Shortcomings of OpenOffice and Working Around Them?

1mck asks: "Most free office software does the job, and after a hard drive failure, I decided to go MS Office free, so I'm trying out OpenOffice; however, I've noticed that there are a few deficiencies that I'm having a hard time getting around like the 'Shrink to fit' function, and also having PPS files open up directly in 'Presentation' mode rather than in the Edit' mode. Has any one else picked up on other deficiencies in OpenOffice? I realize that it is free, and it won't be as well featured as most purchased software, but when I went on the hunt for the workarounds at the OpenOffice forums, and on the web I've come up with very little to no information at all. Have I chosen the right free software, or would you suggest something else?" What minor irritations and shortcomings have you found in OpenOffice and how have you adjusted to (or worked around) them?

PPS Files

[HeavyD14]

Well, PPS files are supposed to open in show mode. PPT files get saved as a PPS file so you can give them out so everyone and their grandmother can view them without spending ten minutes finding the "View as Show" option. In MS Powerpoint, you have to open the program, then chose to open the file to open in edit mode. Perhaps you should try that.

OO cross-references

[DrDitto]

Doing cross-references in OpenWriter is clunky and difficult. For each section heading or similar (e.g. Section 2.3.5.13), you need to manually create some kind of bookmark. It is not automatic like MS Word or Framemaker. This is definitely a showstopper for using OpenWriter with complex legal documents and their dozens or hundreds of cross-references.

OSS

[Jarlsberg]

Heh, 5 comments in and all are buried ;)

OO is neat package, especially for Linux systems, but there's no denying it has some catching up to do to compete feature for feature with MS Office. One bug that's really annoyed me with the latest 2.0 release is that it crashes everytime I import a csv file into Calc, save it and then try to forward the file via my mail client. I haven't investigated it, so I don't know if it does with all open documents, or if it's specific to what I did above. I've filed a bug report, though.

Anyway, I'd suggest this url: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page [openoffice.org] to the submitter, but it does seem to be developer specific.

Strings not treated as numbers

[PhilHibbs]

This is mainly an interop issue because OOo does not behave in the same way as Excel, but there are some circumstances in which OOo does what many consider to be "the wrong thing".

Issue 5658 [openoffice.org]

Trendlines

[Anonymous Coward]

As a college student, learning EE, i need to add trendlines to my data charts and calculate the slopes and their standard errors. A thing you can not do with OO, but you can with Microsoft Office.

Upgrade your computer is the best workaround!

[Anonymous Coward]

When we switched to OO from Microsoft Office, moving from our $399 Dell specials to nice $2,000 each systems with AMD FX-55's really made OO much easier to use. It's just too damn slow to use on a normal system. You really need some horsepower. Of course even with a top of the line system, things like doing an Edit -> Copy in Impress still take so long that you think the computer has locked-up. So, spend more on an upgrade than you would have on Office, and OO will be usable.

Of course the boss now wishes we had stuck with Office since it would have not required so much money spent in hardware to throw at it, and we wouldn't have had to do so much training.

Re:PPS Files

[m874t232]

The equivalent of PPS in OpenOffice.org is PDF. There's even a toolbar button to generate them quickly.

Re:OOo

[afd8856]

You may not know it, but Acrobat Reader supports animation transitions when displaying a pdf full screen.
And who needs object animations, anyway? ;-)

Charts are lacking...

[Masa]

There are few thing that I have missed in the OpenOffice Calc. The chart creation is not as painless as it is with Excel. In addition, it seems that it's not possible to set error margins for XY plot chart with individual error margins for upper and lower margin. It's possible to set a constant error margin for all point and for both upper and lower magrin, but it's not possible to define an individual error margin for each point separately and define greater margin for positive error than negative error. So, the XY plot is not so flexible as it could be and I cannot come up any work-around for that. Well, at least this was situation with OOo version 2.0.0. I haven't yet checked the latest version.

Re:PPS Files

[crath]

To add to the previous poster's comments...

To make a PPS file open in edit mode, rename it back to PPT. The only difference between a PPS file and a PPT file is the name; PowerPoint doesn't save the bits differently simply because the user chose to save as PPS.

Re:Expectations != Deficiencies

[Anonymous Coward]

File --> Page Setup --> Layout --> Under heading Header and Footer --> Different First Page
There..no need to insert a section and disconnect header and footer.

Re:words

[Enderandrew]

From what I understand the reason that grammar checkers aren't included was a license issue. There were grammar checkers that they wanted to include directly in OOO, but they couldn't just use the code, or bundle the program internally. There are external grammar checker programs and there is work to better integrate these external programs in OOO so they work seemlessly. http://lingucomponent.openoffice.org/grammar.html [openoffice.org]

Re:It takes ages to startup...

[Anonymous Coward]

RTFM:
# Openoffice >2.0.0
openoffice -nodefault -nologo
# Otherwise
openoffice -quickstart

Re:Strings not treated as numbers

[Bill Dimm]

I think OO.o does the RIGHT thing: "Text is Text, and you can't calculate with text. So the bug is not on our side, it's Excels."

Except that that isn't what happens. You can calculate with strings -- it treats them as 0 instead of giving an error. As some people pointed out in the bug report, if it gave an error people would know that something needs to be fixed. As it is, they get a "wrong" answer with no indication that there was a problem.

It's The Little Things

[stan_freedom]

I am migrating our small business (25 users) to OO from MS. I recently switched our power user, who is open-minded and a quick study. She has been pulling her hair out over what would seem to be a couple of trivial details. She even came in to work early the other day because she was behind on some commission spreadsheets due the switch to OO. The rest of the users are doing OK with the switch. I'm afraid the owners are going to scuttle my migration to OO, even though I have shown a $10K savings. It's not that OO is less capable than MS, the problem is that it is different in subtle but apparantly very annoying ways to experienced MS users. For anyone doing a switch, prepare your power users in advance to expect short-term grief from the small things as they recondition.

For the record, the "biggest" problem my power user faces is how the Enter key behaves after entering data across several horizontal cells. In MS, Enter will move the cursor down on row and back to the first column that data was entered. For example, B3 -> B4 -> B5 Enter C3. OO does not have this behavior. The Enter key can be customized, but only to go one cell down (default), up, left, or right. Searching the forums confirmed that other MS users are also frustrated by this missing behavior. I tried a quick macro, but no luck.

Problems with Writer

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Keyboard usability

Problem: There is no straightforward way to set keyboard shortcuts for assigning/removing styles, inserting specific special characters, etc. For non-trivial documents, this means repeated use of the mouse/toolbars/insert character dialog are required.

Workaround: Macros can be used, though this is slow and awkward.

Typographical weaknesses

Problem: Support for high-quality typography is poor. In particular, support for professional-grade OpenType fonts is weak, with some of the best (the Zapfino Extra family is a clear example) not rendering properly at all on screen and even being substituted with completely different fonts in PDF output. No advantage is taken of features like ligatures, true small caps, different figure styles, stylistic and contextual alternates, and similar refinements. More generally, the layout algorithms (e.g., for H&J) are poor.

Workaround: There isn't really one: these are straight-up missing features or outright bugs. However, DTP packages already provide this sort of feature routinely, and more significantly, new versions of MS Office are likely to take advantage of the OpenType rendering support in Windows. OpenOffice's cross-platform nature may be a liability here.

Poor support for formal, structured documents

Problem: There is very limited support for things like structured headings and matching tables of contents (try generating two tables, one with only chapter titles+subtitles and one with chapter titles+all subheadings, or formatting a table of contents significantly differently from the default styles). There is no direct support for bibliographies. The UI for bullets, numbering and list styles is poor.

Workaround: Short of typing things in manually (or editing the auto-generated version every time) there's not much you can do. Cross-references can do a limited amount to support bibliographies within a single document.

Poor support for complex page layouts

Problem: Features like frames don't always work as expected. There seem to be several obscure bugs where multiple frames are concerned. Features like overlapping frames and transparency aren't supported.

Workaround: Usually patience or ingenuity, IME.

Start-up times are very long

Problem: It takes forever to load Writer the frst time.

Workaround: Get a faster machine? :-)

Mail merge support is very poor

Problem: Various. The UI is confusing. Output options are limited. (Can you merge to a single file in the latest version? You couldn't the last time I tried it.) The data source system is bug-ridden to the point that it's easier to start again and set up a new source if the slightest thing goes wrong.

Workaround: I've never found one for most of this, although some limitations can be overcome by merging-to-print and using a cheat printer driver that outputs to PostScript/PDF or similar.

Re:Reference Manager

[Noksagt]

OO.o does have great plans to improve the reference management system. Refer to commentary and design by Bruce D'Arcus. In the interim, I think that the ability of OOo to use a database for reference management is pretty good. I use refbase [refbase.net] as my web-based bibliographic database & am able to pull references directly from it in OO.o.

Also: MS Office + Endnote really isn't that great! Different versions of Endnote do have major compatibility programs & it is often hard to collaborate on a document which has Endnote markup. One colleague of mine even uses LaTeX & bibtex & LaTeX2RTF for any document that will have references, as his tolerance for Endnote is so low. Endnote's data model is dated & is still stuck in the dark ages of poor character encoding. They've tried to improve it over the years & it is the best commercial product available, but it isn't (and shouldn't be) the end goal for ANY ONE developing a solution from scratch.

