[ale] A Real Sad Loss for Open Source in the Atlanta Area

[Jim Kinney]

On Sat, Oct 16, 2010 at 8:49 PM, Michael Potter <michael at potter.name> wrote:

> I am sending this so this thread has some balance.


I don't see why this thread needs "balance". It's not an attempt at being a
"neutral" news report.

>
> Here is why I prefer to use Word and Excel rather than OOo:
> 1) I get Word documents from my clients and I do not want to deal with
> differences no matter how minor.
>

bummer. The more people use tools that support and encourage data access
freedom, the better off we all are.  Microsoft has a well known history of
being total $hit$ when it comes to freedom of access.

>
> 2) I get Excel documents with financial formulas and do not want to take a
> chance that some rounding rule is different or numbers are displayed
> differently.   They are also crazy about colorizing the cells to categorize
> data and embedding images that I do want to take a chance is different.
>

As a scientist, I don't fully trust numerical analysis from any source until
I have reviewed and tested the validity of the operations. What happens when
you find a bug in a procedure in M$orrifice? You can report it but does it
get acted on? If it will impact their bottom line: yes; otherwise bugger
off. With Libre/OpenOffice, as well as every other Open Source application I
have ever reported a bug on, I usually get an email back in a short while
acknowledging the bug report followed by a trail of emails from various
involved people from the section managers through the main developers until
the issue is resolved. I have often been sent a patch or a link to a new
build to verify myself that the work has been completed to my satisfaction.

>
> 3) OOo starts slower than Word and Excel.
>

OOo runs on every platform on the planet and doesn't have autoloading libs
buried in the OS like M$Orrifice does.

>
> 4) I find Word help to be much more helpful.
>
> I was a Open Office user BEFORE I migrated to Word/Excel.  Before that I
> used Word Perfect.
>
> One client is making use of OOo for some of their employees.  Specifically
> in place of Excel for opening .csv files and other simple docs.  These are
> document consumers, not generators.
>
> I wish OpenOffice the best, but the only way I will start to use it is if
> my clients are using it.
>

As a consultant, I ran M$Orrifice along side OOo for years. My clients ran
M$ until I showed them how _EVERYTHING_ they did in word/excel could be done
in OOo usually just as well and often from a more logical perspective. The
most difficult part is the button/tab layout differences. There's a
different thinking process between the two. Most of my clients found OOo to
make more sense once they got the hang of things.

There was a major fubar issue when a client did a big spreadsheet with
multiple pages and pretty colors hit save and send. Their recipient got an
ods file and exploded about incompatibility issues, blah, blah, blah in a
total tirade fit on a seriously tight time crunch. So my client had
forgotten to "save as M$". They did so and resent and all was fine. Later
they bought a version of M$Orrifice to be a backup in the office. Same
recipient pitched a new fit when they opened a "save as" file in M$Orrifice,
saved it again and sent it. The recipient was not running the same version
of M$ crap and had the exact same problem again (and the same tantrum).

One example of many.

For the "sort by background color" issue that came up earlier in the thread,
an OOo trick is to use styles defined by data types and/or operational
methods and/or values. "format" -> "conditional formatting" has a dialog for
this process. This will autogenerate background colors, etc based on the
cell contents. Using this coupled with an intermediate sheet of sorted data
to order the output into a new sheet should give the desired "all blue data
here and all green data there" results.

I've always been amazed at how people will abuse a spreadsheet into acting
like a database and a page formator...  :-)

>
> --
> Michael Potter
>
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>


-- 
-- 
James P. Kinney III
I would rather stumble along in freedom than walk effortlessly in chains.
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