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Article #4393

Grumbles about StarOffice 5.0.

#4393
From: Victor Bien
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 00:00
53 lines
3293 bytes
  Sorry for this whinge but I write this to indicate why I think the
word processing facility of StarOffice is not good enough especially
for trying to win over people used to Windows computing.  The good
aspects, notably the ability to read a wide variety of foreign file
formats is compromised by these negatives.

* on my Warp3 Connect machine it leaks memory badly, ballooning out
  the swap file unacceptably after left running for a couple of 
  days.  This makes it essential to shut it down when not in use but
  waiting for the big package to fire up when required is 
  irritating;

* the style of help is too idiosyncratic and too *technically*
  orientated (all that stuff about macros).  It is so unhelpful you 
  tend to avoid using it. Perhaps there should be two types of help
  the technical and the end-user orientated;

* the file dialogue box is cumbersome to use.  You have to use too
  many double clicks to get to the folder you want going up the 
  filesystem tree. The way the box is arranged by DeScribe and
  Windows software is much better;

* you can't overlap windows after opening more than one window on a
  document the way you can in DeScribe or Word for Windows.  This
  makes cutting and pasting from one part of the document to another
  uncomfortably awkward.  You can open another window by using the
  open function rather than "splitting" a window but then the 
  second window is read-only.  Whether 5.1 has fixed this I don't
  know;

* the html code generated for a page with tables was of poor quality
  such that I finished up using an html editor to fix it all up
  afterward!

* the assumption that a file is a "binary" type if it can't work out
  from its filetype extension is far too simple an identification
  algorithm.

  There is a design aspect called the "affordance" of the devices of
a human/machine interface.  The affordance of the Mac is legendary
and the lack of affordance of DOS is also legendary.  Perhaps
StarOffice should get an affordance expert to work over the whole
package for the next release.  See "The frustration of a push-button
world by Harold Thimbleby (Prof of Information Technology U of
Stirling Scotland) Encyclopaedia Britannica Science Year Book 1993,
p. 202f and also the further reading list.

Victor Bien
VCB Computing Alternatives (R)
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From: vbien@ibm.net   (Victor Bien)
Subject: Grumbles about StarOffice 5.0.
Date: 1999/06/13
Message-ID: <3762db5d@dnews.tpgi.com.au>
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