July 15, 2008 at 08:00Victory over OpenOffice?
No matter what the proponents of free / open software say, life increasingly convinces me that a truly good, well-thought out product can not be obtained for free.
Here is a simple example of just such a trifle. Objective: swap two paragraphs with different styles.
In Word, this is done elementarily - select, cut, paste into a new place. We try to do the same in OO. Select ...
Cut ...
Oops, what is it? The next paragraph suddenly took on the style of just removed. By the way, the font was slightly changed compared to the original and this change remained in place - it turned out some kind of hybrid. But the name of the style (top left) is now “Heading 1”. It is here that it is used.
Ok, paste the cut paragraph into the right place:
And now we’ll have to change the style that has left - and the victory is ours. Is it only a victory?
Of course, this is a trifle. But when you need to swap a couple of dozens of such pairs, you start to think about whether M $ is so bad and how it is painted ... After all, it’s such little things that determine the user's attitude to the tool. And at the same time they show the developer’s attitude towards the user.
By the way, when preparing screenshots, GIMP was used, in which about the same little things greatly slowed down the work. In Photoshop, it would turn out an order of magnitude faster.
Maybe someone knows a quick way to swap two paragraphs in OO? In two clicks - as in Word?
Update: the cause of the problem was found. She's in a weird tying of styles in OO. We look at the picture:
Guess what you need to click now to delete an empty paragraph along with the style attached to it?
In MCO, the correct answer would be “delete” - it will remove the bold separator and, together with it, the heading 1 style.
In OO, the bold style is tied to a completely ordinary separator at the end of the previous paragraph. Which looks very different. There is no visual clue that it is the Heading 1 style that is attached to it. This is the very trifle that the creators did not think about. You need to click "backspace".
By the way, as a side effect of this approach, another problem arises: if the previous paragraph does not exist, then it becomes impossible to maintain the correct styles.
Here is a simple example of just such a trifle. Objective: swap two paragraphs with different styles.
In Word, this is done elementarily - select, cut, paste into a new place. We try to do the same in OO. Select ...
Cut ...
Oops, what is it? The next paragraph suddenly took on the style of just removed. By the way, the font was slightly changed compared to the original and this change remained in place - it turned out some kind of hybrid. But the name of the style (top left) is now “Heading 1”. It is here that it is used.
Ok, paste the cut paragraph into the right place:
And now we’ll have to change the style that has left - and the victory is ours. Is it only a victory?
Of course, this is a trifle. But when you need to swap a couple of dozens of such pairs, you start to think about whether M $ is so bad and how it is painted ... After all, it’s such little things that determine the user's attitude to the tool. And at the same time they show the developer’s attitude towards the user.
By the way, when preparing screenshots, GIMP was used, in which about the same little things greatly slowed down the work. In Photoshop, it would turn out an order of magnitude faster.
Maybe someone knows a quick way to swap two paragraphs in OO? In two clicks - as in Word?
Update: the cause of the problem was found. She's in a weird tying of styles in OO. We look at the picture:
Guess what you need to click now to delete an empty paragraph along with the style attached to it?
In MCO, the correct answer would be “delete” - it will remove the bold separator and, together with it, the heading 1 style.
In OO, the bold style is tied to a completely ordinary separator at the end of the previous paragraph. Which looks very different. There is no visual clue that it is the Heading 1 style that is attached to it. This is the very trifle that the creators did not think about. You need to click "backspace".
By the way, as a side effect of this approach, another problem arises: if the previous paragraph does not exist, then it becomes impossible to maintain the correct styles.