I have two other gripes, one I saw already mentioned was about opening shared files read only… that’s quite obnoxious… the other relates to not being able to set system wide default file formats (you can edit a file but it gets overwritten with updates). It’s a major hassle when your boss insists that everyone use open office and everyone saves in excel, powerpoint, and word formats for compatibility outside the office!

2) I distinctly remember when the “save as the default template” was standard practice on (ahem) Microsoft Word. I don’t remember anyone complaining at that point. Much less, with a graphical environment, put a (sim)link to your own template on your desktop and double-click that when you want to write something. It’s that easy.

3) Earthly languages don’t include page margins, and those aren’t stipulated by what language you speak or what country you are in. This goes along with #2: make a template and use that. In fact, link it, then make your template read-only so you don’t accidentally screw something up. Much less, since the only time I care about margins is when I’m writing something for work or something that is going to be hole-punched and put in a binder, your comment is hardly worth hearing. But by all means: create a feature request.

4) Refresh problems sound like a concern you should open a bug report for. Much less, I’ve ran into the same problems with Microsoft Office (I’m military so we have the ultra-uber-version with Everything {tm}), so this comment cannot be used to imply that OOo is inferior.

5) While that doesn’t sound like a bug to me (since I don’t know too many people who change languages on the fly), go fill out a feature request. All the energy you could’ve used to help others or improve the product was spent on this web post. Much less I’ve seen people have issues like this or worse with Windows, so this can’t be used to imply that OOo is inferior.

6) The thesaurus sounds like (again) something you may need to bring up as a feature request or annoyance. However, since I’m military and I write stuff on Word, I can tell you that their thesaurus isn’t good enough that I don’t need to go online to http://www.reference.com more than once, so this cannot be used to imply that OOo is inferior.

That’s a bad position for any software distributor/developer to be in.

Word of mouth advertising is often said to be the best form of advertising. But before word of mouth can work, someone actually needs to know about your product and be using it in the first instance.

So I would say yes. Sun needs to pull it finger out and get something done to get the word out. They need to get people excited about their products. I would say it’s a similar situation with openSolaris. Sun clearly want to play in the same playground as Linux and Mac OS X and Windows. But they really aren’t doing anything to push their OS products.

Getting page numbers to skip the title page, run Roman numerals on the front matter, and print Arabic numerals on the main matter took some work for me, but I can’t say that it sucked. Using page styles makes sense after you read about how to do it.

Anyway, I use Google Docs for most of my light writing these days. I’ve even tried to go application-free for a month and managed it. http://theosisdead.blogspot.com

Developers competing in the same markets as Microsoft need to show a bigger pair of balls. If it works, it’s easier to use than the competition and offers better features, at a higher quality at the right price it will catch on.

Sticking to the Microsoft model of productivity is what is holding OpenOffice.org back. It’s time they broke the mould.

20 mm is a nice round number that leaves the area available for text 170 mm wide. Some strange programs seem to prefer 25.4 mm. Who made up that number?