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?