What were they thinking? (MS Office 2007)

[Max Battcher]

Andrew Crystall wrote:
> On 24 Apr 2008 at 20:18, Max Battcher wrote:
> 
>> Andrew Crystall wrote:
>>> On 24 Apr 2008 at 8:05, Nick Arnett wrote:
>>>
>>>> So... I "upgraded" to Microsoft Office 2007 recently.  Can't do half of what
>>> I'd suggest upgrading further to Open Office, it's less of a change 
>>> in UI from Office 2003 and costs less.
>> ...and does half as much.  OpenOffice.org one of very few applications 
>> that leaves me pining for my Windows system when I'm working in Ubuntu. 
>>   It's pretty stupid and sometimes just painful to use.  (The next 
>> biggest program that I switch to my Windows system for is Visual 
>> Studio.)  There's no way that I could use OpenOffice.org daily.  I'd 
>> rather use Vim.  In fact, with Vim's inline spell check (new in 7.0) I 
>> have been using it a lot more for basic document writing than either 
>> OO.org or Office.
> 
> The only things which are missing from Open Office are a few of the 
> more obscure and advanced functions of Excel (and you can fix sheets 
> up perfectly well with a little research) and functionality which is 
> better situated in products other than your office suite.

YMMV, but for me there I get a huge dissonance from OO.org and many of 
the things that I rely on in Office simply cannot be found.  Not to 
start a flame war, but I could probably name a bunch of little pet 
peeves if I sat down to.  My biggest issue recently was that OO.org has 
been prone to more crashes lately than I'd like.  I don't mind blaming 
that on the fact that I'm running perhaps a bit more of a "beta" 
version, but one HUGE problem struck me the other night: OO.org didn't 
auto-save a recoverable version of my work in progress!  This has been 
an Office mainstay since Office 95 and it appears that OO.org does do 
this...  mostly... just apparently not for Untitled documents, which 
IIRC was fixed in Office 97.

Perhaps it's due to the fact that OO.org borrows just enough from older 
Office UI that I think I can find what I'm looking for only to hit the 
brick wall of not finding it.  Honestly, Office 03 -> OO.org is a lot 
harder on me than Office 03 -> Office 07 because at least with Office 07 
I have something that I can blame when I can't find what I'm looking for.

It doesn't help that OO.org needs better Gnome integration, even after 
the tweaks to OO.org from Canonical/Ubuntu.  It doesn't help that *nix 
and X have always existed in this twilight realm of copy/paste and drag 
and drop that almost sort of does what you expect, some of the time. 
This is something that continually nags at me from time to time in 
Ubuntu but OO.org is where things feel the worst because it particularly 
doesn't feel consistent between OO.org applications themselves, much 
less between OO.org and everything else that I use.

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate Open Source and use a number of 
applications that I like better in spite of their commercial equivalents 
(Firefox, Lightningbird (Thunderbird + Lightning plugin), Vim, Inkscape, 
...), but OO.org, to me, seems the lesser choice to Office.  Given the 
choice I'd much rather work in Office than OO.org.

--
--Max Battcher--