After testing OpenOffice for four days and now spending a couple of hours to get my work extracted from the unreleting claws of your software, I have concluded that it is a piece of nicely decorated useless junk. That you still distribute it without a red blinking “This software will eat your data. And it will not even belch after doing it.”-warning is bordering on intentional neglect of other peoples work and time spent. Clearly, this software has only been tested by writing two-page Linux-propaganda pamphlets, but never for serious stuff. Excuse me while I will ignore all “Linux to the Desktop”-phantasies for the next half decade.
A little extra information about how, why and maybe what exactly happened to your data would make this less a helpless rant against a software package and more of a critique of a flawed application in a way. Now it’s just “Your software sucks, I won’t say why, but it sucks -lalalala I can’t hear you”. This is just like saying “Opel sucks as cars, man I tell you they drive not as good as Mercedes” and that’s that.
What happened to your data?
What did you attempt to do?
What kind of document was it? (filesize, calc sheet?, text? -how should one know that)
Maybe what you’ve experienced is a common bug and people would be able to help you get over it but not with the lack of info “as is”. And btw. four days? It took me more than that just to grasp all the differences in interface to M$ 0ffice. After a week or so I found my way around and now I (almost) know how to get it to do what I want it to -and that’s more than I could ever expect to get out of Word or Excel.
Well in defense of the Software I have to say, that I wrote my whole diploma thesis using OO. It was quite messy sometimes, but in the end it worked out very well. So, there…
=)
markus: I tried to edit an Pages document with embedded JPEGs that I imported as a Word-File as OO does not like .rtfd. After I managed to import it with graphics (it is not that you would expect JPEGs to be particularly rocket science, but apparently it is…), I edited the document for four days. During this time I had 6 crashes upon saving (no, my HD has enough space and works otherwise perfectly well), 3 times the recovery failed. Editing was a pain, as correct cursor position must be still black magic and timely reaction to clicks seems to be something that I can not expect on a 1.2 GHz Ubuntu driven computer. Setting of font sizes yielded rather arbitrary results. Upon trying to export the document (35 pages, 16 embedded JPEGs), the mess began in earnest. The exported Word files (yes, I tried all available formats) were neither correctly readable by Word nor Pages. Table broken, graphics missing, font-sizes broken, TOC a mess. I am perfectly convinced that you will come with the lame excuse that this is of course all the fault of Word or me not understanding how to run a word processor, but that will certainly not change my verdict.
lol
That last sentence was truly amusing. No I will definitely NOT bring any excuse in favor of flaw-riddled OpenOffice I myself had some really annoying crashes in the beginning. Now I can clearly see why you were so angry in the first place. I just tried to gather some more information about your problem if it’s of any use I don’t know but personally I always found other people asking me about my problems somewhat soothing in effect even though the problem persisted. What version of OpenOffice did you use? I had a very bad experience with 2.0 but once I had updated to 2.1 many things improved. I never wanted to defend OpenOffice because I am not a software-fanboy (I’d only do that for GNOME or Linux) but to understand why you were so terribly mad at that piece of software :) Did you try to export the original .rtf files to some other format and edit those with OO?
And because you have already judged me, here one for the record: “Stop complaining, it’s free” ;)