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NeoOffice :: View topic - My suggestions for improvements; typos
My suggestions for improvements; typos
 
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lobosolo
Blue Pill


Joined: Oct 15, 2008
Posts: 3

PostPosted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 5:38 pm    Post subject: My suggestions for improvements; typos

1. Form controls is under View not Format as stated in the Help file.

2. spreadsheet: control-D for fill ... I shouldn't have to go to the menu to do this (yes, this is like Excel).

3. spreadsheet: an easier way of making dropdown menus! It looks like I need to make a form just to put in a dropdown menu.

4. writer: an expression for paragraph marks ... probably ^p so that I can find and replace paragraph marks. Look at Pages ... it does it really well.

5. writer: error – on the find and replace box, once you click more options then it changes to “less options” ... this is grammatically incorrect. Should be “fewer options”.

Thanks for listening!
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yoxi
Cipher


Joined: Sep 07, 2004
Posts: 1799
Location: Dawlish, Devon

PostPosted: Wed Oct 15, 2008 11:51 pm    Post subject:

2. you can assign key combos to the individual fills already through Tools::Customise in the Keyboard tab. It's not immediately obvious where to find them, as the items you want to assign are in the Category Edit, but they're just called Up/Down/Left/Right.

- padmavyuha
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Thu Oct 16, 2008 12:17 am    Post subject: Re: My suggestions for improvements; typos

lobosolo wrote:
4. writer: an expression for paragraph marks ... probably ^p so that I can find and replace paragraph marks. Look at Pages ... it does it really well.


This is already there but may not be obvious. There really are no "paragraph marks" in NeoOffice or OpenOffice.org (which NeoOffice is based on). Instead, they are new lines.

You can search for new lines by selecting the Edit :: Find and Replace menu and in the dialog that appears, click on the More Options button and check the Regular Expressions checkbox. Then, the Search For field, type the "$" character to indicate new line. For example, if you put only the "$" character in the Search For field and leave the Replace With field empty and replace all, all paragraphs will be combined into a single paragraph.

As for items 1 and 5, we are only a two person, donation funded project so our limited funding and developer resources force us to rely on the help documentation and error text that is written by Sun Microsystems (the company that develops OpenOffice.org) and translated by the OpenOffice.org volunteers. So, the best way to lobby for this to be fixed is to file a bug in the OpenOffice.org issue tracker to get it on the radar of the core OpenOffice.org developers and if they fix the bug, the new behavior will get included in a future release of NeoOffice:

http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/pre_submission.html

Note : our advice is to not mention NeoOffice as mentioning NeoOffice may possibly cause OOo volunteers to preemptively close it without actually reviewing your bug.

You should file items 1 and 5 agains OpenOffice.org 3.0 (the latest release of OpenOffice.org and the release that the next release of NeoOffice will be based on) as that release's help stilll incorrectly lists the Forms toolbar submenu under the Insert menu. But, like NeoOffice 2.2.5, it is in the View :: Toolbars menu.

Patrick
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lobosolo
Blue Pill


Joined: Oct 15, 2008
Posts: 3

PostPosted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 4:58 pm    Post subject:

Done ... submitted them to the OO group.

I thought about mapping out the keys after I made the post. Yes, I can figure out how to do it but most people either can't or don't want to. Let's face it, these requests come from my long experience with Excel and I use them frequently. Others making the switch will look for them too.

The point is that if we want more people to drop MSOffice for NeoOffice, then there are just some things that need be done easily. Doing fills, inserting dates, and making dropdown menus shouldn't take a lot of time digging around.

I imported a spreadsheet from Excel and want to change the items in a dropdown menu ... I still haven't figured that one out.
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pluby
The Architect
The Architect


Joined: Jun 16, 2003
Posts: 11949

PostPosted: Fri Oct 17, 2008 5:21 pm    Post subject:

lobosolo wrote:
The point is that if we want more people to drop MSOffice for NeoOffice, then there are just some things that need be done easily. Doing fills, inserting dates, and making dropdown menus shouldn't take a lot of time digging around.


That has never been our goal. Sure, there are some groups who who want to destroy Microsoft Office, but we think Microsoft Office on the Mac is a very high feature product. Our goals are much simpler and more focussed: providing a reasonably compatible, but not identical, office suite for free.

As a famous economist said, there is no free lunch and open source software like NeoOffice is no exception. If people are looking for a free clone of Word, Excel, etc., they are not going to find it as it does not exist. Why? Because there is a real cost to all software whether free or not.

A few projects are lucky in that a benevolent Fortune 500 company funds all costs like Google does for Firefox. However, since there is no such benefactor for NeoOffice (and Sun Microsystems really only funds a tiny portion of what Microsoft funds Office), users of the open source office suites may not have a monetary cost, but there is a real cost in that users get a reduced feature set, no professional testing staff, and peer support.

Through the generous donations of a small percentage of our users, we can provide a very stable product with rapid support for 500,000 users but it definitely won't result in a clone of Microsoft Office. As such, like when choosing any software product, each user must decide whether the cost savings is worth the inconvenience/frustration of learning to adapt their workflow to a product.

If adapting to NeoOffice is not worth it for some people, then we have no issue with people spending $150 or more for Microsoft Office. In such cases, NeoOffice has still served a good purpose in that those people had a choice to compare to.

Patrick
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