FeatureSuggestions

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Revision as of 04:31, 28 November 2008 by Ds123 (Talk | contribs)

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Improve update interface

Allow the removal of specific items from the Updates for extensions dialog.

As it currently stands if one unchecks an item the "Install" button becomes grayed out, leaving the users with only the "Cancel" option. This means that the next time OOo is launched, that the user is again prompted with "Updates to extensions are available" notice which is very annoying. Apple's OS X allows specific updates to be removed from consideration (i.e. not installed, but taken off the list), with users having the option to restore to the list of available updates those items they have previously removed.

Calendering/Communications/etc.

There were talks about integrated OOo with Thunderbird...but I'd like to point-out "SpiceBird" which is already surpassing it, but utilizing Thunderbird, Sunbird, and other useful components...http://www.spicebird.com/ and I hope it'll garner interest.


Photo Album

Scenario: Photos get taken at a wedding

Part 1 (complete) is to be able to quickly turn them into a presentation to show at the wedding dinner a few hours later. The key features are to be able to create a presentation from the pictures with 3 to 4 clicks with random fades between slides, and the presentation automatically set to loop continuously. Impress Photo Album Creator is a fine starting place for this. Needs to be at least turned into a complete addon which can be installed from the addon menu.

complete: See Jan's Photo Album add-on. Just use the built in extension manager to install the .zip


Part 2 is to be able to export such a presentation into a video format of some kind, so it can then be imported into some 3rd party DVD writing software to burn as a playable DVD as a gift for the non-techy not computer owning wedding couple.

Blogger

Scenario: Blog editing with word processor features

Writer can create tables, insert images and spell check. There exists a plugin for Microsoft Word, Blogger for Word which only supports basic functionality for blogging from MSWord, a superior solution for Writer would be nice. oooblogger is a good starting position, support for more blogger backends is required, and support for media uploads to support inserted images needs to be completed. Improving the responsiveness of the "edit existing blogs" and a preview in a brower would also be nice additions.

Browse Online Addons

Scenario: Make it easy to find good quality addons

From the Add-Ons dialog add the ability to browse a pre-defined online location where Add-Ons can be found. www.ooomacros.org exists as a possible starting point. The proposed Add-Ons collection would need to be strictly quality controlled to work on all platforms, and to not require any user installation work except possibly restarting OOo. The brower of Add-Ons should show a summary of the Add-On and the ability to view the documentation URL of each Add-On before determining whether to download and install it.

Wikipedia Smart Tags

Scenario: Find articles in wikipedia from topics in your document.

The idea is that openoffice.org would automatically look up phrases in your document (possibly automatically, or possibly only at a users direction) in wikipedia and see if they have an article written about this content, if so highlight them with a special link which takes you to the wikipedia article about it. e.g. reading a document about Russian History and "Peter the Great" automatically link to background information about Peter on wikipedia. Or firefox style, a sidebar accumulates the links.

Better Template Dialog

Scenario: Creating a document should start with selecting a picture of the type of document you are going to write

We have a create from template wizard for impress, this is a suitable route for creating a word processor document as well. The existing impress dialog is a bit klunky and doesn't by default contain many examples for openoffice.org. The Apple iWork suite has nice templates and a nice selector widget. So we need a better template dialog like the iWork one, and ideally with the ability to browse an online set of quality controlled templates. documentation.openoffice.org contains a starting position, but some selection of best of breed needs to be done as well as seperation by language and theme, cleanup in terms of setting titles and licences and generation of previews. AppleTemplateDialog.png

Tackle FAQs

Scenario: Known FAQ problems

e.g. we know that users find it difficult to do certain tasks because they have become FAQs. So we should tackle these known FAQs with new approaches, e.g. creating a title page in writer is a common problem. So we should e.g. by default dock the styles browser when using writer to make it more obvious that styles exist, making it more likely that they will be discovered. Another approach for writer is to take the impress approach and create a side panel which shows a preview of all the pages in the document, in this panel right clicking the first page should allow the most common task of applying the title style to the page, selecting the first two pages should enable the auto creation of a first page style and a second page style with all the appropiate follow styles set to create a "first two pages do not have headers/footers and page 1 starts on the third normal style page" Writersidepanel.png

Help Agent Notification

Scenario: Help Agent activation is overly-intrusive

e.g. When the help agent is triggered due to some feature occurring e.g autocorrect getting triggered. The help agent appears in the bottom right of the page, noone ever clicks on it and it stays there annoyingly. Perhaps a better solution would be to use the GNOME notification area and for a fixed period show the text of the tip there instead which explains what has taken place, and disappear it after some short period of time. Uncluttering the main application window.

There have been some discussions on the mail lists:

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=discuss&msgNo=57241

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?listName=discuss&msgNo=59619

See also the Help Agent Wiki page.

Keynote features

Keynote-style transitions

Scenario: Making OOo Impress presentations even more impressive

I saw a few days ago someone doing a keynote speech using Apple's Keynote presentation software. Is it possible to integrate that amazing animation functionality to Impress? I think it would be an excellent feature to make our presentations even more impressive.

