Karma's Nucleus DevBlog

I also have lots of problems with the OpenOffice 2.0 database program. It crashes sometimes for no good reason , sometimes you can't create new reports/tables etc. I had one specific problem with a bug in the creation for a report (actually a 'Writer' bug since Writer is used for creating a report of a table/view). Since I was using version 2.0, I thought maybe if I update to the latest version that bug would be fixed, so I tried installing the latest version (2.0.1) and what did I found out: The program crashes much more than before. Nice going OO...
I think if you really want to use OO you should install the old one (1.x) never had problems with it.

Posted by Klaas at Tuesday, February 21, 2006 12:20:30

Update: The new Open Office version 2.0.2 solves many bugs :-)

Posted by Klaas at Wednesday, March 15, 2006 08:05:52

I really wish that it had been something I could consider as an alternative to M$.

They had a real chance there to do something great.

But you're right - It's flaky, and just butt-ugly. I'd be embarassed to show it to anyone used to M$ Office - OO looks like it turned to Fisher-Price for its UI inspiration.

Posted by Annoyed at Thursday, March 23, 2006 07:33:47

My OpenOffice Complaints so far:

OOCalc Gripes
-Can't Paste a set of data in
-Weeknum function funkiness
-Selecting stuff is weird
-defaults to YY, not YYYY
-View settings affect ALL sheets everywhere

OOBase Gripes
-Only supports count(*)?
-Buggy
-QueryViewer gets confused about which columns to show

Posted by Hmph at Tuesday, March 28, 2006 07:09:13

Hello,

I also started using Open Office and yes, you are right it really sucks. I treid to write some macros and check documentation. They are writting how to do it, but if you try their example it won't even compile. So I will stick up to FrameMaker or Microsoft Word, they work.
Cao, Frenk

Posted by Frenk at Saturday, April 01, 2006 06:09:57

I just updated OO to 2.02 and I can't use the Writer anymore. While attempting to make a bulleted outline, soffice.bin freezes and uses 50% of my cpu, just from hitting enter. 2.0 didn't do it, and while the charts were pathetic and ridiculously difficult to configure, Writer worked great for me.

Posted by John at Thursday, May 04, 2006 14:11:08

oO Truely sucks and i dont see why they are encourraging people to use there software.

I mean they've got a very nice website and all... but they could at least stick a big word like "BETA" onto the software they are giving out for free.

That could make a lot of us understand that bugs are common with there software.

oO freezes on my PC when i use the right click menu... and that sucks cause i'm so used to using it.
And it's so ugly it looks like i'm not working on an XP pc, it has a very primitive UI, thats just ugly hello oO where in the year 2006 ya know... get started on better UI design.

oO has pushed me to look for anither word processor but which one ??? a free one ???

Posted by NeDolM at Tuesday, May 16, 2006 14:53:22

Ha Ha Ha, your all noobs. Open office is easy to use if you know how to use the computer. Anyone tried moding it?

Posted by LinPro at Thursday, June 08, 2006 05:13:34

OO 2 is a vaste improvment on 1 but it falls down on speed. I get the feeling that it was not compiled with fast code in mind.

However it is now being recomended to SMEs by business publications as a viable and cost effective alternative to M'$oft.

I'm counting on the increase from 2 to 3 being as good or better than the one from 1 to 2 in which case it will rock old gates clean out of the market... or at least be a fine and well rounded product.

Posted by Lord Matt at Wednesday, June 14, 2006 02:16:46

Hello am I missing something??!!
To everyone complaining about how it looks easy solution go and pay Mr Gates £300 and have a nice pretty interface.

It isn't perfect by any means but it's damn good for the money ;o)

Posted by andy at Friday, July 07, 2006 19:43:53

Sure it's free - but be prepared to take a hit in productivity. MS Office just hangs together much better and is faster and more stable. And, if you are using Linux, of course all that OLE stuff that is just plain missing ... it is for a reason that Linux / OOo adoption is hitting a wall.

Posted by Michael at Wednesday, August 23, 2006 02:00:19

Open Office is only good if you do the MOST BASIC editing you can with it.

Start really messing around with it and you will get nowhere.

HOw about adding an equation of a best fit line to a chart? Can you even do that?

What if I already created a chart and I want to change the legend? Is there an easy way? What about adding new data to a chart?(The manual says drag the new data onto the chart, but that is buggy and doesn't even work)
Wow... seriously people who say open office is great are people who haven't done anything other than type and print.

I mean my god, try to find an easy way to just make one sentence red, the next one blue, and the third one green. Even that is much more difficult than Word.
Bottom line Microsoft messes up a lot, but they did a good job on Office. Bottom line.

Posted by A six month linux user at Wednesday, September 20, 2006 08:39:19

Mutli click to select the sentence,
Alt+o, h to get to Character
Select the required colour.

I don't use Office so I can't compare for this function but it works for me and seems quite eay.

My daughter uses Office at school and says it is much more complicated to insert images and crop them in an M$Office document. So there is an element of swings and roundabouts I guess, but the M$ swing is very expensive and crashes my computer much more often!

