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Hi :)
Oh, and as for better places to get more help with LO there are tons of
them now.  It's not like it was 3 years ago!  If you go up to the Help menu
it now pushes people into using the Ask LO thing
http://ask.libreoffice.org/en/questions/
or the unofficial forums at
http://libreofficeforum.org/

The old OpenOffice forums seem quite happy to deal with questions about LO
now, unlike when they were owned by Oracle.  They are particularly good for
questions about Base as they have hefty archives.


I'm not sure what help pages or manuals you have found on-line but the
official "published guides" are likely to be better;
https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Documentation/Publications


Over the past year, but especially in the last few months i've noticed a
lot of the old crowd seem to have left leaving it quite desolate in here.
Some new people have started but we don't seem to have the intensity of
even a year ago.  I don't know what has changed, apart from there being so
many other places now but the drop-off seems to have been quite sharp.

Apols and regards from
Tom :)





On 7 August 2014 12:39, Tom Davies <tomcecf@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi :)
Several suggestions.  Err, which version of LO btw?

Perhaps try Kingsoft Office.  It looks a lot like MS Office with the
ribbon-bar and all.

On a lower-spec machine it might be better to use AbiWord and Gnumeric or
a Cloud solution such as Google-docs.  Some who don't like LibreOffice find
OpenOffice suits them much better as the slower pace of development means
people have usually found work-arounds to most issues.  It sounds like this
wont owrk for you so AbiWord or Kingsoft might be a better answer.


Even if Java is uninstalled from your system you might still need to
de-register it in LO.
Tools - Options - Java  (or Advanced)
and then untick the box at the top to stop LO from looking for Java.

Is Java still installed on your system?  I've found machines with more
than one version.


Did you play around with memory settings in
Tools - Options - Memory  (or Advanced)
Those are usually set for far toooo low spec and bumping them up radically
might help.


MS Office from 2002 is really ancient nowadays and might struggle to cope
with the demands of modern documents.

If you are still running Xp then maybe it needs a bit of an overhaul.
Defragging and disk-clean-up only go so far.  Hard-drives slow down and get
cluttered.  Ram chips decay.  OSes suffer from "system rot".  Windows
really needs at least 20% hard-drive free/empty otherwise it's performance
nose-dives.

A fresh reinstall of Xp might boost everything right back up again.
Alternatively revo uninstaller might help remove traces of programs lurking
around the hard-drive and even tidies the registry.

Maybe it's time to take the plunge into something new such as Ubuntu, or
better might be Mageia or something made for lower-spec machines.  Ubuntu
needs at least 1Gb of Ram and 20Gb hard-drive space but many others don't
need half as much.  Dual-booting lets you keep the Windows to give you time
to migrate.

Regards from
Tom :)




On 7 August 2014 11:22, Jon Harringdon <jonathan.harringdon@virgin.net>
wrote:

Well, what can I say... after spending almost four weeks on and off with
LO I finally have decided that, alas, it's not for me.

For a start, it's too slow: all three LO applications I've worked with
(Writer, Calc and Draw) are feeling sluggish on my PCs whereas MSO seems
quite nimble. Incidentally, I had a very similar impression quite a few
years ago when I installed, tested and removed a version of StarOffice:
this was virtually unusable on an admittedly underpowered netbook which
nevertheless ran old MSO XP (2002) just fine.

I get spurious error messages about Java RE not being installed whenever
I try to run a macro and (although I'm not using Base or any of the
Wizards) there are other places where this message unexpectedly pops up.

I believe users who deliberately keep away from those bits which
explicitly require Java should never see this sort of message. As it is,
any use of macros "almost" requires Java. Almost, because it's possible
simply to click away this annoying message: the fact is that Java is NOT
AT ALL required for executing LO Basic macros... perhaps somebody should
forward this tidbit to the developers;-).

Many of the help pages and manuals I found online seem to be more or
less out of date.

There are too many obscure half-bugs (or else stuff where I need obscure
workarounds). Last but not least, LO is simply too inconvenient,
unpolished in actual day-by-day use; this is very hard to describe in a
few words but LO somehow feels wooden, even "pedestrian" at times.

There are some very good things, sure, but simply not enough to warrant
the change and all the accompanying loss of productivity and bother when
modifying a long-running, well-oiled set of tools. As Pip Coburn writes
about change in the tech industry: "The industry acts as if change is
easy when it's actually quite difficult. Users will change their habits
when the pain of their current situation is greater than their perceived
pain of adopting a possible solution." Precisely so.

Additionally, I found community support not to be a strong point of LO,
at least on this list. (There was another user recently who complained
about that and I have to agree.) There may be forums out there on the
web but I can't say anything about those.

I had really, really high hopes for LO, because I'm sick and tired of
MS. Alas, LO, at least for me, just ain't ready for prime time. Perhaps
I should come back in another few years when LO has hopefully been
stripped of some of the layers that have built up over the decades...

Bye for now

Jon

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