Wonderful World of Machines
Today was another of those “machines are out to get me” days. You know, you buy a nice, shiny new multi-function device and then have to spend all day trying to get the software to load so that it will work properly.
Maybe it’s me, but if they say it will work with your operating system, shouldn’t it work with your operating system? None of the machines would even recognise the disc properly! Ended up having to use a laptop that was running a different OS to copy the contents of the disc across to the machine that needed to have the software loaded, and then run it from the hard-drive.
I hate the way that we have to rely on machines to get anything done these days. Don’t get me wrong, I love gadgets (I have to, I’m male - it’s the law) and I love tinkering with them; but that’s when I don’t have to rely on them. I can re-format my laptop anytime I want without losing anything important, so I can play about with it to my heart’s content. But I can’t re-format my work PC anytime I want because it takes up too much time and I can’t afford to risk losing any important data. So, I want my work PC to be reliable, but today has further proved to me that’s just not possible.
The PC I use is several years old and has had software added and taken off across that time, but to my mind the OS should be able to deal with that. Yet, you read all over the ‘Net that if you’re not reformatting your drive every six months or so, you’re just going to end up with a PC that grinds to a halt. Well, mine is definitely grinding.
But I’m not sure that a new PC would help. For a start, I’d have to make sure it didn’t come with Vista, as I know that several of our peripherals will not work with it (the manufacturers are not producing Vista drivers, because of the age of the machinery); then you’ve still got all the same issues with XP - if not more, because of all the security holes, etc. I know from experience with my laptop that loading all the MS updates can cause untold problems (it’s taken me about a year to identify why my laptop kept locking up, due to a file that got updated in SP2).
So, all-in-all, I’d quite like to go back to a mechanical typewriter please.
Open Office
It’s not often that I think good thoughts about Microsoft, but today’s experience with OpenOffice is making me think that perhaps Mr Gates and his pals have actually got it right. Let me explain…
I’m thinking of changing my ageing laptop for a nice, shiny new iMac - I’ve wanted to have one for a while now, ever since I borrowed a friend’s MacBook, and I’ve been saving up (and waiting for Leopard). Most of my laptop apps are Microsoft and, being Windows-based, won’t work on the iMac. So, rather than shell out hundreds of pounds to buy all the Mac versions, I thought I’d experiment with open source software.
I’ve been using Firefox for quite a while as my browser, and I wish I’d started using it earlier. It’s great. I’ve also just started using Thunderbird to deal with the email; also good. Coupled with my Palm Desktop software, for task and calendar functions, that gets rid of Outlook.
So, I’m looking for an office system, but which doesn’t have to have any sort of contact management, calendar, etc. OpenOffice seemed like the perfect candidate. Went to the site, downloaded it, installed it. Nice and easy; so far, so good.
Started to use it; it apparently opens Microsoft file formats - that’s good, don’t need to recreate all my documents - and also saves them - even better, don’t have to worry about swapping files between home and work. All looking good.
First file I needed to open was a simple spreadsheet, created in Excel, which I use to keep track of my personal budget. Opened it fine, saved it fine, kept it firmly in Excel format. Lovely. Looking good, still.
Next file was a one page letter, created in Word. Again opened, saved, kept the format. Job done! This is going to be easy.
But that was yesterday. Today is a different story. Today I needed to open and alter some files created at work. The first was an Excel file. This particular file keeps track of product sales on a month-by-month basis, with graphs for each product as well as data. There are 13 pages in the spreadsheet, each page has 28 products on it - so 28 graphs and data per page. This file - which opens in about 20 seconds normally - took 20 minutes to open. 20 MINUTES!!!
I could get it to open quicker, if (after it finally opened) I then saved it as an OpenOffice format file. Opening then took about 20 seconds. But I can’t have it in that format, because we use Excel at work and it’s a work file. So, OK, I do what I need to do and re-save it back into Excel format; then it opens it more quickly - but without any of the graphs. I’ve looked at the settings and I can’t find anything that tells it to do that.
So I gave up on that one. The work I had managed to do had indicated that the data I was using was possibly not correct, so I needed to check its source. That source is an Access database. Again, I thought that’s OK, the Base program will deal with that.
Well, sort of. I had to first convert it to an OpenOffice format, but at least it did it quickly. Now, in Access what I needed to do would have gone like this:
Open the correct table
Apply a filter to narrow down dates and product codes
Export the data to Excel
Use Excel to determine sub-totals and totals, to check against doubtful data
With OpenOffice, I could open the correct table, but couldn’t find a filter function. Help says I need to create a query. OK, create a query and run it. Does odd things with some of the data, adds a column that I don’t need and don’t know where it came from. But it gives me the important stuff; so let’s export it to Calc to get the totals. But you can’t - I couldn’t find an export function anywhere and that’s where I gave up.
I wanted OpenOffice to be good enough that I could dump my reliance on Microsoft. I wanted to be able to continue my great open source experiment, knowing that I could still work with all my existing files without too much hassle. I needed it to be good enough to at least be able to do what I can already do. But it’s not and I’m so disappointed. I’m going to persevere for a little while longer, but anymore days like today and it’s bye-bye OpenOffice.
I hope that the problems I’ve encountered are just because I’ve done something wrong, not looked in the right place, whatever. I know that there are loads of people out there who use OpenOffice - perhaps you could give me some pointers.
Or perhaps OpenOffice isn’t the one to have - is there another open source office suite out there that will also work on Windows and Mac, and do everything that Microsoft Office can do? Let me know and save me from pulling the rest of my hair out.
Wolfs Stuff
Wolfs Helpers
