A rant about OpenOffice 1.1 and The Gimp 2.2
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I do a lot of work in MS Excel and it seems that most of my *.xls files never import correctly into Excel. Unfortunately, this is one of the only remaining reasons I have an MS OS running on my computer...to use Excel. Is it even possible for the OO people to figure out how to import more of the specialized features from Excel? It may not be, which is why I ask. In my opinion, this is one of the reasons many people may be hesitant to convert totally to linux. MS does have a good office product. I love OO for Word Processing though, and the available thesaurus and dictionary packages for linux are great (i.e. wordnet)!


On a similar note, I cannot even begin to figure out the logic behind the menu arrangements in "The Gimp 2.2". From what I can tell, The Gimp has more functionality than Adobe Photoshop, but when it takes me 5 minutes to find a simple crop or brightness control, even after I've done it 5 times before, some rethinking of the menus needs to occur.

Overall, I dont' see Linux ever coming close to the functionality of some MS products in the near future when it comes to business tasks, as much as I'd love this to happen.

-- End Vent

I appreciate everyone that actually contributes to the Linux community, as I have little to no programming experience myself, in addition to an 80 hour/week job, therefore have no chance for contribution.

Go get a blog.

Openoffice:

Well, you are using an archaic edition. Try 2.0, it is vastly improved.

The way I read the situation, OOo 1 was never meant to be used in a mixed environment. You'd convert documents once (if possible) and that was it. The runaway success of OOo and Staroffice cought the team on the wrong foot.

Also bear in mind that they had to "crack" the formats, which are closed and obfuscated. I am currently my company's "guinea pig" in using OOo 2.0 in a mixed environment (I kicked and screamed and held my breath!) The acid test will come after Christmas when I have to work on a contract based on a standard document which evolved over many years using different versions of MS Word. It doesn't import well into StarOffice 1.7 (=OOo 1.4).

The Gimp:

I have to agree that the menus are difficult (frustrating?) but do, in their own context, make sense.

At work we found that word documents with tables were sometimes destroyed by going from Office 97 to 2000, which was pretty poor in my opinion.

Moved to.. you guess it.. General.

The importing problem will change in the future. Keep in mind that everything that has to do with cross-compatibility has been done through reverse-engineering MS stuff. When the document formats open up (as they will in the next version of Office) and become standardized and well documented, this will change dramatically.

As for the Gimp, only advice I can offer is learn to use the Gimp and quit expecting Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro when you open it.

Why is it that everyone assumes that a product's interface is bad if it's not a clone of the market leader? What you need is practice, my friend, practice. I too found the GIMP a little awkward at first, but rather than rant about it, I learned the interface. Now I find that I'm quite productive with it, and think it's great.

This will happen at the same time as pigs grow wings and take to the skies.

The whole thrust of MS's effort at the moment is not to open up the formats. Why do you think they put in that binary header in the files?

OOo will come on in leaps and bounds once XML becomes the standard. At the moment they are fighting against MS's proprietary formats. Be grateful that you can see the files at all.

As for The Gimp, it is getting better.

If you dislike the gimp look, why not give gimpshop a go http://freshmeat.net/projects/gimpshop/

I agree GIMP is frustrating. It used to be easy for lots of people, but it was possible to do the same task in a few different ways. They started trying to make it so theres only one way to do a task, as a result its gotten less easy for new people. However, once you do learn, youll find it rather powerful and good (just read a few tutorials on some jobs to get the hang of things). But for me, i dislike GIMP's team because it seems like every new release they change everything. Menus change, but most importantly, look at the "new file" dialog (its changed soo often, each new release it seems like). It use to be so easy, now they hide options i always set by default, it seems like they might be making GIMP's dialogs more like gnome, simple and easy, until you need to use it.

The next version will be XML based and open. Not to mention, the state of Mass. is requiring an open document format for their new Gov't documents. If MS doesn't do it, they'll likely be using OOo.

Scuzzman, precisely my point. The problem will be that MS Office will still be around and we will still have problems reading MS Documents in OOo.

Corporate cultures are not ready to adopt Open Source Desktop Applications. They don't "get it". They believe that if they pay for software they will get "real" support.

Open Document Formate will definitely become the norm. However MS's income is measured in large numbers per minute so they will drag their heels as long as possible.

MA is blazing a trail. Even they have problems as many poiticians are on MS's side.

But the fact of the matter is that these new document formats will be required to be standardized. Thus, the OOo developers will not need to reverse-engineer them, but can write the program to work with them natively. We won't have incompatibilities because Office and OOo will be using them the exact same way.