"Next slide preview" in presentations

The possibility to see on the monitor the next slide of the presentation while the actual presentation is running on screen.

New 3D effects

Reflecting of images on the "bottom" to give a 3D impression. (Also seen in compiz-fusion 0.5 cube animation.)


new OpenGL transitions have been proposed to students in Education Project, and this one is a great idea -> will add it

Alpha blending of fonts

Effects to scale and blend fonts as animation effects like in Keynote 3.0 or flash animations.


Flash animation possibilities

Why have presentations and flash animations not joined yet? Morphing is definetly a feature that should be integrated into presentations! User animations should be edited on a timeline and not on base of numbering.


Latex Beamer Class readability of slides

To improve the readability of text on slides the possibility to use DTP-typesetting features would be nice. As an alternative Latex beamer class import/export function could be implemented.

Hover preview (mouse over) & displaying styles on the menu

Scenario: Less clicks, previewing effects before clicking to apply

Office 2003 displays a preview of the style in the menu, and Office 2007 will do hover previews on styles, font size, font, and probably other things. I don't think OOo needs to get much from Office 2007 but these 2 features are neat. I don't have an issue with the toolbar set up right now (mine are custom and extremely slimmed down); I have memorized most every icon and hardly ever use the menus.

All icons on the toolbar should have a hover effect (translucent color, something 3d, etc), it just helps out as far accessibility goes and also can add some cool aesthetics effects.

Paragraph toolbar

Scenario: More toolbar, less dialog box

A toolbar with paragraph options that are displayed in the Paragraph Options dialog box would be extremely useful. Things needed would be indenting and spacing of course, but not just simple button to get general ones such as Single, Double, etc. I'd love to see an input text box to enter things like 12pt or 0.17" for each item (customizable which ones appear of course). I do not think the alignment buttons should be moved from the General toolbar however.

Subversion

Scenario: Centralized storage and enabling teams to work on the same document at the same time.

An extension on the already existing version control of OpenOffice.

This would be rather trivial to implement, by teaching OpenOffice to save documents as uncompressed directory-hierarchies. Then you can have the directory in the revision control system of your choice, using standard checkout, commit, and merge tools to collaborate on the document.

Add to that the ability to trigger some sort of automatic "commit on save" functionality and you have undos across sessions. Me want!

Document Encryption (GPG)

Scenario: encrypting/decripting on the fly document using GPG

An extension or feature that can encrypt and decrypt on-the-fly documents with GPG. Say for example we want to keep secret document FOO between alice and bob, you can double click on a file, and it devcrypts on the fly. When you save the documents, it "automagically" encrypt the file with the keys you decided on the document properties or in the save button. That would have a lot of advantage over disk encryption, so that a document can be shared and can be backed up on a central storage. This plugin/feature can be useful for banks, govs and where sensitive data and usability is key feature.

Pfolk 19:52, 24 May 2007 (CEST)

Write Code in OpenOffice

<PIPEDREAM>
In a full-fledged rip-off of Jack Ganssle from Embedded.com, I want to code inside a full-fledged editor. I want my documentation to be a part of my code. I want to describe a state-machine with a good picture and then code it. I'm sick of creating RTL timing diagrams in ascii pictures, I want real diagrams. I want to draw a diagram of what my system will be like and then turn around and enter "code-mode" and create the system I diagrammed. Inside of "code-mode" I want to highlight the most important part of my algorithm. If a piece of legacy code is really-really fickle, and must be maintained "as-is", I want to be able to highlight the code in red.
</PIPEDREAM>

Additional keyboard shortcuts

Presently Ctrl+[?], Shift+ [?], and Ctrl+Shift+[?] are available as keyboard shortcuts. I would LOVE Alt+[?] to be added as a possibility as well. It can serve as more of a wildcard for custom shortcuts than any of the other which are largely already assigned to functions, if not in OOo, then in Word or other common applications. Oh, and an additional reason to add it... Word lets you do it. I don't, at present, have need/desire for anything additional other than alt being added, nor even know if it would be possible, but I could imagine others might find use for other key combinations (windows+[?], for example). - Wmblewett

Personally, I'd like to see a way that, once I'm in the Format > Character box, it will let me choose Small Caps without taking my hands off the keyboard. -- TimNelson 23:48, 7 March 2008 (CET)

Keyboard short cuts need to be more flexible. Arbitrary creation of two-key shortcuts (e.g. Ctrl+r, a) would be extremely useful, boosting usability and typing speed (when integrating typing with formatting).

Ability to attach short cuts to toolbar buttons would boost efficiency.

Real Indexing

The indexing in OpenOffice Writer has its good points, but it could be so much better. The main feature I'd like to see is the possibility to add entries that say things like "John Citizen: see Citizen, John". But there is so much more that could be done. For comparison, look not to other word processors, but to professional indexing software, such as DEXter or CINDEX feature list.

