[Leaplist] Sun releases StarOffice 9, drops price to under $35 ($25 and below in volume) ...

[Steve Litt]

On Tuesday 18 November 2008 04:47:55 pm Jason Boxman wrote:
> Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> <snip>
>
> > I'll gladly pay for community and developments I believe in.
> > It's up to you if you agree or not and use what you wish.
> > Although don't call for "boycotts" of the product if you
> > don't want to look like a fool (especially if you use
> > OpenOffice.org).  ;)
>
> I keep trying OpenOffice (dot org, weee) and being almost thoroughly
> disappointed.  The latest version is certainly an improvement, though.
>
> It's still incredibly slow compared to, say, WordPerfect.  (And since
> OOo is a huge monolithic binary, that's not necessarily a fair
> comparison, though that in itself is a strike against OOo.)
>
> There are also some awful quirks.  For example, mail merges need to be
> done against even number of pages, or you end up with blank pages in
> your output.  In recent versions, you can suppress the extra page, but
> it's broken by design that such a option is even necessary.  Doing a
> merge of around 500 entries is also extremely slow and it crashed at
> least once.

What caused me to bail on the OO wordprocessor was the behavior of styles. 
They seem to magically revert or change. I spoze there's a specific reason 
why my exact actions cause that, but I don't have time to learn the exact 
reasons, and even if I did I'd probably forget and do whatever changes styles 
again. Nothing quite like magically having every note or tip in your document 
all of a sudden look different.

They say Ruby follows the principle of least surprise. My experience of OO 
wordprocessor is it follows the principle of MOST surprise.

These days, if it's gonna be over 5 pages, I do it either in LyX or in 
kompozer (html wysiwyg editor).

SteveT

Steve Litt
Recession Relief Package
http://www.recession-relief.US


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