Posted by: Anonymous Coward
on April 20, 2005 11:11 PM
One nice feature about OO.o, which I just last week needed to use quite a lot, is the built-in ability to generate<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.PDFs. OO.o's<nobr> <wbr></nobr>.PDFs work not only in Acrobat Reader, but in every other PDF reader I've tried (xpdf, kghostview, gpdf, etc.). That means that you don't need Adobe Acrobat at all, including Adobe Distiller; that functionality's already built into the entire office suite. I like this *A LOT*.
One thing I would like to see OO.o make easier to do is the ability, that MS Word also has, to record macros that comprise keystroke sequences. Say you need to delete the first five characters of each line (yes, I know, sed does that stuff very well, but I'm talking about typical Windows/Mac users here). With MS Word, you simply turn on keystroke recording, delete your five characters for one line, and assign that keystroke sequence to a "hot key." Hit that hot key, and all four, six, or ten of those keystrokes are done for you. For really long files, it makes it easy for end-users to simply put the cursor at the first line, hold down that hot key for a minute or however long it takes to get through the file, and it's easy as eating pie.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta can do this, and it does indeed work, but assigning a hotkey to your new macro sequence is more of a pain to do than in MS Word. You've essentially got to go through and act like you're adding a new menu item or a new toolbar icon (I consulted the instructions in OO.o Help for this). I guess once I do it a few times, it'll become second-nature to me, but with MS Word, it was so easy to do this that I didn't need any help to figure out how. Not a show-stopper for me by any means--I still prefer OO.o--but it'd be a "nice to have."
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Built-in PDF creation in OpenOffice.org
Posted by: Anonymous Coward on April 20, 2005 11:11 PMOne thing I would like to see OO.o make easier to do is the ability, that MS Word also has, to record macros that comprise keystroke sequences. Say you need to delete the first five characters of each line (yes, I know, sed does that stuff very well, but I'm talking about typical Windows/Mac users here). With MS Word, you simply turn on keystroke recording, delete your five characters for one line, and assign that keystroke sequence to a "hot key." Hit that hot key, and all four, six, or ten of those keystrokes are done for you. For really long files, it makes it easy for end-users to simply put the cursor at the first line, hold down that hot key for a minute or however long it takes to get through the file, and it's easy as eating pie.
OpenOffice.org 2.0 Beta can do this, and it does indeed work, but assigning a hotkey to your new macro sequence is more of a pain to do than in MS Word. You've essentially got to go through and act like you're adding a new menu item or a new toolbar icon (I consulted the instructions in OO.o Help for this). I guess once I do it a few times, it'll become second-nature to me, but with MS Word, it was so easy to do this that I didn't need any help to figure out how. Not a show-stopper for me by any means--I still prefer OO.o--but it'd be a "nice to have."
Thanks for the article!
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