Well this is a bummer. Everyone always says to try open source software, and I’ve tried Open Office a few times - each time to be disappointed. In fact, each time the same thing happens that happened this time. And no, it’s not on the same computer either, I have a bunch of different ones and it does the same thing on every one of them.
Earlier today I was writing up some coding guidelines in Open Office Writer, saved the file, came back later and all the formatting was completely screwed up. Things were bolded I didn’t bold before, and entire sentences mysteriously vanished. So 3 hours worth of work was destroyed because OO can’t do a simple thing like save a file.
There wasn’t any advanced formatting done either, it was all basic letters, spaces, tabs, and a few bolded items.
And before someone yells at me: it has done this same thing to me in the past when saving in different formats, on different oses, etc. It is just a bug in the program that hasn’t ever been fixed (and yes, I’m using the most up to date stable version).
Oh well, back to using Microsoft Word.
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May 4th, 2008 at 7:39 pm
Well, I have to agree. I have used Open office for quite some time and what killed me about it was the spreadsheet version. The most simple task I did all the time (the sum of a set of cells) was IMPOSSIBLE to accomplish.
I figured it out once, but finally gave up. It is a good secondary platform in a pinch, but the high end functionality is not there (IMO).
May 5th, 2008 at 8:23 am
Try Zoho Writer (and other apps available at http://zoho.com ) and get rid of Microsoft software
May 6th, 2008 at 7:53 pm
You see, cheap more often than not means bad. The way FOSS guys propaganda their product is borderline scam.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
@Scott - Agreed. That is one thing that ticks me off about some open source software - it can be great at some things but utterly fail at simple tasks.
@Bart - Good suggestion - think I’ll stick with Microsoft Office though. It seems to work the best for me.
@Jerina - I have to agree to a certain extent. Sure there’s a lot of crappy OSS software, but there’s also a lot of crappy commercial stuff.
May 6th, 2008 at 11:27 pm
Oops, That should be @Jerino. Sorry about that.
May 8th, 2008 at 9:54 am
Open office 3 is currently in beta 3 maybe it will be better.
May 8th, 2008 at 8:25 pm
Yeah, I just saw that on Digg earlier. Might try it just to see.