Thursday, May 04, 2006

I swear OOo has got worse

I've been using OpenOffice 2.0 at work and found it to be quite frankly a piece of crap. I'm sure it used to be more reliable back at 1.x. As has been pointed out by others you don't get anywhere just trying to match MS Word. I just can't decide which one is worse at the moment - they seem to be about the same.

Why can a word processor have so much difficulty:
  • Getting outline numbering working.
  • Handle styles appropriately so you don't end up with sections as 'Default' and 'Body Text' without being able to tell.
  • Make images anchor properly.
  • Have a simple diagram drawing tool that is usable.


It really doesn't have to be super fancy, RISCOS managed to work it out many many years ago. Just blend that with a modern file format (Open Document) and you're sorted.

Hopefully AbiWord will replace OOo...

1 comment:

Joel said...

You should be using latex ;P

But I agree, OO seems to be quite buggy. Abiword is generally fine but has more trouble interoperating with MS formats - which I only know because the world insists on using MS Word.

One thing that MS Word is good at is doing revisions - so the scientific community and other writers like it. OO has to match at least that feature or it won't get very far into the market.