"Amedee Van Gasse" wrote
in message
...
PopS shared this with us in
microsoft.public.word.newusers:

From the peanut gallery:

Reply from a nutcase:
=== You're rather an enigma, aren't you? Here you're
almost insulting, and also in a couple of other places,
but in the overall it doesn't appear to be your intent
to name-call or be rude. Since you could easily think
the same of me I suppose, it's attributable to a
difference in cultures for the moment. Best to never
dwell on emotions anyway g.

OpenOffice is "good" for a Word intermediate user,
poor for advanced,
but "good to great" for less than intermediate
users. IMO at least.
I consider myself intermediate but not quite
advanced. The MVP tests
seem to agree with me (I'm -not- an MVP).

Please explain why OpenOffice is poor for advanced
users. When I follow
the discussions on Gmane (like
news:gmane.comp.openoffice.questions) I
don't get that impression.
=== I believe you, and I also had the same experience.
That's one of the reasons I decided to try OO, as a
matter of fact.
If you think I don't support OO, you are wrong. It's
a great suite of apps and does a formidable job of
succeeding for the most part. In fact, I still follow
the project, and even offer a penny's thought here and
there, though now it's less than I used to do.

I'm not asking this because I disagree (or agree)
with you. I'm just
asking this because OOo /needs/ user feedback to get
better. Only if
advanced users point out the weak spots something can
be done about it.
=== I agree, but 1., this is not the forum for it, and
2., I have already done so at the forums for a few of
my major concerns. Many others were already talked
about, so the most I could do there was offer a
"confirm" if I had a detail or two to add.
At this point I'd be a poor reference since my use
of OO and/or its components is now rather "specialized"
so my memories aren't going to be terribly accurate
without either going thru my past communications about
it, or better yet, going thru the issues manually, one
at a time. For me, that is not productive and also I
don't think this is the forum for that.
IMO, instead of asking people to be specific here,
you should be encouraging them to post their
issues/concerns at a particular address rather than
writing a long mail about it on a point by point basis.
Also realize of course, that you're going to get a fair
amount of blathering should you do that because non-OO
lovers are also going to respond.

It's definitely a ymmv for many, with cost being the
driving factor
of course.

I disagree on the cost argument. Money is an obsolete
argument if you
see that Microsoft is almost giving away software
with volume licenses
or student licenses or OEM licenses.
===
1. No, it's not obsolete, nor even moot. It's also
not "given away" by MS: The software IS paid for in
the price of the machines. Else you wouldn't have
machines with less supplied applicaitons selling for
less cost than the pre-installed machines. Anyplace
that allows you to customize your purchase adds or
subtracts from the bottom line on the receipt based on
the software and hardware you've chosen. The fact that
default items are shown as $0.00 dollars simply means
it's included in the cost of the machine.

2. Especially in the case of an upgrade, it's still
pretty expensive where OO is only the cost of the
download time.


I made a pretty good effort at using OpenOffice, and
was
impressed, and still do use it occasionally for
specific tasks it's
useful for, like saving to a PDF file, speed for
simple things, and
fast open/close times. But, that said it's not
ready for "MY" prime
time yet.

What issues hinder you from it becoming "YOUR" prime
time?
=== See my references above.

I don't speak for others. So, though I keept it
installed, and use it for a few various things now
and then, some
more often, I am still with Office in a big way.
It's not free,

It's not free(gratis) but more important it's not
Free(libre) and even
more important it's not Open - I mean not only the
software but also
the file format.
=== I'm sorry, but in my world it IS free. I paid
nothing for it. I used my internet connection, but
that minimal cost is overhead and would have been paid
had I downloaded OO or not. So the OO was free.
If you'll look at http://www.openoffice.org/ you'll
see that it is indeed not only a no-charge item, but
also that is is open sourced. It's open source to
ANYONE that wants it, and it's easy to become part of
their project if you wish to.

Here in Europe I see a lot of movement towards open
file formats becoming mandatory by law. For example
the Belgian
Department of Justice starts using open file formats
because legal
documents made today should be readable in a few
years without
acrobatics (I don't mean Adobe). I don't see a lot of
interesting
reaction from Redmont...
=== I've no idea what you're getting at there.
Nothing seems relevant to the subject at hand.

but it does what I need it to do and, being so well
versed in it, I do
have some set ways and enough experience to know
that quite a few
things I do in Word are harder or even less
intuitive to accomplish
in OpenOffice (Write et al). That's not a cut
against OO, just an
observation; often the "intuition" factor in OO
beats MS right out of
the water, but, again IMO, it's just not able to do
everything I want
to do yet in the ways I need to do them.

That's not intuition,
=== If you look again, you'll note the quotes I used:
Or is that a language problem between our cultures? I
said the same thing you seem to want to explain.
that's how you learned to use Word. You forgot
the initial problems you had when you switched from
WordStar to
WordPerfect, or from WP DOS to WP Win, or from WP to
MS Word,...
=== Ahhh, Wordstar: I recently had the "fun" of
getting some old WS files off my long ago forgotten and
archived floppies and re-rendering them to something
useful. But the floppy recovery/refreshing turned out
to be the easy part - surprisingly, I found a large
Wordstar community still existing out there! I still
think they had the right idea with their key triangles.

So if I had to give one up, I'd have to give up OO
at the moment.

It's a good thing you don't have to.
=== No, not really. OO just makes it more convenient
by having the "other" things I need easily accessible
in one wrapper as opposed to a few different apps from
different places. Which is what I had prior to OO.

I tried OO for web authoring too, with all its bells
and whistles,
some of which I really liked, but... though it's
more intended for
writing web pages than Word is, it still didn't make
it. Old Word97,
albeit a simplistic authoring tool, did better IMO,
when combined with
FP and a little HTML knowledge. I was finally able
to wean myself
from WD97 et al when I discovered N|VU and now use
neither MS or OO
for web authoring. (nvu.org if you care).

Neither MS Word nor OpenWrite are web authoring
tools. You can't expect
a program that does something "on the side" to excel
(no pun intended)
in that feature.
FWIW, you found the better tool with nvu.
=== Definitely NVU is good. But I did very well with
the combo of word97, FP and some HTML knowledge for a
long time. WD97 was in fact a decent web authoring
tool and wrote decent html code. At the time I used
it, it was a valid, useful tool. Once I learned enough
HTML I was able to graduate to NoteTAB, then PSPAD, and
finally N|VU. N|VU still has a long way

I guess, all in all, if you could almost but not
quite use Wordpad
for all your needs, you're a great candidate to
check out OO. If you
actually use a lot of Word's features though you may
not be so happy
with OO.

What exact features are you talking about?

And, if you're interested in downloading OO, be
aware; it's
a huge download but at least it's free and very
functional.

I don't call 80 MB a huge download - but then again,
I'm on broadband.
80MB is rather small compared to the 640MB for an MS
Office ISO file
(in Belgium there is a special website where students
and teachers can
download student licenses of selected MS Software)

Often OpenOffice also comes on the CD or DVD cover
disk you get with
computer magazines. So you can buy it for about 5?
(6$).

My two cents

Mine two (pun intended)

Pop

--
Amedee Van Gasse