This is why I no longer use Open Office

[xenith]

I just opened this file, last saved in OO, in MS Word. It's a nice simple format, no indents, blank lines between paragraphs and such.

I scrolled down a page...





I didn't realise that could be done in a word processor. (Anyone know how to do it in Word so I can undo it?) (Saving it as .txt fixed it.)

Comments

[webfarmer.livejournal.com]

Too bad stuff like this can't be an excuse not to use M$ Word rather then the other way around. My guess is that M$ probably figured out a way to detect OOo documents and mung them like this so people would bail on OOo.

I decided to re-install an old version of Corel WordPerfect Office 8. It's pretty snappy on this new-fangled platform. Too bad I can't get the old copy of Dragon NaturallySpeaking that came with the "legal version" to work. (Yet.)

[monissaw.livejournal.com]

I had problems with every RTF file I saved with Open Office, whether I opened them in Word, Word Perfect or in OO. Usually moving the indents on random paragraphs and changing the size of bullets to something unusable (and I couldn't find a way to resize them without clicking on each one individually).

That plus the weird autocorrect behaviour & problems with replacing end of paragraphs markers and... Finally, I found an old copy of Word Perfect (I think it was 8, Win 95 version?) and used that instead. I'm sure OO is a perfectly good program if you're just used to basic word processing function, maybe in a few more versions I'll try it again.

[webfarmer.livejournal.com]

It does seem odd that RTF would come out wrong. I've had good luck with RTF and OOo in the past. Maybe there's more than one RTF format and that might be part of the problem? (Seems like I've seen a couple on occasion while importing/exporting.)

Biggest problem I have with it is that it's a slow and lumbering system by comparison with some of the other options. Abiword is a lot snappier (and user friendly) but it has its own issues.