Cropping inserted images, had to go back to office.

[FeraTechInc]

I do not understand why the process of simply inserting an image from the clipboard or file is so ridiculously complicated.

I have never seen anything like it. The operation to crop a picture requires another image editor or you have to right click the image and use the most absurd cropping tab ever devised.

I actually had to go into Word properly crop all my pictures then open up OpenOffice and save it as an odt file.

Is this a feature that is going to be fixed. For any editing or inserting images being able to properly crop them is a must.

[acknak]

Have you read the Forum Survival Guide? Venting your frustration here is largely unconstructive, since no one reads this forum except users like yourself.

There is work being done: Improved picture cropping for Draw/Impress (blogs.sun.com), targeted to appear in OOo 3.0 coming in September. It sounds like that still won't be available in Writer, but it's a start at least.

You should also be aware that cropping in OOo may not be quite what you want. OOo never changes the image data, it only changes which part of the image is visible. So cropping the image in OOo does not give you any reduction in the size (i.e. the amount of data) required for the image in the document. If you insert a 3 Mb image and crop it down to postage stamp size, it will still add 3Mb to the size of the document. The nice thing is that you can just as well go back and un-crop the image because the image is still completely intact.

As you said, you can also use a separate image editor, which I prefer anyway, as that gives me full control over the size, as well as other aspects, of the image.

I don't mind an extra copy and paste to get better control, but I can see that it would be nice to have an improved cropping feature built in to Writer.

[foxcole]

You should also be aware that cropping in OOo may not be quite what you want. OOo never changes the image data, it only changes which part of the image is visible. So cropping the image in OOo does not give you any reduction in the size (i.e. the amount of data) required for the image in the document. If you insert a 3 Mb image and crop it down to postage stamp size, it will still add 3Mb to the size of the document. The nice thing is that you can just as well go back and un-crop the image because the image is still completely intact.

Word does it the same way. Images "cropped" in Word aren't cropped either, so the statement "For any editing or inserting images being able to properly crop them is a must" is moot, if the cropping is done in Word or Writer. The only way to "properly crop" an image is in an image editor.

All that aside, there is an extension currently available that improves cropping:
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/node/460