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Post by clarencebunsen on Jun 7, 2011 7:38:02 GMT -5
I feel much the same about OO. I've down loaded it a few times, test drove it & found no compelling reason to switch.
Right now my wife requires 100% compatibility with her work files and any government agency with which she communicates. Also if she is doing office work at home, it means that there is something due tomorrow morning which she wasn't able to finish at work. Consequently she has zero tolerance for playing the "where did they hide that menu" game. So a couple times a decade we upgrade Office. Usually one of us is registered as a student somewhere & we qualify for the Student Edition.
All that may change when she retires but then I suspect we won't have much need for anything beyond a basic word processor & maybe a spreadsheet.
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Post by Swimmy on Jun 7, 2011 9:26:05 GMT -5
Dave, you seem to have a lot of bad luck when it comes to open source software. I'm not aware of a copy-paste problem in OOo. The only major issue I had with switching over was the outline capabilities. ms tends to make a list automatically, but supremely difficult to make an outline. With each new version of ms office, they do a very good job at hiding functions or removing their original quality. For example, it used to be easy to have several page number formats within one document. The vista version of office took away that functionality. So far, I have not had a need to worry about it with oo.
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Post by dgriffin on Jun 7, 2011 17:39:49 GMT -5
Swimmy, yes I've suspected they are vitiating function in Word. I've had a problem with page numbering when setting up book texts. Re copy/paste problems with Open Office, Google "Open Office copy paste problem." The problem happens when copying from a document external to OO and when copying spreadsheets. And it's intermittent, so there is evidently an OO design error. I have occasion, as do many writers, to copy/paste from and to (for example) Word, Jarte, Word Pad, OO Writer, and various browsers, as well as web page construction programs. This means OO doesn not properly interface with the Windows clip board. How nonsensical is that? How long should it take Oracle to fix that?
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Post by Swimmy on Jun 7, 2011 22:42:05 GMT -5
I don't know. Maybe they're not aware of the glitch? Could also be a windows issue intentionally placed there to better promote its own software. They have been known to do that from time to time.
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Post by dgriffin on Jun 7, 2011 23:03:18 GMT -5
Hmmm. To me the Microsoft trojan idea is not as believable as a major design flaw. A lot of these old systems got added to so much that one day it finds itself in an environment it was never designed for, and in fact an environment unheard of when the product was designed. OO's grandfather never worried about interfacing with competitors' formats or a "clipboard."
I'm pretty sure Oracle is aware of the problem. One never knows where one will find an answer to a problem on the Internet, so you keep searching the forums until you find someone who has a good work-around or the latest news on when it will be fixed. So ... long story short ... finding it hard to believe there wasn't a fix or one coming soon, I searched a lot of OO help forums and found no answer, but a lot of discussion about the problem. Oracle can't help but know about it.
That said, there's surely nothing wrong with a complete text and calc product that does everything Word and WP does, but for free. And that might be the reason why there's no maintenance. A better plan may have been the more standard way of offering a basic version for free and charging for the deluxe, in that way having some income to cover maintenance expense.
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Post by clarencebunsen on Jun 8, 2011 5:07:08 GMT -5
From a couple days ago: Oracle Hands Off OpenOffice.org to Apache Software FoundationOracle has released a proposal that would transfer open source office suite OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation. Should this happen, OpenOffice.org will become a part of the Apache Incubator and operate under a permissive license, which means that there will be more flexibility in implementing source code changes, and there will no longer be a need to mandate the publication of such changes.
Oracle got its mitts on OpenOffice.org when it acquired Sun, but didn't address many of the OpenOffice community's beefs with the office suite. One of the community's major gripes was the difficulty in merging code contributions from different sources. That in of itself stymies the open source movement.
A group of developers broke off from Oracle last year to establish the Document Foundation, a group dedicated to continuing the work started with the original OpenOffice.org, and create the new LibreOffice open-source office suite. Then in April, Oracle announced that it would no longer offer a commercial version of the OpenOffice.org software, and that it plans to move the suite to a purely community-based open source project. www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2386364,00.asp |
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Post by dgriffin on Jun 8, 2011 6:44:35 GMT -5
Aha! That would explain some things!
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Post by Swimmy on Jun 8, 2011 19:45:17 GMT -5
I tried... sorry.
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