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Here's an article you can show to others.
http://lifehacker.com/battle-of-the-office-suites-microsoft-office-and-libre-1147940828
Hi 
Any chance of passing this on to the marketing list?
Has the article about the school been passed on that way yet? If not then could someone pass on both links to them?
Regards from
Tom
Tom Davies wrote:
Any chance of passing this on to the marketing list?
Feel free.
"James Knott":
Here's an article you can show to others.
http://lifehacker.com/battle-of-the-office-suites-microsoft-office-and-libre-1147940828
What a ridiculous article. The LO suite inadequacy is clear to any who worked with it more than 15 minutes. The reason for this is implementing features by an order from Sun/Oracle/RH/whatever or by cargo-cult feature transfer. It is clear that no one actually did their work with it by themselves.
Urmas wrote:
"James Knott":
Here's an article you can show to others.
http://lifehacker.com/battle-of-the-office-suites-microsoft-office-and-libre-1147940828What a ridiculous article. The LO suite inadequacy is clear to any who
worked with it more than 15 minutes. The reason for this is
implementing features by an order from Sun/Oracle/RH/whatever or by
cargo-cult feature transfer. It is clear that no one actually did
their work with it by themselves.
Dang. I left my shovel down in my car.
Yeah, bad troll is truly terrible. Someone should teach him how to
troll.
FUD spreading M$ fanboy.
"Paul":
Yeah, bad troll is truly terrible.
Meanwhile you could work on a feature parity with Microsoft Word 2.0, from 1991.
The think I've learned about features is that it doesn't matter how many a software program has, as long as it has the one that *I* need. LO has the features I need. In some cases MSW does not. For example (and this is truly minor), LO allows me to control widows and orphans separately, which I appreciate since widows aren't nearly the problem that orphans are. Last I checked, Word only had one setting that controlled both. A simple little feature that I like.
I'm sure there are other features that Word has that others need. But, for my needs, LO works just fine.
Oh, and btw, it has the greatest feature of all; guilt free installation on any computer I want.
Virgil
And, of course, I think I got that backwards. Orphans aren't a problem, Widows can be.
As I understand it, an orphan is the first line of a paragraph alone at the bottom of the page, and a widow is the last line of a paragraph at the top of a page. A widow can be as small as one word, while an orphan will aways extend the entire line length.
Virgil
Now a productive use of time would have been to tell us what the one feature you would like to have which existed in Word 2.0 in 1991 and doesn't exist in LO.
Werner
Hi
I had one person say they "gave up on" LibreOffice when they asked about how to switch off insert mode and no-one here knew how to do that through the menus. I must admit i didn't see the question and doubt the validity of whether they really did ask here. Also they weren't happy with the idea of pressing the "insert" key on their keyboard. Apparently MS Office has a 3 clicks solution to it and we (allegedly) didn't give a suitably long-winded equivalent.
Then another person grumbled about how the UI looks so old now, compared to the shiny ribbon-bar. They then said they hated the ribbon-bar because they could never find anything they needed on it unless it was a feature they used all the time. However they still wanted to know why LO didn't have a ribbon-bar and asked me how long before it would get one.
When faced with morons such as that i think the best advice is to just leave them to it. Get on with helping other people instead. Sometimes the gentlest nudge in the right direction is enough. Sometimes you can see that people really are trying and are going to break-through but other times you just know that people are purely looking to create problems and then blame them on you. So, walk on by.
Regards from
Tom
"Werner F. Bruhin":
Now a productive use of time would have been to tell us what the one
feature you would like to have which existed in Word 2.0 in 1991 and doesn't exist in LO.
Paragraphs longer than 65k characters?
Custom languages?
Normal view?
(Working) multiple indexes?
"Paul":
Yeah, bad troll is truly terrible.
Meanwhile you could work on a feature parity with Microsoft Word 2.0, from 1991.
The think I've learned about features is that it doesn't matter how many a software program has, as long as it has the one that *I* need. LO has the features I need. In some cases MSW does not. For example (and this is truly minor), LO allows me to control widows and orphans separately, which I appreciate since widows aren't nearly the problem that orphans are. Last I checked, Word only had one setting that controlled both. A simple little feature that I like.
+1 - This is true of any software package; does do what the user needs not whether it has features that the user will never use.
I would submit for most users that features they need in an office suite were available in the major office suites since the early 90's. This is the marketing conumdrum MS faces; to find must have features that almost all users would pay for in a new version.
I'm sure there are other features that Word has that others need. But, for my needs, LO works just fine.
Oh, and btw, it has the greatest feature of all; guilt free installation on any computer I want.
+1 - An often forgetten feature; no limits on the number of installs or other restrictions on the user.
"There is some disagreement about the definitions of widow and orphan; what one source calls a widow the other calls an orphan."
Brian Barker
Really? You want to be able to write a 20-page PARAGRAPH? I'm not sure even James Joyce would have been up to that task. Now show me the person who's going to read it!
I can see why Microsoft might not want to devote resources to setting a reasonable limit on paragraph size, but since all the formatting information sits in the pilcrow at the end of each paragraph, I would not be shocked if suddenly the font changes to 72-point Arial Black Bold somewhere in the middle of the mega-graph. If this happens, you probably wouldn't be able to re-apply the Normal style either.
Urmas presumably would angrily phone Microsoft to demand an answer: the tech support person (after rolling her eyes and stifling a chuckle) would calmly suggest "Have you tried putting in a hard return somewhere before the font changes?"
Remember what your English teacher taught you (I suspect this is true in most languages, too; even "custom languages"): Paragraphs are groups of sentences that "deals with one point or gives the words of one speaker." (http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/paragraph)
Michael McCallister
who strings sentences and paragraphs together for a living
The standard for typing speed is 5 characters per word. For 65K characters is roughly 13K words. A paragraph this long would definitely need some editting. An English composition teacher would have a field day with the red pen.
If I recall correctly, StarOffice had the widow/orphan designations opposite from OpenOffice. I could be misremembering that, but I do seem to remember some discrepancy between versions of the programs over the years.
The way I heard it explained is that an "orphan has a future but no past, and a widow has a past, but no future."
Virgil
By profession, I am a lawyer. I once had an opponent who wrote a 20 page brief, most of which consisted of a single (badly composed) paragraph. Fortunately the judge didn't want to read it either as I won the case.
Virgil
I heard that in some countries it is actually legal requirement that
stenography from court case is to be written without any paragraph breaks.
And even if this is not true, there is no point in turning limitation into
strength. LO Writer does not allow paragraphs longer than certain size,
period. If this limitation has been discovered, there was someone that
actually needed longer paragraphs for whatever reason.
I think custom language might be somehow valid point, too. Maybe not entire
language, but definitely wordbook. If you write a novel, you don't want you
character names to be underlined by spell checker. But when you write article
to local newspaper, you want the same words to be marked as mistakes.
So there is need for different wordbooks and ability to disable them on the fly.
I am not sure how LO handle that.
I wouldn't dare to create index in Writer, but then this is yet another
limitation. Some people care about it.
So far, Urmas has some valid points. There are things that MS Office can do, but
which LO can't. They might be corner cases, they might seem unrealistic, but
someone somewhere might need them sometime. We should acknowledge them as
limitations, because that's what they are. After all, no software is perfect.
I am not sure about "Normal view", because I do not understand what it is
supposed to do and whether there is equivalent function in LO.