OpenOffice - WTF?



  • This goddamn shit keeps changing "CDs" to "Cds"  WTF?

    I found an option in the settings for "Words that start with two Capitals."  CDs is in that goddamn list.

    I know in Word, I can hot CTRL-Z to undo auto-correction shit.  In OpenOffice, it doesn't work the same.  It undoes my last edit, which has no effect, because it changed Cds to CDs which was autocorrected.  

    Also listed in that list is OOo.  It doesn't except that either.  You're not excepting the name of your own goddamn product.  What the hell is wrong with you people?

    Fuck you OpenOffice.

     

    Oh I finally fucking found it.  You have to uncheck a box if you don't want it to autocorrect words that begin with two capitals.  Why is this not on the same tab or BEFORE the tab that the exceptions is on?

    OOo, you fucking fail



  • I want to add that the forums linked in the help screens come up with a 404.  Good job.



  • I have to say, Microsoft Word really isn't that bad. It's complicated, but that's because it's a professional piece of software. Adding the ribbon was a pretty useless move, as it doesn't make the program more suitable for those who can only cope with WordPad (it's still freakishly complex), and those of us who actually knew how to use it, are thrown for an infinite loop.

    Never tried OOo, always sounded too bloated for me. Now that I no longer use a PII 333 with 512 MB RAM, I guess I could see what it does. I refused to install Office at home in Windows due to the tendency of it to mess up your PC (mostly Word) but I think Word Viewer (which I do have) is not a whole lot better. I finally found the hidden setting that stops it pwning .html files, and I've found some files that I can regsvr32 /u to stop it pwning .xml files.

    Word is a competent word processor, but it's long since got too big for its boots and thinks that it's a competent XML and HTML editor and screws up your configuration of those file types.



  • Does it also fail on MB turning into Mb?

    I got pwned for misspelling that on our website. But I use OOo to open docx because we're not allowed to have Office 2007 yet.



  •  The Real WTF is Lotus Word.



  • @Daniel Beardsmore said:

    Adding the ribbon was a pretty useless move, as it doesn't make the program more suitable for those who can only cope with WordPad

    Good thing then that they added the Ribbon to WordPad, too, in Windows 6.1 7.



  • Guys, aren't we already in the middle of another ribbon-versus-toolbar flamewar?



  • @Nyquist said:

     

    Does it also fail on MB turning into Mb?

    I got pwned for misspelling that on our website. But I use OOo to open docx because we're not allowed to have Office 2007 yet.

     

    You didn't think Microsoft would have solved that problem itself?



  • Both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org are far too bloated for my taste. I prefer Abiword these days, on those rare occasions I need to do write a document.



  • @tdb said:

    Both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org are far too bloated for my taste. I prefer Abiword these days, on those rare occasions I need to do write a document.

     

    You don't have an office job do you?



  • @dtech said:

    @Nyquist said:

     

    Does it also fail on MB turning into Mb?

    I got pwned for misspelling that on our website. But I use OOo to open docx because we're not allowed to have Office 2007 yet.

     

    You didn't think Microsoft would have solved that problem itself?

    Would be nice, but at work I have permission to install free software on my profile, but not to patch MS Office.
    :/



  • The best word processor I've ever used was by far ProWrite on the Amiga. It did exactly what I wanted it to do. It didn't try to guess at what I really wanted to do. It simply did what I wanted.

     Whenever I highlight text on any application program running under Windows, I constantly must fight what Microsoft thinks I really want to highlight. I usually end up having to delete character-by-character what I had wanted to highlight (and replace) and only then type its replacement.



  •  

    Would be nice, but at work I have permission to install free software on my profile, but not to patch MS Office. :/

     

    Well, there's TRWTF.



  • @derula said:

    Good thing then that they added the Ribbon to WordPad, too, in Windows 6.1 7.
    Speaking of ribbon in Windows 7, why is it visually so much different from ribbon in Office 2007?



  • @dtech said:

    @tdb said:

    Both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org are far too bloated for my taste. I prefer Abiword these days, on those rare occasions I need to do write a document.

     

    You don't have an office job do you?


    No .. he works in software development .. no need to write those pesky documents that contain things like design descriptions or documentation or any other sort of communication to another person.



  • @SilentRunner said:

    The best word processor I've ever used was by far ProWrite on the Amiga.


