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 -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: users+unsubscribe@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
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