Friday, April 27, 2007

OpenOffice is a nannying piece of ****

From the "preventing the user from ever making a mistake by relentless confirmation dialogs every time he/she tries to do something" department, here's a screenshot from OpenOffice.org 2.0's spreadsheet. All I did was select a cell and press the "delete" key to delete its contents:

Yes, for the the love of God, I do want to delete the cell I just told you to delete, you ****ing [long chain of expletives deleted].

Honestly, what is this dialog supposed to accomplish? If I decide afterwards that I didn't want to delete whatever was in that cell, I'll use the Undo feature to restore it. (Maybe undo doesn't work in OpenOffice?) Even Microsoft Excel gets this right! Yes, software from Microsoft! It makes me want to vomit with rage (to borrow a line from the Simpsons.) Don't even get me started about the gratuitous incompatibilities between OOo Calc and MS Excel.

The only reason I was even using OOo in the first place was that the Windows version of Gnumeric was having trouble with the =chitest function, and I'm too much of a cheapskate (and open source weirdo) to buy MS Office for my laptop.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The other thing I don't like about OpenOffice is the fact that they use Anti Aliasing for their fonts. I love the fact that it's Java, but they need to change that. My entire Ubuntu installation looks beautiful with the sub-pixel smoothing for LCDs in my fonts, but when I open any document or any window dealing with OpenOffice, the Anti Aliasing just kills the beauty, and makes it suck.

I still have it on here, but I disabled it in the menu. For now I use AbiWord and Gnumeric. Also, another thing Gnumeric has over OO, Gnumeric can add a trendline and equation to a plot chart. OO can't do that, and I need that functionality for Chemistry and Biology labs.

So I threw OO away for AbiWord and Gnumeric. Also, they play a lot nicer with the global menu than OO, same situation with Epiphany browser (a very nice web browser) compared to Firefox. The global menu is a Mac-Menu type hack for Gnome. It's pretty nice, saves space in the window you are using, so you can view a little more in your documents or a web page. I think this works with Eclipse. Not sure, I'll have to try it out. The global menu can be found at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/global_menu. I've used it for some time, and I do like how it works. It makes use of the upper panel which I like as well.