Revision as of 11:28, 8 October 2010

The basic idea here is to find a way to group issues, so that their resolution allows the greatest number of users to achieve their work with OOo.

For the time being, OOo can't fulfill the needs of every kind of users.

User profiles

"Active" readers

This are the people who are not using OOo as their main Office suite ; they receive ODF document and just have to amend them a little.

Basic λ users

Just a "joe average" user that expects basic, predictable behaviors.

Advanced Excel users

That's the category that OOo won't address *for the moment*' . Because they generally accumulate the problems preventing them from using Calc (applications binded to Excel,), solving one issue won't generally change the global outcome. So, when an issue/a workflow relates only to this category of users, they should get lowest priority.

Simple real life Workflows

Receiving a document via email, opening it, reading it, correcting a few things, sending it back

In this case we assume the user's email client is Outlook 2003 (quite common, unfortunately).

Successive problems the user might run into:

• OOo opens /behind/ the current window, so the user believes it's not open.

• If opened from the preview panel, the document will open as read only. That means that a lot of basic *viewing* operations won't be offered, like filtering data in a spreadsheet, etc. i73155 and additional info in the comments of the duplicate i75946

• The icon for switching to read/write sometimes doesn't work. description and screenshots

• If he adds comments or if the change tracking is enabled, they will be labeled as "unknown author" and get mixed with other people's input.

• If he uses the "send to email" function, he might freeze the application if he copy/pastes the email address.

If the document is a presentation

• Scrolling through slides with the mouse wheel doesn't work.

Consolidating presentations

Different users create different presentations that must be merged into a single presentation. So the other will open the first two files, select all the slides in the first one, copy, go to second and paste.

Conflicting Master pages

Conflicting Styles

Dodging the problem?

If your presentations don't have any animations, you can use the PDF format and a tool like PDFSam.

But... : a nasty bug in OOo's PDF makes them print upside down when the "Autorotate and center" option is checked" in PDF readers (and most of the time is it, because you actually need it).

The Basic User's Rights

Copy/paste

When an average user copies and pastes something, he wants to get the same thing that he has copied. He doesn't want a long explanation ; just the same thing.

That doesn't happen :

• When copying a slide from one presentation to another

• When copying a shape from one presentation to another (conflicting styles)

• When copying cells formatted with styles between two spreadsheets

Undo

Users consider as normal to be allowed to make a mistake or to try something, and then come back to the previous state thanks to the great Ctrl+Z.

In impress,

• you can't undo changes made to Graphics style. Combined to the fact that every styles depends on "default" and that users often modify it accidentally

• Undo in native tables is not completely satisfactory