A gripe about some Open Office quirks

[Orrex]

Specifically, the "Calc" program that approximates the function of Microsoft's Excel.

I've noticed that a lot of minor but convenient functions seem not to exist in Calc. Nothing fatal, and for all I know it may be easy to customize, but in the meantime these quirks really annoy me.

For one thing, when you select a bunch of cells containing numerical values, Calc doesn't seem to show the sum of those values as Excel does in the lower right corner--not fatal, as I said, but mildly inconvenient.

Additionally, when you manually select a bunch of cells in a column, Excel shows a count of how many you've selected, but Calc does not. This is also inconvenient.

There are other issues, such as different key-strokes, but these are even more minor.


Why would the folks behind Open Office make the conscious decision to diverge in this way from the program they're mimicking?

[HopeHoops]

1. My biggest gripe is Fill-Down.

CTRL-D doesn't work. You have to use the menu.

[Orrex]

2. Ooooh! Yeah, I hate that!

One of the most useful functions in Excel, and they fouled it up in the knock-off. :wtf:

[HopeHoops]

3. But OO is free!

And it loads WAY faster than M$ apps. I use it on several flavors of Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux and the files move between machines without problems. It is all I use.

[Orrex]

6. Faster? Really? Hmm...

Maybe I've got something configured incorrectly, but the first time I open any OO app (in a given session), it takes a looooong time. Longer than any other app I use.

[HopeHoops]

7. Weird - I just ran it side to side against Word and Excel a few months ago and it was much quicker.

My daughter's laptop (for college) has M$ on it (school required it) and I was testing the apps. My machine is 2 years older than hers (slower, obviously) and OO still loaded faster.

[Chan790]

9. OO comes with a pre-loader...

that will be resident in the icon bar next to the clock...it loads the 90% of the code for the OO suite that is standard between all 5 applications.(Mine is a blue thing that looks like two sheets of paper with some sort of symbol on them.) If you shut it off, then it has to load all that code every time you start an OO application if you don't already have one open and it takes *forever*. It does tie up some small amount of memory (a few kb) though to leave it running if you rarely use any OO apps.

(MS Office also does this but it doesn't give you the choice to shut it off or give you a handy icon. My computer became so much faster once I killed and deleted my MS Office suite.)

[kentauros]

4. Well, what did you expect with freeware?

:P

[Orrex]

5. Perfection, of course.

Well, not really.

But when they set out specifically to duplicate the functioning of MS Office, why would they neglect to include some of the most basic and useful functions?

[Pool Hall Ace]

8. I don't like the fact that you can't decimal-align columns.

Of course, I haven't been able to upgrade to anything past 3.0. I guess it's a Vista issue.

But yeah, I'll still take it over Micro$haft.