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Article #4393Grumbles about StarOffice 5.0.
From: Victor Bien
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 00:00
Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 00:00
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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) Employing network marketing concepts to promote OS/2 The network is the channel (apologise to Sun). Use and help promote OS/2 to your friends and associates and teach them to do the same!
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X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 112d6c,77d160ff6bd1394d,start X-Google-Attributes: gid112d6c,public X-Google-Thread: 10a752,77d160ff6bd1394d,start X-Google-Attributes: gid10a752,public From: vbien@ibm.net (Victor Bien) Subject: Grumbles about StarOffice 5.0. Date: 1999/06/13 Message-ID: <3762db5d@dnews.tpgi.com.au> X-Deja-AN: 488902097 X-Original-NNTP-Posting-Host: 203.26.27.50 X-Complaints-To: abuse@telstra.net X-Trace: wa.nnrp.telstra.net 929225585 203.12.160.33 (Sun, 13 Jun 1999 08:13:05 EST) Organization: VCB Computing Alternatives (R) Reply-To: vbien@ibm.net (Victor Bien) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 13 Jun 1999 08:13:05 EST Newsgroups: comp.os.os2.apps,aus.computers.os2