From: webmaster-Kracked_P_P <webmaster@krackedpress.com>
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Sent: Monday, 24 September 2012, 15:48
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Re: MS raised prices so people will now start renting their
office products instead
I keep hearing that 90% of the MSO users use less than 10% of MSO's package features.
That is 90% of the Word users use less than 10% of its features, 905 of Excel users use less that
10% of its features, etc., etc..
I remember seeing an advertisement for MS-Word in the late 90's stating that there are over 1000
new features in Word alone for the next version of MSO. That must have been either for MSO-98[?]
or MSO-2000.
Can you imagine how many features Word has now? Then try to think of how many features you have
ever use for Word or Writer [OOo and then LO] in the amount of time that you have used either one.
I doubt I have used too many myself from Word 95 through Word-2003 and OOo Writer [1.x.x - 3.3.0]
and LO [3.3.0 RC2{or RC3?} till 3.5.6].
I think if LO tried to match all the features that Word/Excel/PowerPoint has with
Writer/Calc/Impress, it would make LO so bloated that people will not want to use it. The last
time I has MSO-2003 on the same system as LO/OOo, Word took almost 2 minutes to completely start
up to the point I could type in anything while LO's Writer icon took less than 30 seconds on the
same machine to get Writer to the point where I could type in anything. I wonder what MSO-2012 or
MSO-2013 would take to start up to that point on the same system - 5 minutes?
Look at all the drive space MSO and any major Adobe package takes in its "default" installations.
The last time I installed Photoshop it took over a GB of drive space on my 120 GB laptop. Yes, now
we have over 700 GB laptop drives and 3 TB drives for desktops [I have a 1 TB and a 2TB internal
and the same with USB drives], but it still does not mean that a package should be so bloated that
it will take so much drive space for its installation.
For my Ubuntu 10.04 desktop, I have internally a 1 TB drive and a 2 TB second drive. The 2 TB
drive has 185 GB free, while the 1 TB drive 221 GB free. The 2 TB drive is full of audio and
video files and the 1 TB is for OS and all of the other data, like all my digital photos since
2005. I have two matching external drives [1 TB and a 2 TB] for a full backup of each drive. For
me EVERY package that takes more that it should in drive space is less space for my own data that
needs storage. I should backup my 2 laptops and the computer I have hooked up to my HD-TV
entertainment setup, BUT I do not have enough space on my external backup drives for it to happen.
SO
MSO [Word, Excel, PowerPoint] are bloated with mostly unused options that LO should not even try
to include. We need to keep it with the needed options for the 90% "average" users and not for
those that are in the last 10% or even those in the last 1% or less users that do so complex work
that the "average" user could not figure out why this is being done or even how to do such a thing
even with the needed documentation. I remember seeing a 12 volume of 3 inch thick book set
[shrink wrapped together] that claimed to document all of the options for Word 95 or Word 98[?].
It was in the 90's that I saw it on the shelf of the biggest book store in the county. I do not
think our Documentation people would want to match that for each version line [3.3.x, 3.4.x,
3.5.x, 3.6.x, 3.7.x, 3.8.x].
On 09/24/2012 08:31 AM, Jay Lozier wrote:
On 09/24/2012 06:11 AM, Gordon Burgess-Parker wrote:
On 18/09/12 20:38, Jay Lozier wrote:
I suspect most users do not use much outside the common core features
of any office suite (LO, AOO, MSO, etc)
You suspect correctly. In any organisation, home use etc, the usual
statistic is that 80% of users only use 20% of the functionality....
(I'm a retired Systems Accountant and have seen that more or less in
most places I've worked, from a 2-man advertising agency to a couple
of large quoted companies...and MOST places don't use VBA or Macros at
all, which is the usual excuse for keeping MS and not moving to OO/LO...)
Gordon,
+1
Most features one needs have been include in office suites since the
some time in the 90's. I can not think of a feature that I want see
implemented that is not already implemented. I can remember when spell
checking was the user looking up the word in a dead tree dictionary. So
the problem with commercial suites is how to get users to buy a new
version when the current version is probably overkill.
My observations on macros are:
1. most people do not know any programming and do not wish to learn any
programming. More accurately, they will not learn any programming. Thus
they will never write their own macro and will only use macros provided,
if any. Since the macros they use are canned, they would only notice
differences in "look and feel" not in the actual code and would only
care that the macro worked.
2. those who can write macros are mostly not professional programmers
but users who probably learned programming elsewhere. Many engineers and
scientists probably fall into this category, they learned programming in
college (my case Fortran and Pascal). Often, their macros were written
for their purposes not because of some perceived business requirement.
3. the professional programmers who write macros probably know several
languages so they should be able to learn another. Unless they are
selling commercial products, they could be suite agnostic, e.g. they
only want to know what the suite is (API's) and its macro language(s). I
believe LO supports several different languages for scripting - I saw
Python and JavaScript listed.
My guess the group that complains the most about switching because of
macros would be the second group because they only know a few languages
at most (VBA and what they languages they learned as an undergraduate)
and do not want to learn another since their primary function is not
programming.
When I was writing macros for MSO, I was firmly in the second category
but I have migrated to a situation closer to the third category.
Because macros are a potential malware vector, I believe macro execution
requires more user interaction before a foreign macro will execute.
Thus, I would consider other ways to implement macro functionality if I
needed one for a large number of people in most situations.
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