-- TimNelson 23:48, 7 March 2008 (CET)

Fonts and typographical features

Announcements whether a font effect is included in the font or generated by OpenOffice

There is an announcement whether italics or boldness is included in the fonts or generated by OpenOffice. I would like to see the same concerning the font effects. For example small caps are included in many OpenType fonts, but OpenOffice uses only scaled down small caps? The difference between true and computer generated small caps is tremendous.

Typographical features

The poor font support is one of the main reasons OpenOffice cannot be used to publish professional looking documents. Also typographical features like kerning, tracking, word spacing, auto leading and vertical spacing should be implemented.

Digital Ink in OpenOffice

A feature with which one can scribble handwritten annotations to any OpenOffice document would be fine. Correcting documents would be in a more natural way.

Non-Greedy/Lazy Regular Expressions

It would be nice to be able to switch the find/replace, as well as other places where regexps are used, to be either greedy or not greedy.

Password protect .odb openoffice.org database documents

As other documents (.odf) have this feature, it would be great if it could be implemented for openoffice.org base as well!

Document-wide Spellcheck Dictionary

It would be really useful if there was a way to add words to a dictionary that only applied to the current document. Many times there are words that you only use in one document. For example, lets say you are writing an article about Bjarne Stroustrup. In most documents, you would never use the name Bjarne, and don't want it to show up in your "suggested spellings".

Alter behaviour of "Font Size" combo-box control

I'd prefer the current font size to be not on top of the "pull down" list, but in the middle (if it's not the smallest size available). It's unnatural that all the "bigger" font sizes are easily accessable when clicking the combo-box (because they are below the head of the selection), but for accessing all smaller sizes, one needs to scroll the pull-down-list up.

Of course, the current behaviour is based in the standard combo-box behaviour, but it's just not optimal. The suggestion above might be implemented using a listener on the click-event on the combo-box control, moving the viewport of the inner list element such that the currently selected size is in the vertical middle of the list.

--Schmiddtchen 15:48, 31 August 2008 (CEST)


WYSIWYG Font Viewer

When selecting fonts, its nice to know what the font looks like! Lets see what the fonts look like by making displaying there name with the font they are!Drsassafras 18:43, 1 October 2008 (CEST)

Font Selecting Help

When moving the cursor over the font I would like to change it, I have found it handy in other document editors for the font on the page to change accordingly. This is especially helpful when trying to size where the font will fit, or how it will fit, or what it look like in context to the rest of the doc.Drsassafras 18:43, 1 October 2008 (CEST)

Smarter Font Detection

Right now I browse down the font list and there is - Trebuchet MS... Trebuchet MS Bold... Trebuchet MS Bold Italic....Trebuchet MS Italic.... - I would like to see Open-Office become a little smarter, and detect that this is all one font (even though they are separate font files) When I hit the bold button, Open office should switch to the bold font...... Does this not make sence? So the list would look like this - Trebuchet MS! - And then I can hit the bold button or the italic button if I want it bolded or italicized. For features Open Office might not be able to deal with such as extra bold and ultra light, the fonts could be left in the font list.Drsassafras 18:43, 1 October 2008 (CEST)

Ok. I now see that Open-Office does do this...kinda. Perhaps bringing all the fonts under one name would be nice. But, greying out all the options that are not there. For example if a font can not be bolded, grey out the bold button. This way people can see what there options are. Or a B , I , etc. could be shown beside the font name in the font list. So people know what options are available before hand. In my mind though, just greying out the non-selectable options is enough.
One more thought in this instance. For fonts like regular, demibold, bold, ExtraBold... The Bold button could toggle between them. Maybe the icon could change a bit to let people know that there is different grades of bold underneath the bold button. Instead of one B in the icon, there could be 2 Bs overlapping with different amounts of boldness. Drsassafras 14:49, 10 October 2008 (CEST)

Crossref showing Listitem Number

Legal documents often have "See paragraph <ParNum>" where <ParNum> is some paragraph number, and the paragraphs are numbered sequentialy, e.g.:

1. para_1 2. para_2 3. See paragraph 2.

where the above ordered list is created by turning Numbering On. The problem is if later, an extra item is inserted. Then the number is not automatically updated.

What's needed is allowing composer to provide a unique name , e.g. Para2nd, (where uniqueness is enforced by OOoWriter) for the paragraph to be cross-referenced, and then the composer could say:

3. See paragraph Para2nd.

where Para2nd is actually some sort of field name with a new format, similar to Page or Text for Formula formats, but called something different, say Index. Then, updating the fields would replace Para2nd with the actual listitem number, e.g. 2. This should work just like when the Page format is used, only instead of retrieving the page number, the item number is retrieved and displayed. This could be extended to multi-level lists, where retrieval would be 1.2.3 or whatever, depending on how deeply nested was the targeted listitem.

Fit To Page

A feature I really miss is the "fit to page" feature that I used years ago with word perfect. It will fit your document to a certain number of pages. Very handy. You tell it what it can mess around with margins, line height, font-size, character spacing, etc. Used it all the time. Great results. Rally miss it. Drsassafras 06:10, 5 October 2008 (CEST)

Formatting

Add to Change Case: Sentence case and Title Case.

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