Openoffice.org

[prev] [thread] [next] [lurker] [Date index for 2003/08/14]

From: Leon Brocard
Subject: Openoffice.org
Date: 10:16 on 14 Aug 2003
Now, before I start, let me say that spreadsheet programs are a
wonderful invention. It's amazing how far we've come with them. I can
send spreadsheets to people and they can load them, pretend they
understand the statistics, and produce pretty graphs. This offloads
work from me. This can only be a good thing.

Now, in the good old days, we used Excel. If fact, ExcelXP still uses
the old Excel95 engine as nobody understands it and it hasn't been
hacked upon in years apparently. Excel has arbitrary limits - for
example you can only have a maximum of 65,535 rows. It's commercial
software that hasn't been updated for a while, so you kind of expect
this suckage. I don't have CSVs smaller than 65,535 rows any more...

[So I've used Gnumeric in the past, but now it's complaining about
locales and failing to load the CSV, sigh]

So where do I go? To the new, exciting, open-source, office
productivity suite that is OpenOffice.org. No, really, "OpenOffice.org
is both an Open Source product and a project". Huh? What? URL eq
project? And why are they abbreviating it to OOo?

My thought processes go: It's all written in C++, it's open source,
they've been working on it for yonks, it can't have any arbitrary
limits...

How wrong can I be?

OOo has a 32,000 row limit.

32,000! That's half of Excel's arbitrary limit!

They've noted this as a bug since 2001: http://sc.openoffice.org/row-limit.html

I hates Ooo!

I hates software!

Consider me not impressed, Leon
-- 
Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/
scribot.................................http://www.scribot.com/

... All programmers are optimists

Generated at 14:02 on 01 Jul 2004 by mariachi 0.52