General Question

[Geoff K]

iMac, OS X 10.3.9, 1 gHz, 1.25 M memory. (increased memory from 250M after getting OOo,) Not a power user. Not an expert. Somewhat above entry level.

I recently acquired OpenOffice.org.

OOo seems sluggish and difficult to use. My only comparisons are AppleWorks and Pages on the Mac and MS Office on Windows at work. I got OOo only because I could not open a simple Excell spreadsheet emailed to me monthly from work. OOo does well with that although I can not save it in Appleworks format and it does not give me the printing options other programs give. (I tried the Gimp-Print drivers but it botched up printing from all my other programs.)

Is it worth putting in the effort to learn more about OOo? If I take the time to get used to OOo does it approach Appleworks in useability?

Geoff

[Hagar Delest]

As I don't know Appleworks, I can't tell. OOo is heavily based on styles. They allow you to control your document on a global approach : modify a style and all the parts where that style has been applied in the document will reflect that change immediately.

What are the printing options you miss ? As a workaround, you can export as PDF and print it from your PDF reader.

[davidb]

Geoff,

Unless you plan to buy MS office for your mac OOo is definitely worth learning. It is slow yes, but is the best Office alternative I have come across - I run it successfully on a 500 MHz G3 Imac with 10.4.11 and 640 MB memory. It is much more powerful than appleworks - expecially in the spreadsheet department - I would never go back to appleworks spreadsheets - plus you get a degree of compatability (read and write) with MS Office formats that appleworks does not have. The X11 thing is a pain in the neck as the program does not interface well with the normal Mac OS - printing can be a problem for example. The compatability with MS office is not perfect either. Overall though I would recommend sticking with it.

I also use NeoOffice - it is the OOo program packaged better for the Mac (there is also some politics between NeoOffice and OOo that I wouldn't pay attention too) - it runs without needing X11 so can use the normal printer drivers etc - but it is usually a couple of versions behind OOo (though can already handle the new MS office formats) and runs significantly slower that OOo - which itself is already slow. I usually use OOo for creating and editing documents and then use NeoOffice for printing, especially for documents that contain images. I am not an expert, but my wife is less computer savvy - she uses NeoOffice exclusively.

Good luck
David

[smsm1]

The printing options are currently being worked on for the aqua version. Thus you will have the the same print options as any other Mac OS X application.

[Geoff K]

Thanks Hagar, David, and smsm, This is helpfull.

Hagar, I don't get many options at all. At the very basic, I can not choose print quality. It's all in "standard" quality which I seldom use. It takes a long time to print. I don't have a 2 side print option. I can not print multiple copies; the option is there but it doesn't do it. It's OK for what I need, just one document a month and that is one page only. But if I were doing lots of trial printing or lots of letter printing I could not do it with OOo.

David, that's intersting in that the only document I need and for which I got OOo is a spread sheet. It's not used as a spreadsheet, though. The person in administration that prepares our schedules (work schedules 6 weeks long) has created an Excel template and puts our schedule on it; basically initialls in a box under a date heading. There's no numbers and no tabulations. All I do with it is add colored background on the boxes with my initials in them.

I don't understand what X11 is, just that I have to have it. Perhaps better that way?

I've not heard of NeoOffice. I should probably try and learn OOo before venturing into another. However, I want to get work out of my computer but really don't want to put work into it. I guess, about computers, I'm sort of like those ninnies on the road that want their car to take them anywhere but don't want to bother learn the rules of the road. Well, I hope I'm not that bad. And i really do appreciate the help you guys have given.

smsm, it sounds like Aqua my answer all my problems.

Thanks all,

[ericb]

@Geoff K

Which Aqua version are you talking about ?

The native print dialog box is in the unofficial build I do provide, but not in official Aqua version (the one available at Good Day). I do provide such builds because I'm one of the devs who added the code, and we need fast feedback from users before integration ( we can miss some issues in the Design process) and you shouldn't use it in production.

If nothing goes wrong, maybe the native print dialog box will be included in official builds by the end of January 2008.

HTH , and thanks for your feedback

[wurzel]

iMac, OS X 10.3.9, 1 gHz, 1.25 M memory. (increased memory from 250M after getting OOo,) Not a power user. Not an expert. Somewhat above entry level.

Hi,
250Mb of RAM is going to be rather slow going, since OOo is one memory hungry app. As others have mentioned, NeoOffice is a good alternative for neophytes because it adheres more closely to the Mac user interface philosophy, and to be honest, it works pretty well, but it will be slow on your machine with limited RAM resources.

Alex