
I just noticed that Sun Microsystems is mentioned once in this entire comment thread. Does anyone else think Sun needs to do more — far more — in terms of evangelizing the commercial version of the suite, and promoting the suite to customers (especially schools and government orgs that are seeking open source options)?
I think the open source software community in general needs to do more to get the word out their are alternatives to Microsoft. Most people don’t know OpenOffice.org exists until someone more technically minded tells them about it.
That’s a bad position for any software distributor/developer to be in.
Word of mouth advertising is often said to be the best form of advertising. But before word of mouth can work, someone actually needs to know about your product and be using it in the first instance.
So I would say yes. Sun needs to pull it finger out and get something done to get the word out. They need to get people excited about their products. I would say it’s a similar situation with openSolaris. Sun clearly want to play in the same playground as Linux and Mac OS X and Windows. But they really aren’t doing anything to push their OS products.
Your comments are absurd.
2) I distinctly remember when the “save as the default template” was standard practice on (ahem) Microsoft Word. I don’t remember anyone complaining at that point. Much less, with a graphical environment, put a (sim)link to your own template on your desktop and double-click that when you want to write something. It’s that easy.
3) Earthly languages don’t include page margins, and those aren’t stipulated by what language you speak or what country you are in. This goes along with #2: make a template and use that. In fact, link it, then make your template read-only so you don’t accidentally screw something up. Much less, since the only time I care about margins is when I’m writing something for work or something that is going to be hole-punched and put in a binder, your comment is hardly worth hearing. But by all means: create a feature request.
4) Refresh problems sound like a concern you should open a bug report for. Much less, I’ve ran into the same problems with Microsoft Office (I’m military so we have the ultra-uber-version with Everything {tm}), so this comment cannot be used to imply that OOo is inferior.
5) While that doesn’t sound like a bug to me (since I don’t know too many people who change languages on the fly), go fill out a feature request. All the energy you could’ve used to help others or improve the product was spent on this web post. Much less I’ve seen people have issues like this or worse with Windows, so this can’t be used to imply that OOo is inferior.
6) The thesaurus sounds like (again) something you may need to bring up as a feature request or annoyance. However, since I’m military and I write stuff on Word, I can tell you that their thesaurus isn’t good enough that I don’t need to go online to http://www.reference.com more than once, so this cannot be used to imply that OOo is inferior.
Yes, as previously mentioned, right-click on the bottom status bar to change languages. Though I’ve never had to; when I write in another language (Japanese, via the Skim input method), OOo picks it up automagically.
My wife is a writer of the non-technical variety. I switched her to Open Office when she bought a new laptop about 6 months ago. The MS Office CD appears to be hosed and would not install correctly. So I installed OOo 3.0. I told her its not the Office you are used to but it will do everything you need and save in the formats you are used to. By the way it took me all of 30 seconds to figure out how to setup the default file formats the first time I used it. She has been using it for 6 months now. She says it fine with her she does not have any issues with it and it does everything she needs it to do.
My biggest gripe is that it won’t seem to let you compress any images that have been put into it. Now for the IT guy he may not care when he’s making a document because he has a billion and one ways to change those photo sizes and dimensions, but it’s far from easy for the average user. At least you can tell them to make and use pdf files (which they should do anyhow).
I have two other gripes, one I saw already mentioned was about opening shared files read only… that’s quite obnoxious… the other relates to not being able to set system wide default file formats (you can edit a file but it gets overwritten with updates). It’s a major hassle when your boss insists that everyone use open office and everyone saves in excel, powerpoint, and word formats for compatibility outside the office!