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-190

OpenOffice? Dell can do better...

-190 points posted to Software by runbei 03/23/07

OpenOffice is likely to hurt as much as help. Having formatted a self-published, 300-page book in OO, I've become thoroughly familiar with its formatting features. A nightmare.

OO was designed by well-intentioned techies who appear to have not the remotest clue when it comes to user interface smoothness. Nearly everything in OO is either slightly wrong, outright awkward, or horribly inconvenient (the aforementioned formatting). And much, much worse: all of it is virtually undocumented. (The online documentation is obscure, at best; and at worst, ulcer-inducing.)

Why not provide a far, far better, inexpensive commercial alternative: Softmaker's TextMaker and PlanMaker. Sensible, user-aware design, full-featured, expertly documented. Where OO feels like a lumbering Microsoft Word-imitating Borg cube, TextMaker is light, efficient, and friendly.

benjesuit
03/23/07		 Excellent suggestion. Openoffice, like Linux, is just not ready for primetime.

I have Textmaker for my AXIM X50V and it's incredible.
reg
03/23/07
reg
03/23/07		 One Scribus Screen Shot.

Good for desktop publishing your magazines or latest 300 page book :





Click to Zoom.
benjesuit
03/23/07		 Vim is junk, kiddo.

Scribus is not so bad, but not as intuitive as other commercial packages. But It's not a word processor. Would you use MS Publisher to write a novel, screenplay or a thesis?

And Reg, could you please stop the pic posts? TIA.
steveoc
03/23/07		 How exactly is vim junk ?

It is extremely well written, and does its job excessively well. That is not junk by any measure.

To anyone that knows their way around it, it has to be one of the fastest and most elegant ways to edit things ever invented. I for one couldnt live without out.

Nobody is saying that everyone should switch to vim - because there will always be people who find it too steep a learning a curve to climb out of their kindergarten environments or fisher-price IDE's ..
but thats not vim's fault, and doesnt make it junk. Its built for a purpose, and does it very well.

By your reasoning - the renault F1 car pictured above is also 'junk', because if you stepped behind the wheel for a lap, you would kill yourself in it. Even though it won an F1 constructors
championship, you would say its junk because its not as easy to drive as your automatic Ford station wagen.

Sorry b, but you are making yourself look silly calling vim junk.

The only time you can call vim junk and get away with it is if you are arguing that emacs is superior, in which case you would still be wrong, but at least you would be making a respectable claim.
benjesuit
03/23/07		 It's a text editor, not a wordprocessor. So yeah, just like a Renault F1 on city streets is "junk."

AKA wrong tool for the job.
steveoc
03/23/07		 ;)

Ah shinola - I just read TFA and noticed that he said vim was a great DTP tool. Pardon my jumping the gun there .. unless you have been bought up on latex, in which case vim is the way to nirvana.

Now - emacs on the either hand, that would make a great DTP tool all on its own in the right hands. (but lets not go there)
reg
03/23/07
rambutan
03/23/07		 I think VI might be one of the ten best word processors when your computer does not have a GUI. And I think those poor people without graphics are right to defend it. But where are the Microsoft loyalists? I wonder if any Dell employee will have to wade though this babble... :)
steveoc
03/23/07		 yep, especially when debugging some nightmare over an unreliable line .. like Ive been doing for the last 7 hours between reading ideastorm.

As for a GUI - U used gvim ??

indepsensible. Works great on win32 as well, if you ever have to do more than 10 minutes work on a winbox
flooted
03/23/07		 Why don't you use the propriety software and let the rest of us with more modest writing ambitions continue using OOo, which seems just fine.

Who with professional writing ambitions ever uses standard word processors, whether OOo, Word, WordPerfect or whatever.

Like trying to use Picasa for professional photo rendering....don't make no sense....Use a program for professionals - which Word is not.
jordann
03/24/07		 Use the most appropriate tool for the job at hand.
kenjennings
03/25/07		 Compared to Microsoft Works which comes "free" with many Dell systems, isn't OOo a considerably better "free" alternative?
steveoc
03/25/07		 works is not free on dell peecees -

http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/03/25/1944209
kenjennings
03/26/07		 But most people don't know they've paid for Works. (Hence the quotes around "free".) Actually, per Microsoft EULA they've only paid to rent a license.
sumyunggai
06/23/07		 Whoever wrote this clearly has not used OpenOffice.org before.
rotthund
10/18/07		 I use vim everywhere, Mac, Linux, Windows. Is anything else so consistant across all platforms? I started using vi as a necessity for embedded systems, now I use it everywhere. I saw someone else typing notes in Word. Their hands kept jumping to the arrow keys. I think VIM saves batter too.

I like Works Suite. It includes Word and other stuff. I breifly used OOo and prefer Word. I agree, Word costs too much compared to some users needs.

Wasn't WP5 popular for it's speed and long document support?
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