Shortcomings of OpenOffice and Working Around Them? 236
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?
OOo (Score:4, Interesting)
Video in presentations (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Well featured software? (Score:2, Interesting)
Office 2007 will support PDF. (Although that isn't a great reason to pay for the upgrade price...)
"From my perspective OpenOffice seems to be well featured software compared to the "most purchased software"
OO is quite good. However, the original quote you posted here is still correct. OO doesn't have Outlook, for example. Those who don't know the difference between Outlook and Outlook Express would say "Good Riddance.", which is why I'm posting anonymously. OL is where a lot of the differentiating features are kept, and there are some slick ones there. I had a job a couple of years ago that involved a lot of emailing (in my case, with more than one account...), and a lot of meetings. Outlook is a strong email client, especially when dealing with multiple accounts, but it also has the Calendar and the ToDo list. (not to mention Notes, but I think I'm one of the few people who actually used that...) Not only is that a great place to centralize all your appointments and such, but it also syncs with PocketPCs and cell phones quite nicely. I made great use of it, even miss it in some ways...
Anyway, this is all academic to me. I've changed careers since then and now I do not need OL anymore. That is why I have OO installed right now. I'm quite pleased with it. It's a little rough around the edges, but it serves its purposes well. I have to say, though, that there is something else that really killed Office for me. I purchased a laptop in 03 and it came with whatever version of Word was available at the time. (Word XP?) I accidently clicked on it when trying to start something from the quicklaunch bar. I ended up 'end task'ing it in the middle of it starting up. Oopsie. That tripped off some sort of alarm within Word and it requested to be re-activated. That's right, I had to go through the authorization process AGAIN with it. I just hated the thought of switching to a new machine, installing Word (or a modern version of Office...) and going through the activation process each time. I've called that 800 number before, it's not fun. Way to fight off piracy, Mr. Gates.
Hrmm maybe I didn't need to post anonmously afterall. Oh well. Still, I'm tired of arguing about which is better. They each have their strong points. BFD.
Lost your recovery partition, eh? (Score:1, Interesting)
Sounds reasonable to me, but you do realize you can order recovery CD's from the manufacturer and if they don't give them to you, you can sue under the EULA for false representation of a product, right? Nobody can sell you a lisence, then through copyright, ensure you're never able to use it.
Re:Expectations != Deficiencies (Score:3, Interesting)
The one (and only) example I can think of is the way the enter key behaves in the spreadsheet tool. It makes sense to me, if I am entering in a lot of data, I should be able to tab through the rows and when I'm done that row, if I hit enter, it should go back to the first field of the next row. It does this in excel and I would probably switch to OO except this "feature" drives me nuts.
Re:Charts are lacking... (Score:3, Interesting)
The main problem I've had with graphing engineering data in Excel is that it's limited to 32768 (or maybe 65536, I forget) rows. I'd often exceed that trying to pull in data from, say, a digital scope or logic analyzer. Other than that, I found it had some screwy defaults but otherwise worked reasonably well. For my data, anyway; YMMV. I mostly used it to plot XY data.
You're right, though, that it's primarily designed for pie charts. I never did find a way to get it to automatically export the equation from the regression curve back to a worksheet so I could use it in further calculations. Or a way to get it to just plot an equation without me having to creating a table of sampled XY values.
PHP and downloading tables (Score:2, Interesting)
Using PHP and the following headers works fine if you want to generate a HTML table and dump it into Excel.
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.ms-excel");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
Using the following to open the table in OOo doesn't work. (It didn't for me at least)
header("Content-Type: application/vnd.sun.xml.calc");
header("Expires: 0");
header("Cache-Control: must-revalidate, post-check=0, pre-check=0");
Luckily there is a nice PEAR package that takes care of this problem --> http://pear.php.net/package/Spreadsheet_Excel_Wri