    In its heyday the best PC based word processor was Word Perfect. It was driven by keystrokes and not by menus (so the typists loved it), and when the going got tough you could do a "reveal codes" and hack the formatting directly.



  • @SilentRunner said:

     Whenever I highlight text on any application program running under Windows, I constantly must fight what Microsoft thinks I really want to highlight. I usually end up having to delete character-by-character what I had wanted to highlight (and replace) and only then type its replacement.

    you can turn off that behavior. it's hidden but doable. it's has a weird description like "select text around my selection."



  • @ender said:

    @derula said:
    Good thing then that they added the Ribbon to WordPad, too, in Windows 6.1 7.
    Speaking of ribbon in Windows 7, why is it visually so much different from ribbon in Office 2007?

    That's is the "improved" Ribbon which is also used in Office 2010 (well in 2010 it's also different now :p)


    http://www.codefear.com/wp-content/content/office-2010.png


  • @SilentRunner said:

    Whenever I highlight text on any application program running under Windows, I constantly must fight what Microsoft thinks I really want to highlight. I usually end up having to delete character-by-character what I had wanted to highlight (and replace) and only then type its replacement.
     

    The only application under Windows that does this (that I use anyway) is Office. What it does is when you drag off a word it selects the whole word, and from then on it also highlights every word you drag over. One way to get it to do what you without changing any settings is when you move off the first word and it selects it move the mouse back slightly. It'll then drop the selection back to what you actually selected. You can now carry on and it will just select the characters you want.



  • @Mithious said:

    @SilentRunner said:

    Whenever I highlight text on any application program running under Windows, I constantly must fight what Microsoft thinks I really want to highlight. I usually end up having to delete character-by-character what I had wanted to highlight (and replace) and only then type its replacement.
     

    The only application under Windows that does this (that I use anyway) is Office. What it does is when you drag off a word it selects the whole word, and from then on it also highlights every word you drag over. One way to get it to do what you without changing any settings is when you move off the first word and it selects it move the mouse back slightly. It'll then drop the selection back to what you actually selected. You can now carry on and it will just select the characters you want.

    I like the way most Linux applications work. If you single-click and drag, you select characters; double-click and drag to select words; triple-click and drag to select lines.



  • @tdb said:

    triple-click
     

    triple-click is fucked up and should die. We're not all spastic drug users with a sped-up sense of time and microsecond reflexes to match. I sometimes even get stuck double-clicking, but I grant that that's just me.

    @Mithious said:

    you move off the first word and it selects it move the mouse back slightly. It'll then drop the selection back to what you actually selected. You can now carry on and it will just select the characters you want.

    This works like a charm. Compares rather favourably to a triple-click.

     



  • @Nyquist said:

    @dtech said:

    @Nyquist said:

     

    Does it also fail on MB turning into Mb?

    I got pwned for misspelling that on our website. But I use OOo to open docx because we're not allowed to have Office 2007 yet.

     

    You didn't think Microsoft would have solved that problem itself?

    Would be nice, but at work I have permission to install free software on my profile, but not to patch MS Office.
    :/

    @Nyquist said:
    Would be nice, but at work I have permission to install free software on my profile, but not to patch MS Office.
    :/

    Contact your local system administrator? (Or whatever the hell that message says when you install something without sufficient rights)



  • @tdb said:

    Both Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org are far too bloated for my taste. I prefer Abiword these days, on those rare occasions I need to do write a document.

    Agreed.  Abiword is good enough for 95% of my word processing needs and it is lightning fast and doesn't have so many complex/annoying features I won't ever use.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Mithious said:

    you move off the first word and it selects it move the mouse back slightly. It'll then drop the selection back to what you actually selected. You can now carry on and it will just select the characters you want.

    This works like a charm. Compares rather favourably to a triple-click.

    I'd go nuts if I had to wiggle the mouse around like that when I want to select stuff. Another fine example of how the same UI is not optimal for everyone, despite what some people try to preach.



  • @tdb said:

    I'd go nuts if I had to wiggle the mouse around like that when I want to select stuff. Another fine example of how the same UI is not optimal for everyone, despite what some people try to preach.

