Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Why the fuck does this worthless program even exist. What an inferior piece of shit. Why don't you at least make some sort of attempt to be even a fraction as good as word.

Thank you for telling us so expressively how much you dislike the program. There are over 80 million users of the current version, most of whom do not experience any difficulty, so perhaps the problems you experience, which you do not specify, are due to your inexperience or methods of working.

If you dislike it so much, remember that it is not compulsory to use it. Perhaps you should look for some other program that better suits your method of working and/or experience.

Very nice direct approach. I like it.

Post in Impress section, referring to MS Word
It could explain the problem

Hagar Delest wrote:Post in Impress section, referring to MS Word
It could explain the problem

Note that poster also misspells "shittiest."

I would also like to point out that OpenOffice is completely free. No one can complain about something that's free.

dan.thorp97 wrote:I would also like to point out that OpenOffice is completely free. No one can complain about something that's free.

I registered so I could reply to this moronic comment.

There was an article in Dr Dobbs a few years ago about OpenOffice, titled something like "Scoop the cream, not the scum". The gist was that open source software is vital in the digital age, but not if it emulates the market oriented bloatware of the commercial sector.

I hate Office, but I use it twice a day. because of Office, there will never be a decent package that does anything more than anybody would want to do in an ...office. And now, because of OpenOffice, not even open source development is capable of providing relief from this mediocrity. The gap in the market that OpenOffice has now filled needs something original, but that won't be happening now, will it.

This would all be perfectly fine and dandy if only OpenOffice worked properly. Unfortunately, as the author of this thread has discovered, it is really a piece of crap. And contrary to the claim of dan.thorp97, it is not free. It costs everybody who uses it in time, frustration and a flood of health sapping cortisol.

Wouldn't it be awesome if somebody decided to write —for the 21st century— a 'productivity suite' with the adamantine brilliance of Chris Pugmire's GLE and it's hilariously useful spreadsheeting app 'manip', or even to emulate the genius that was WordPerfect 5.1. That would indeed be worth the download time.

I'm sorry to dis the developers of OOo because i know how much work goes into programming anything, even rubbish, but really folks. Can anybody explain why deleting a chart in Calc is like getting thru level 17 in Tomb Raider 2?

Actually, I retract my criticism of OpenOffice. It's quite good really

however I stand by my response to dan.thorp97 Being free is not a reason to accept poor quality software.

I remember WordPerfect 5.1, and shudder. I also remember the immense relief when Word 6 for Windows became available - finally something intuitive that worked out-of-the-box and didn't require an expensive training. I still cannot understand why the programmers of WP thought that you would not normally want to overwrite an existing file when writers do that all the time. What were they thinking?

I also noticed that the original poster only has one post to their "credit", and that was made over 6 months ago. Personally, I'm wondering if (and I doubt this very much) the poster is even monitoring this topic.

floris v wrote:I remember WordPerfect 5.1, and shudder

from wikipedia: "extensive use of key combinations that enable touch-typists to access features without having to click ribbon icons or click through multiple drop-down menus, its streaming code architecture, its Reveal Codes feature, and its unusually user-friendly macro/scripting language"

No other word processing package has ever come close. I produced several books using WP5.1 (alongside a few with with LaTEX, Ventura Publisher and pageMaker). Nothing else touched it, certainly not Word, and nothing about Word suggests it could touch it now.

Let me make myself a bit plainer. When you had edited an existing document and wanted to save the changes, you'd press F7 to quit, WP would ask if you want to save changes, you'd press Enter to confirm that you wanted to save the changes, WP would ask if you wanted to overwrite the existing file and you'd have to press Y(es) to confirm that - if you'd hit Enter, it would not save the changes and not offer the opportunity to save with another name - you would lose your work. I was once asked by people who lost their work too often to make some macros to save files overwriting the existing ones.
I agree that you can't beat WP when it's used by professionally trained typists who don't have to work with anything else. As soon as you have to swap between WP and for instance Word, you're in great peril.
There was a well-known comment on WP that said that it's marketing was better than its word processor. It says a great deal about WP that the programmers were allowed or told to chuck the incredible macro language of 5.1 for a new one for WP 6.

I wrote just such a macro, among many others. WP 6 was crap, which is why the we now all use Word. The typists I worked with hated WP6 and also hated Word and complained constantly of having to use the mouse. It took them years to give up on the DOS screen and I totally relate to that. I much prefer console text for word processing.

Haven't tired any newer versions of WP but I would if someone else was paying