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Inside OpenOffice 3.2

Posted on 23 Jun 2010 at 15:19

Simon Jones gets down and dirty with the latest version of OpenOffice

The Calc application is perfectly adequate for most people’s spreadsheet needs, and comes with all the mathematical functions and capabilities that anyone could need, except perhaps nuclear physicists, rocket scientists and professors of advanced mathematics. However, it isn’t as easy to use as it should be: charts look good but you have to go through a pretty dumb wizard to create one.

The Data Pilot analysis module (equivalent to Excel’s Pivot Tables) has the same problem: to create or edit a Data Pilot you have to use a modal dialog, and it really could do with a task pane that allows you to drag and drop fields and see the results in real-time.

As I’ve mentioned before, Impress is a bit of an ugly duckling. The functions are all there, but there’s no pizzazz in the default backgrounds or formatting. The start-up wizard leads you by the nose through many steps, making you choose between two or three equally depressing options at every step. Thank goodness there’s a box you can tick to say “don’t show this wizard again”, and if you’re not “launching a new product” or “recommending a strategy” you really won’t want to.

Usability is a sore point once again. If you want to add a picture as a background for your slides, you’re stuck: you can’t just edit the slide master to insert a picture because that stops you seeing or editing the text on the slide, even after you’ve used the “Send to Back” command that’s supposed to place the picture behind the text. No, what you have to do is employ the Format | Page command, switch to the Background tab in that dialog, select Bitmap from the dropdown list and pick one of the 20 possible options.

If you want to use your own image as a background, the Help text says you have to use the Draw module and import the image as a background bitmap, but I couldn’t find the Import button anywhere. You can make your presentations look good, but it takes far longer than it should. You have to battle against outdated formatting, and are confronted at every stage by yet another damned modal dialog.

The Draw module is all right for knocking up quick diagrams using basic shapes, lines, arrows and so on, but its ideas about connecting lines and shapes differ greatly from mine – it sees connecting as creating a new shape from the intersection of two others, rather than being able to move the shape and have the end-point of the connected line move with it.

Consequently, you have to be precise about where you start putting your shapes and lines, because moving them later can be a lot of extra work.

The Database module looks like a right dog’s dinner, with several different wizards, disgusting colour schemes and six toolbars spread around three sides of your form, and yet more floating toolbars will appear at the drop of a hat.

The Create Table wizard includes the good advice that creating a primary key for a table is recommended, because it helps link the data to that in other tables, but then it spoils it all by adding “oh, and by the way, if you didn’t create a primary key you won’t be able to enter any data into the table”. You have to wonder why it makes creating a primary key optional at all?

What good is a database table into which you can’t put any data? Another poor design decision that spreads more than a little confusion is the fact that, because the form designer is built on top of the word processing module, you’ll encounter both database tables and word processing tables referred to as “Tables” throughout.

OpenOffice 3.2 is a perfectly decent, workmanlike package with several good points, the most important of which is that it’s free. Its document interoperability with Microsoft Office, the market leader, is reasonable for simple formatting but far from great, and it would be nice to see it able to write OOXML files as well as read them.

OpenOffice isn’t, however, as easy to use as it should be, and many aspects of its interface look tired and old-fashioned. If its developers would do some more work on usability, particularly by reducing the number of modal dialog boxes, and bring its default formats into the 21st century, then I’m sure they’d find even more enthusiastic users.