     

    The "wiggle" is perfectly acceptable to me.  The problem with it is that the beginning of the selection moved to include the whole word and it doesn'trevert back to the character you started in with a simple wiggle.  The have a selection start in the middle of a word and end in the middle of a word you need to follow this proceedure:

     1.  Start dragging your selection where you want it to start.

    2. When you get to a new word it will select the entire word

    3. drag back into the first word, and the selection will revert to character mode.

    4. Now drag to where you want the selection to end.

     

    At least you don't have to finish with a wiggle since dragging back to the original word has made the selection permanently character based.



  • I like the way most Linux applications work. If you single-click and drag, you select characters; double-click and drag to select words; triple-click and drag to select lines.

    XP here does the same? :P


  •  Tools->Options->Editing->Uncheck 'Automatically select whole words' (freely translated from my Swedish version)



  • @tdb said:

    I'd go nuts if I had to wiggle the mouse around like that when I want to select stuff. Another fine example of how the same UI is not optimal for everyone, despite what some people try to preach.

     

    As has been pointed out already, you can turn the feature off entirely, and if you only want to do it temporarily, you can press and hold ctrl+shift any time while dragging (if it's already altered your selection then it will change it back).

    So either wiggle, use modifier keys, or turn the option off.  What more do you want?



  • @Aaron said:

    So either wiggle, use modifier keys, or turn the option off.  What more do you want?

     

    I'm the biggest Microsoft defender here, but having options and modifier keys does not make up for having a bad default (NOTE: I'm not saying the default is bad, I don't know enough to know that).  Most users (dare I say, almost all) don't know about that modifier key, nor that they can change that behavior in the settings.  The default will be the most widely use, and should be the best decision for the widest audience. 



  • @tster said:

    I'm the biggest Microsoft defender here, but having options and modifier keys does not make up for having a bad default (NOTE: I'm not saying the default is bad, I don't know enough to know that).  Most users (dare I say, almost all) don't know about that modifier key, nor that they can change that behavior in the settings.  The default will be the most widely use, and should be the best decision for the widest audience. 

     

    The default makes perfect sense.  If your selection spans multiple words then it's extremely likely that you meant to select the entire words, and even if you didn't, it will still probably take you less time to just delete the entire words and retype a few extra characters than to use very fine-grained mouse motions to select the perfect number of characters.  If your selection is entirely within a single word, then you probably only meant to select certain characters, which again is the default action in that case.

    Of course, for programmers writing things other than documents - code, hypertext, that sort of thing - these defaults don't always make sense because there may be all sorts of weird punctuation, whitespace characters, and so on, that do not make any sense within the context of a document written in plain English.  But said "power users" should know how to use modifier keys or change program options.

    People complaining about this particular Word default comprise another example of programmers and IT people not having any clue what kind of UI really works for ordinary users.  They don't understand that a lot of people don't use computers as heavily as they do or haven't been using them for as long or from as young an age, and therefore literally don't have the physical coordination required to do precise dragging or initiate a double-click-drag.  Even many heavier users just don't have great hand-eye coordination.  These people aren't corner cases, they're the general case.



  • @dhromed said:

    @Mithious said:

    you move off the first word and it selects it move the mouse back slightly. It'll then drop the selection back to what you actually selected. You can now carry on and it will just select the characters you want.

    This works like a charm. Compares rather favourably to a triple-click.

    And, by this you mean, "rarely and unexpectedly, but the times you really remember?"  Or something else?  I ask, because some people say Windows is flaky and others say it's solid; I'm uncertain which you are stating.

    Note also that X Windows allows one to cycle through the three selection modes by additional multi-clicking, in case you mis-count.  Note that this doesn't work on the Linux console; gpm is apparently gimp - quadruple click cancels the original select and starts a new (single-click) selection.



  • Any chance that you (or anyone else on these boards) know whether this automatic word selection using the cursor is an option in OOo Writer and how to enable it? I apologize in advance for wasting anyone's time, and I have posted over in the OOo forums, but no answers are coming. I'm kind of tearing my hair out. It will likely drive me back to using frigging MSWord.



  • @Sowana said:

    Any chance that you (or anyone else on these boards) know whether this automatic word selection using the cursor is an option in OOo Writer and how to enable it?
    Start your selection by double-clicking, then drag as usual.



  •  Least amount of clicks wins, saves coworkers nerves.



  • You're a peach! Many thanks.