Posted by Amy at Thursday, October 19, 2006 17:08:37

@Amy: just seeing you write "M$Office" makes me take your comment much less seriously. Also, how can you claim that Microsoft Office crashes more often if you don't even use it?

Posted by karma at Friday, October 20, 2006 03:46:27

You are right. I should have said "did crash".
The "M$" I used as shorthand for the closed source and non-free Microsoft Office, Which runs on the relatively insecure and and non-free operating system which, before I went to the open source and free GNU-Linux, crashed regularly.
It may be that the next version of the Microsoft Operating system will incorporate some of the native security and speed of bug fixes I now enjoy.
For those of you who want to use MS products all well and good, but the wealth of applications including choices of word processing, spreadsheet and other office components and the abilty to run servers on my home network, the ease of netwoking, the ability to run a networked personal video recorder based on an old pc etc. etc. etc. for which my only payment is to feed back the bugs, means I am very pleased with Open Source Software.
All of which diverges from the original point, I know, but OpenOffice is a part of that offering and I and my family use it all the time and are happy.
And I will always be able to read the documents it produces and so will you. Which is not the case with closed source formats from Microsoft or anyone else.

Posted by Amy Broadbent at Friday, October 20, 2006 05:06:03

@Amy: That's a more interesting comment.

I do like open source software, since they can often provide a cheaper alternative. And because they most often do the job rather well or better.

I use OpenOffice because I don't want to pay for e.g. Microsoft Office. I just don't use office often enough to make the payment worthwhile. However, if I would have to use an office suite daily, I'd probably cough up the money.

I disagree on Windows being less secure or less stable. Don't really want to go into that here, as this could turn into a pointless "yes it is" vs "no it isn't" discussion. I've been having little to no crashes using WinXP, and the crashes I did encounter either had to do with lousy drivers, bad memory or third-party applications. That's my experience.

My adventures into GNU-Linux land have never lasted very long, mostly because of the inability to configure the most simple things, like swapping the mouse buttons or configuring a dual monitor.

That's why I stick to Windows: it just works. (for me :))

Posted by karma at Saturday, October 21, 2006 02:22:05

From the KDE Menu (Like Start Menu) Select System Settings->Mouse Settings->Click on Left Handed.
Back to System Settings->Display->Click to enable Second Monitor Then Choose Clone of Primary Screen or Dual Screen Then Choose Whether 1 left of 2 etc....
If thats too difficult then I don't know how you manage with XP;-)

Posted by Amy Broadbent at Saturday, October 21, 2006 22:59:49

@Amy: Try kububtu Linux, you will not have any trouble.

The problem with oo isn't just oo's problem... its all Linux users problem because of the lack of a good, reliable, functional office suite... now a days Linux beats windows in every aspect, its even prettier, except for the fact that there is NO office suite good enough even for basic users.

The fact remains: the whole Linux community is waiting for oo to improve... even the ones that still use windows, its the last step.

Posted by Lisandro at Friday, November 03, 2006 19:12:41

My main problem with OO v.2 is its dysfunctional spellchecker. The damn thing simply does not work. It eats up the entire CPU and refuses to switch between languages. The whole process of adding new languages to the spellchecker and thesaurus is cumbersome. The older Sun StarOffice 8 is considerably smoother and more stable than OO 2, which, clearly, is a half-baked product. Very disappointing.

Posted by Ven at Friday, December 29, 2006 15:27:18

I have tried Open Office 2.1 and my first impression is that it does not work as well as the earlier version 1.x.
I live in Germany and here in Europe Lotus Smartsuite is cheap. It seems to work well with .doc and .xls files produced by Microsoft Office. If you don`t want to spend lots of money Lotus Smartsuite could
be the answer. OpenOffice 2.1 is so bad I can not use it. At least I can get everything done with Lotus software.

Posted by John Milbank at Thursday, January 04, 2007 05:07:18

I thought I'd begin to use OpenOffice Base for handling some data that was in a spreadsheet but would be much more suitable to store in a regular database.

I have just installed OpenOffice to 2.1 so it's the latest version released.

Well, I'm not able to properly import boolean values, and even when manually editing boolean columns in the table editor I get the values as BOOL99AN in the reports I create.

Apparently the issue with BOOL99AN has existed in a prior version and apparaently it rears it's ugly head again. It's bizarre.

I'm no newbie in these matters having designed report editors, SQL-frontends etc etc so I guess it's time to roll up my sleeves and get to work or give my well-earned cash to Microsoft or some other agent of "evil" ;-).

I was really looking forward to using OpenOffice for more than the ocassional simple text document but that's clearly not going to happen soon.

As soon as I try to use a bit more "advanced" functionality of OpenOffice I often get a crasch as a result. Then, trying to report the crash, describing what I was doing at the time of the crash, and then send the crash report, what happens? Nothing! The crash report tool just sits there with an hourglass cursor despite it clearly a minute before I gave it permission to connect through my firewall.

OpenOffice no work good. Me tired. Me go sleep now. Sigh!

Posted by Björn at Saturday, January 06, 2007 04:08:36