Re:Video in presentations

[Anonymous Coward]

It works fine in OO.o 2.0 with the Java Media Framework installed. Just click Insert->Movie and Sound or Insert->Object.

Re:OO cross-references

[supra]

To cross reference headers/sections/tables/graphics/etc, I find OOo's hyperlink to work very well:
    - Insert->Hyperlink...
    - Click 'Document' on left side
    - Click "circle" icon besides Target field
    - Expand Headings item
    - Choose desired heading
    - Click Apply, then Close
    - Provide Text for document (if desired)
    - Click Apply

Re:Compatibility with MS Office

[Stellaaa]

(in)Compatibility with MS Ofice has been the deal breaker for OO at my workplace.

I was overjoyed about a year ago when the word came down from our new CEO that we should try to wean ourselves off M$ Office. I had been trying to do that for 5 years, but he did it in one email.

I have, sorry to say, switched back. First, it was trying to print Excel files from Calc. I just can't afford all that wasted paper. Excel went back on my machine.

Then I had to update a manual written in Word. Writer (00 v.2) ate ALL the graphics in the entire manual and went on to balls-up the fonts and formatting. I reported the error and got a message back from the coder that this bug would be fixed in the next release - and that my report was one of hundreds. So Word went back on my machine.

Then there was the boss's powerpoint. He worked all day, built this file in Presenter (or whatever it's called), unfortunately he saved it in ppt format instead of the native format. Went back to it the next day. WHAT A MESS! Every slide had to be redone. Powerpoint went back on his and my machines.

We use Access databases all the time. Base has never been up to the tasks we throw at it, or compatible enough to replace Access.

So that's my sad story of trying to convert an office to OO. I know it's mostly not OO's fault (except for the graphic-eating bug), and their word processor and presentation software is much easier to use (IMHO) than M$'s bizarre shite, but until EVERBODY stops using M$, I'm stuck with it. (at least we haven't bought a NEW version of Office - and have no plans to - just reinstalled the ol' 2000 version)

Stella

Re:It's The Little Things

[DeafByBeheading]

I don't know if this is close enough to be helpful, but ctl-left arrow (and ctl-right arrow) will skip "words", like in text-editing contexts. Here, "words" are contiguous non-empty cells, so if you enter text in B3, C3, and D3 (I don't know if Excel does it the other way, but in OO.o, columns are lettered), and then hit ctl-left, then enter, you'll be in B4. I agree the Excel behavior seems a lot more intuitive, though.

Graphs!

[MadAnalyst]

I find graphing in OOO to be completely unacceptable.

I am a scientist, and I generate dozens of what Excel likes to call "x-y scatter plots" every day. They tend to be mildly complicated, but thats OK. I like tricks like multiple axes, ease of changing scales and labels and legends, and also the ability to make each graph its own sheet in the workbook.

I have spent time trying, but I have to conclude that OOO is just bad at all of this.

On the other hand, I have been quite pleased with Gnumeric for my spreadsheet needs.

And I also recognize that I am a specialist with a niche need, so I'm not expecting to have my requests fulfilled anytime soon. I realize that the more picky, demanding, and unusual you are the less likely that there is an open source option waiting for you.

My $0.02.

OpenOffice != MSOffice

[josepha48]

and they never will. They are two different products. The nice thing about OO vs MSO is that OO you can get on the forums and request features or things and its free. MSO you pay for. Personally I have no idea what you are talking about 'Shrink to fit'. Chances are that it may be one of those MSO features that is less used or less needed, but I'm not sure. Also I didn't know PPT could open in presentation mode, I'd wonder if the OO developers do. There may be a way to do it, but it may not be as easy as MSO.

The 2 biggest issues I have had with OO, is 1) graphing; 2) I have no idea what each program is from their name ( except writer ). Maybe this is just a fedora 4 menu name thing.

Re:Bullet points and indentation are screwy

[nmos]

I think you'll find common people use spaces to indent everything, and manually insert the bullet characters.

Yes and because of this the auto-formatting features of OO seem to annoy a lot of users. People get surprisingly upset when OO turns

        * Stuff
        * More stuff

into a bulleted list. Never mind that at least some versions of MSO do exactly the same thing and the menu item to turn this on/off is in exactly the same place, it 's still the number one example that people give me when they say "I hate OO because ..."

   

Re:PPS Files

[m874t232]

PDF permits animation, timing, and interaction. I don't know whether you can embed audio or animation.

If you like, OOo also has built-in support to let you export your presentation in Flash format, which supports all those features.