RE: Why Aren't Open Source Tools Being Considered?

["Bonnie Granat" <bgranat -at- granatedit -dot- com>]

> 
> - A third poster complains that OpenOffice.org lacked some features in
> MS Word. Unless she is talking about a grammar checker or some of the
> reference and collaborative features found in the Tools menu -- which
> seems unlikely in context -- I can state categorically that she is
> wrong. Presumably, she has not familiarized herself with the 
> software to
> find where the functions she wanted were located.
> 

What I meant was that is was disconcerting to have a program try so hard to
be *like* Word in many things and then suddenly go off that track and do
something utterly different and ultimately not as well. Just the other day
on this list there was a query about a feature that OO just doesn't have (I
can't recall at the moment what it was).


> I believe that she is closer to the mark when she goes on to 
> call to say
> that it isn't intuitive. However, since we do not live in a world of
> Platonic absolutes, no such thing as intuitive software exists. People
> who use the term usually mean "familiar." Since she continues by
> complaining that it doesn't do things the way that MS Word does, I
> suspect that this is the sense in which this poster is using it.
> 

I used it for about two months, and I was not at all sorry to stop using it.
Yes, for a "competitor" to mimic Word so faithfully in many things and then
*not* do some things the MS way is rather a pain in the patootie to someone
who just opened it and began using it. I would never work with OO if I had a
choice. In many ways, it just was inferior. But I'm primarily an editor, so
that may be part of the problem for me. 



Bonnie Granat | http://www.GranatEdit.com
bgranat -at- granatedit -dot- com
Cambridge, Massachusetts, US



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