Friday, July 1, 2005

OpenOffice Bites, Use Pirated MS Office

I am rather distraught any time I need to lauch a Microsoft Office document. From my perspective, Office is fabulously complex and I don't know how to use it (nor do I particularly care to spend time learning). I run Ubuntu linux, and today I played around for a few mintues with OpenOffice 2.0.

What a piece of shit. Granted, I'm using a pre-release version, but wow is it bad. First, the look-and-feel of the app is horrible. The fonts and colors for the file, edit, view... menus are completely off. The file selection dialog box is wrechedly ugly and confusing. If you have the perseverance to wait the full minute it takes for OOo to load, then load a spreadsheet, you are rewarded with the wonderful frustration ahead of you. First, you'll notice that the formatting doesn't look right. Yes yes, blahbidy blah proprietary fonts, blabidy Microsoft blah. I don't care. It looks like crap. Drag and drop of cells does not work. Drag and drop of information from one OOo window to another does not work. Copy and paste doesn't work the same. For an unexplicable reason some of the fields that have simple arithmatic fuctions are giving the wrong answer... 38% times (not plus) 0 equals, oh, that's right, $0.38. Now you go to save and it says that the formatting you did (I used a background color for table headers, changed the width of a column) is not compatible with the XLS format you're trying to save it as - and you should really save it as an OpenOffice format. No thanks - I would have used vi or HTML if I didn't have to modifiy and return this crap document in the first place. After all that, the document I ended up saving had macros for some god awful reason, and it ended up crashing Microsoft Excel on Windows.

Ryan's rating: thumbs down.

3 comments:

  1. This just in: Used Hyundai's don't cost much, but they suck. Just steal a BMW or Mercedes instead.

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  2. I agree. OpenOffice has retarded interface keyboard shortcuts and it doesnt have a clue what's going on with spreadsheets. It's like that guy that just got hired and you ask him about stuff and he gives you answers, but they're just things he read in a magazine article and he tries to sound like he knows what he's saying, but he doesn't. You should take OpenOffice Spreadsheet out back and shoot that mofuka, then the rest of OpenOffice will drink 40's to its death like it was a hero.

    Why do they always take one for them and one for their homies? Do you know how much revenue is poured onto the ground each year in 40s stock? There's going to be a beer shortage when the prohibition period returns and the makers of Colt and Steel Reserve are probably going to start a huge None For the Homies campaign.

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  3. Kinda like the twix campaign - "Two for me - none for you".

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