  • @ender said:

    @Sowana said:
    Any chance that you (or anyone else on these boards) know whether this automatic word selection using the cursor is an option in OOo Writer and how to enable it?
    Start your selection by double-clicking, then drag as usual.
     

    You hear that?

    You're a soggy fruit!  :D



  • @ender said:

    @derula said:
    Good thing then that they added the Ribbon to WordPad, too, in Windows 6.1 7.
    Speaking of ribbon in Windows 7, why is it visually so much different from ribbon in Office 2007?

    It's one of those little WTFs that comes out of Microsoft from time to time: the Office and Windows teams both suffer from not-invented-here syndrome. As a result, Office doesn't use the standard Windows controls (in *nix terms, they use a different widget library from everyone else) and Office apps look and act slightly differently from every other Windows app.



  • @Carnildo said:

    @ender said:
    @derula said:
    Good thing then that they added the Ribbon to WordPad, too, in Windows 6.1 7.
    Speaking of ribbon in Windows 7, why is it visually so much different from ribbon in Office 2007?
    It's one of those little WTFs that comes out of Microsoft from time to time: the Office and Windows teams both suffer from not-invented-here syndrome. As a result, Office doesn't use the standard Windows controls (in *nix terms, they use a different widget library from everyone else) and Office apps look and act slightly differently from every other Windows app.
     

    I don't know how to say this, but the combo box for fonts in wordpad is making my penis hard:

    1. Wider than the actual combo box (thank you god, I hate combo boxes for this)

    2. Can change the length of the drop down.  Nice for some boxes which don't show very many by default.

    3. A button at the bottom to take you to the "Fonts" folder.  I could see this being VERY useful in many apps.  For instance, show a default filtered list and have a button on the bottom "Show All X" to add the other items to the combo box.

    4. A context menu on items in the drop down (doesn't apply specifically to the items, but I assume it could)



  •  I'd be happy if Windows actually contained a proper fucking font viewer. Is that in 7 yet?



  • @dhromed said:

     I'd be happy if Windows actually contained a proper fucking font viewer. Is that in 7 yet?

    Different fonts are for hippie faggots.  On my computer everything is sans-serif monospace, just as God and Alan Turing intended.



  • It wouldn't be so bad if the programs that used fonts a lot had proper viewers, but they don't. You can't really compare a fairly small hinted Cleartype preview to Photoshop's smooth AA.



  • @dhromed said:

    It wouldn't be so bad if the programs that used fonts a lot had proper viewers, but they don't. You can't really compare a fairly small hinted Cleartype preview to Photoshop's smooth AA.

     

    I think Word 2007 does pretty well.  If you hover your mouse over a font it will temporarily change the selected text to that font.



  • @morbiuswilters said:

    @dhromed said:

     I'd be happy if Windows actually contained a proper fucking font viewer. Is that in 7 yet?

    Different fonts are for hippie faggots.  On my computer everything is sans-serif monospace, just as God and Alan Turing intended.

    Blasphemer!  von Neumann proved mathematically that Comic Sans is the One True Font.


  • @tster said:

    If you hover your mouse over a font it will temporarily change the selected text to that font.
     

    That's pretty good. Zenith thumb!



  • Alan Turing was what you call "faggot". I don't know about God, though.



  • @alegr said:

    Alan Turing was what you call "faggot". I don't know about God, though.
     

    A bundle of sticks?



  • @Zemm said:

    @alegr said:

    Alan Turing was what you call "faggot". I don't know about God, though.
     

    A bundle of sticks?

     Or iron bars?



  • @dhromed said:

     I'd be happy if Windows actually contained a proper fucking font viewer. Is that in 7 yet?

     

    What exactly is wrong with the Windows font viewer again?



  • @Aaron said:

    @dhromed said:

     I'd be happy if Windows actually contained a proper fucking font viewer. Is that in 7 yet?

     

    What exactly is wrong with the Windows font viewer again?

     

    dhromed feels that it doesn't fuck properly.



  • @Someone You Know said:

    @Aaron said:

    @dhromed said:

     I'd be happy if Windows actually contained a proper fucking font viewer. Is that in 7 yet?

     

    What exactly is wrong with the Windows font viewer again?

     

    dhromed feels that it doesn't fuck properly.

     

    It needs to pray to the God of Fuck more often then.


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