Re: [PLUG] FYI: Open Office Review

["Aaron Mulder" <ammulder@alumni.princeton.edu>]

On Dec 4, 2007 4:05 PM, K.S. Bhaskar <bhaskar@bhaskars.com> wrote:
> Over the years, its formatting compatibility with M$Office is comparable to
> that of one M$Office version with another.
> ...
> I use OOo on Linux in an S&:P 500 company (thousands of employees) that is
> officially M$Office on Windows, and almost all the time no one notices the
> difference.

Really?  I've noticed that the bullets are consistently wrong.  As in,
you create a bullet list in OO and load it in Word and the bullet
icons are daggers or some other oddball character.  If by some miracle
they appear as round dots, they're either larger or smaller than in
the original.  It seems to happen both ways (created in Word and
opened in OO or created in OO and opened in Word).  This has been a
problem forever -- I don't know why getting bullets right is so hard.
(I've never had a similar problem when going from one version of a
product to another version of the same product on either side.)

Also, the page spacing is typically not the same between OO and Word.
That is, if the page ends on a certain line and word in one product,
there's no guarantee that the same page will end in the same place on
the other product.  So if you massage the document to make the page
breaks look nice or just barely fit everything onto one page, it's all
lost in the conversion.

I use OO a lot, but I try to export to PDF wherever possible to avoid
crap like this.  I also am a big fan of putting text in an e-mail or
wiki page instead of a casual word processing document.  I'm actually
still fairly grumpy about the OO/Word compatibility, since I use about
1% of the features and I still consistently notice these
discrepancies.

However, for what it's worth, I've been using OO on Linux and Mac for
several years, and almost never had it crash (except when SuSE shipped
a pre-release version once).  I'm not a big fan of the usability of
Impress, but I have used it a lot without crashing-type problems.  On
the other hand, I hate the stupid right-side window that always comes
back from the dead, and I wish someone would explain how slide
templates can be made to work (versus always using "Duplicate Slide").
 I can't believe any of the OO developers actually give presentations!

Thanks,
       Aaron
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