I just stumbled across an OOo bug, an obvious usability issue, that’s been outstanding for more than five years. I mean, what the fuck? Seriously. If you select a bunch of cells, then start using the tab key to go through them for data entry, as people have done since time immemorial, a cell that invokes ocalc’s tab auto-completion eats your ability to use the tab key. It simply stops working entirely for either completion or moving fields.
The OOo project is clearly an epic fail at a fundamental level. Nonsense like this points to serious internal management issues. I wish upon a shining star that Quattro Pro didn’t crash every five fucking minutes, because the interface is a thing of beauty. It works. It’s consistent. It just, uh, crashes often. The only thing OOo calc has going for it is its stability versus Quattro Pro, honestly. If not for that, I would happily pay for a copy of Corel Office X4.
An issue I find even more insidious is the bug, outstanding for ages, where an extra page is inserted into odd page number merges. Seriously, I’d wager 90% of mail merges done on planet Earth involve only a single page letter. The extra page is a bug, plain and simple. There’s no rationale for a blank page begin inserted, period. The truly hilarious part is the solution to this bug is simply a workaround whereby the latest OpenOffice dot org, version 3, will let you suppress blank pages when printing. Hilarious! Why is there a blank page in there?
Oh, yes, and that bug is closed WONTFIX. The rationalization is some nonsense about duplex printing. If merging is broken by design because you can’t figure out how to handle duplex printing properly, the software is broken, not the bug report.
Which reminds me. One of the mail merge wizard options is to save to individual files. Last time I did that, owriter crashed before it made it half way through. It’s also extremely slow merging. The same merge operation takes a few seconds for 450 records with WordPerfect 10 from 1999. Yeah. Wow.