On 13-Jul-2010, at 1:02 AM, steve wrote:
Hi,
On 07/12/2010 09:12 PM, Pratik Anand wrote:
This is a post related to usability of Open Office Suite. [...snip...] There are few elemental things not available in Open Office which makes its use little more rough
Most important being, Inability to change slides with arrow keys . I don't understand why OO people are not implementing this simple feature. Is there a copyright issue or programming difficulty (?)
Not quite sure what you are speaking about here. Arrow key navigation to go previous/next (left/right arrow key) works for me with OO 3.1 on my Fedora 12 system, in slideshow mode. Is that what you were referring to ?
Using page up and page down buttons instead of arrow buttons is more sensible. I dont see why anyone will not want to use OO for this. In fact, the transition methodology on OO makes a lot of sense (I use only OO since i use a mac and dont intend to buy MS Office on mac).
- For slide show, both page up / down and arrow keys work - for Normal mode, arrow keys is to navigate within a slide (from one row to another and for horizontal movement) while page up and down is specifically for moving to the next slide. This way, you dont accidentally move to the next slide when all you meant to do was to go to the next line to change something.
I am surprised that you have not instead raised the point of having to use ";" instead of "," in formulae in spreadsheets which is probably the biggest grouse of people moving from msoffice to OO
Second being, compatibility with MS Office 2007 files (esp. .pptx). With these formats being more than 3 yrs old, it should start supporting it fully.
Open Office 's saved ppt files change in orientation and design when opened in MS Office, not talking about templates (can be really troublesome).
If you could please point me to the complete documented specification for the format for the .pptx file, I'll make sure the good developers at OO.org implement all the features and interoperability you request.
Except PPTx files, all other formats open properly in OO / MsOffice. The differences are mainly in tab / bulleted formats in Word files.
Few more smaller issues.
Note: this post is not made for criticizing OO , rather it points out woes of users who want to shift their workspace in open source but are still facing difficulties.
One of my recommendations to those who start using OO is to use it on all platforms. OO on windows behaves pretty much the same as OO on linux. Also, secondly, although as an office suite OO is _similar_ to M$ Office, it is not the *same*. There is a learning curve to be productive in OO as there is in M$ Office. Spending sometime looking for documentation, especially something that points out differences[1] between the environments.
cheers,
- steve
[1] Quick google gave me these: http://www.linuxtopia.org/online_books/office_guides/microsoft_office_to_ope... (there is a section named General Differences In Use) http://documentation.openoffice.org/searchresults.html?cx=008361175193398611...
I have no clue how good they are though.
random spiel: http://lonetwin.net/ what i'm stumbling into: http://lonetwin.stumbleupon.com/ -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers