The Limits of OpenOffice

I tried to do this week’s “web exercise” for a class in OpenOffice instead of Word. I figured it wouldn’t be a big problem, since I wasn’t going to be graded on precise formatting. The biggest problem was that I need to post screenshots into a table in a Word document in order to do the assignment. This is where two limitations of OpenOffice 3 came into play.

First, you can’t crop pictures from within OpenOffice. This meant that, in order to get rid of the menu bars and blank space in my screenshots, I had to use GIMP. This, in itself, wasn’t a huge problem. The GIMP online help pages are well done, and I now feel like I wouldn’t mind playing around with GIMP the way some people like to play around with Photoshop. Problem #2 ended up being the real sticking point.

And that second problem was that OpenOffice table cells don’t resize to fit pictures. This would have meant that I would constantly have to resize table cells every time I inserted or resized a screenshot. Since I had to play around with the scaling of the images in order to make the text readable, I couldn’t complete the project in OpenOffice. I had to boot into Windows to do it in Word (since I haven’t gotten around to getting Office 2007 to work under Wine in Jaunty).

Fortunatley, this is probably only a minor bug in OpenOffice. After all, how often do you have to put pictures in tables?

OpenOffice 3 Write and MS Word 2007

I got Office 2007 to work in Wine (as in starting up without crashing), an undertaking  which will eventually get its own post whenever I have the time. But today, something happened which gave me the chance to explore the depths of OpenOffice-Ms Office incompatibility.

It’s well known that Open Office can both read and write to MS Office documents made with any Office version before 2007. It’s also well known that some formatting might get lost in the translation. Normally, this means that I don’t want to take a chance with OpenOffice on a school project that demands both precise formatting and delivery as a .doc attachment.

However, today I encountered my first glitch running Word under Wine. I had e-mailed myself a copy of an assignment that I had created in Word 2007 at school. I downloaded it to my home computer and opened it in Word. Every time I scrolled past page 3, Word crashed. The odd thing is that it only happens with this document. All other Word documents open just fine.

Faced with this problem, I decided to see what work I could do on the paper in OpenOffice. There were a couple of problems right off the bat. It appears that  Write (the OpenOffice word processor) won’t import styles from Word documents. This was a huge problem because applying pregenerated styles was part of the point of this assignment. Actually, I have to qualify this statement somewhat. It appears that Write will import any style that matches its own existing style list. For example, if there is a different “Heading 1” style specified for the document, something close to that style will become Heading 1 in the OOo document. But any style with a different name, like “Chapter Title” is out of luck.

Since I had to wait for some laundry to dry, I decided to soldier on and do what editing and formatting I could, using the closest equivalent OpenOffice styles instead of the original Word styles. I figured I could use the OOo styles as visual placeholders and change them when I got to the lab and got access to Word in Windows. Imagine my surprise when I found out that OpenOffice had added a bunch of wingding fonts to the style list. Not only that, it had removed two of the original styles. So I had to go to the trouble of cutting and pasting my assignment into another file to get back to the professor’s original style list.

I love working with OpenOffice. Actually, I kind of like working with Word 2007 too. It has some really handy new features. But today I learned conclusively why the two don’t mix well at all, except possibly in the simplest text-only documents.

Update: My next saved version of my paper works on Word in Wine. Maybe that was just a one-time glitch. Obviously, the huge compatability glitches remain, though.