Showing posts with label RantOpenOffice. Show all posts
Showing posts with label RantOpenOffice. Show all posts

Saturday, March 31, 2007

OpenOffice 2.2 is out

I've been using OpenOffice developer snapshot for chart since February. So any accidental update of OpenOffice causes to replace the beta chart with the default chart which has much less features. However I've decided to update both developer snapshot and stable released version.

It's been about a year since I decided to move away from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice. I though the transition would be easy since I didn't do any heavy duty writing or making PowerPoint presentation. But I have been keep encountering little bumps to my old Microsoft Office habits: expecting certain menu in certain place, looking to make it as MS Office, etc. Almost all MS Office habits are worn out. But still OpenOffice feels like foreign to me.

Here are the few things that I'm kinda annoyed by OpenOffice

  1. Did you ever try search and replace a newline(paragraph mark)? OpenOffice supports regular expression but I'm unable to match newline. In regular expression mode, \[ matches [ but why \a, \b, \c, ... matches a, b, c, ... respectively.
  2. Scatter plot!!! OpenOffice does not allow to make a scatter plot when x and y data columns are not right next to each other in that order. And it also does not allow to have separate x data column for separate date series.
  3. I don't know whether it's problem with Firefox or OpenOffice, but sometimes I can't paste text from OpenOffice to Firefox. I usually had to copy text to notepad then copy to Firefox. I've never duplicate the problem seems happening at random.

Update: OpenOffice 2.3 is out. It has better Chart options. See posts

Friday, February 02, 2007

OpenOffice vs Microsoft Office: Scatter Plot

I had to make a simple scatter plot in OpenOffice today. I didn't think it's going to be a problem. Surely they implemented easy to use chart in OpenOffice. Well they kinda didn't. The major problem is no easy way to select two columns for x and y data. It's charting function just sucked. However there is a separate OpenOffice chart project with way better chart function.

Finally my scatter plot in OpenOffice Calc:

Time to get two 500GB hard drives?

Update: OpenOffice 2.3 is out. It has better Chart options. See posts