OOo Off the Wall: Recovering Hidden Treasures (Linux Journal)

First, I will here express some points that mostly came to my mind after discussing with people that do think more in terms of what they want to do with their computer rather than how to do it. Thanks to them I discovered that many things that where natural to me are in fact totally stupid and ridiculous. I was thinking like a technical guy before, but now I tend to see things differently, because most people are not technical, they are just people that want to get some work done fast and reliably without needing a PhD.

So let's split the issue in a few main points :

a) Most people I know do not want to bother knowing the various differences between tools.
examples :
- having a file brother that can show thumbnail images and a presentation document that can show pictures in sorter mode can be confusing because at first look that seems similar on many aspects.
- having tools to visualize a file (like a picture) and other tools to edit it (not always the same due to formats for example) is confusing
- why shall I choose between text or drawing or presentation? I want everything in the same document, the size of our RAM shall allow that, legacy MSOffice way to do things shall be abandonned, I want the spreadsheets inside my presentation to be a part of it, not something that is managed by another program, and graphics that are updated automatically in relationship with texts and formulas and automatic titles and summaries and page breaks (yes, in a presentation). I need all the functions at the same time inside a single format. I don't want to have to plan wether I want/need my graphics be done under a presentation or a drawing, I may not know at the time I start, all I want is to have all the options availables all the time. And maybe in the end I could either print my presentation in a booklet format with portrait format and then display it on screen in landscape format with the same original document.

b) Most people can not focus on all the details of their screen : more than a few buttons is too much, important things must be written in clear and bold text, and always be here and located at the same place. the rest shall stay accessible in clear and easy to find locations, but not on the way. Buttons shall have a nice look and not look alike. The toolbars can be customized, of course, but the non techies must have a default configuration that is clear and simple.
example : did not find the print preview button but found half a dozen with a magnifier that I could mistake with a preview button.

c) Most non technical people do not understand what contextual menu or contextual actions can be. They just don't care that they have 1 text 3 pictureS 6 graphical objects 2 spreadsheets or whatever selected, they want that whatever the context the same action are always available and produces a reliable result. That is also referred to as consistency, something one can not achieve by copying the behavior of MS products.
examples :
- let us put in Arial Bold with blue filling and dashed lines border whatever we select, and let the suite produce the result accordingly. (putting a border on pictures and spreadsheets is not that stupid to ask for, is it?)
- let us have the same and consistent behavior for layers, headers, footers, transitions, etc across all our documents. I don't want master slide and master title, I want layers for my presentations, I also want layers to put my drawings on differents ones and then do some manipulations with some layers locked or not if necessary.

d) Better have fewer options but no bugs for the everyday ones, it is hard to defend a product that you can not use for its most common tasks without hitting a bug. No example given due to the "beta" nature of current code, but I have had enough troubles printing documents with transparent drawings to tell that this is a blocker for the adoption of OOo in the enterprise (my company has a logo with a transparent background that is small but must be printed on every pages, the printing must be good and not take a huge memory and a huge time to print as well)

e) We can have many view of the same data, that is nice (example : sorter, normal, handout... views in presentation) but I want to be able to duplicate a slide or print from any of them, why shall I change my view to get the functionalities? Let me do the stuff unless it is totally dumb and irrelevant (and even then, try to do something clever for me anyway). Also, those templates for documents are pretty, do someone actually use them other than to comply with a corporate policy? (even with a corporate policy I do not use them, they are always so ugly and never fit to the need, it is a typical counter productive feature that often breaks more than anything else, everyone I know just take an old document, copy it then modify and save)

f) It could be usefull to have some recovery mode that could save a work done days ago and deleted by mistake in a document saved more than 10 times since then. Kind of CVS versionning inside the document that could be activated and would allow to see the document as it were at nearly any point in time during its creation. It would give a strong feeling of security against the risk of loosing data. In the other hand, before sending the document as E-mail the option to first convert it to PDF or MS format or at least to suppress the versionned data from the mailed document shall be provided. By the way, the suite can write PDF but not open them, it makes thing a bit messy again to have another program to use after the conversion.

g) Office suite are mostly about building a lot of appearance around a few data (not even discussing about the accuracy or usefulness of those data). It always seem important to me that any appearance shall give a hint about the way it has been built. A line in the middle of a text can either be a drawing or a piece of border, a border around a text could be a table and not just a border, a text in a box can come from a rectangle shape with a text inside or be a text box with a border added to it, how do you want most people to understand what to chose and why that does not behave the same way? Some consistency can be gained there again, and that was only some examples.

h) To state some things I illustrated above in a different way : the fact that MS did something does not mean it is clever or usefull. OOo shall first build itself with the user in mind, and then only try to import what makes sense from MS documents. Sometime a feature would be converted to a totally different but more clever one. The MS compatibility shall be seen as legacy if OOo want to build its own future. Otherwise the suite will remain stuck in the middle of nowhere. Don't run behind the rabbit, become the eagle.

I'm sure I could say a lot more, but I'm not a fanatic of using any office suite. I prefer to try to create real information even if a bit raw. Hope you will forgive me all here. I'm not as nasty as I may look.