I downloaded and installed the latest Libre Office, much improved.
I posted earlier that Open Office was more than a little bit buggy, but despite five thumbs down, I'll stand by that statement. However, I did give Libre Office another try and its definitely much improved now. I was able to format my resume and save it, then reload it with the formatting still intact. Open Office was so buggy that some important formatting was mangled every time I saved and reopened the document.
I still think that it goes too far in copying lame metaphors from Word, rather than choosing a better way to do anything. The people giving me the thumbs down should understand that I don't like Word very much at all, but unfortunately it is so prevalent of a standard I have to put up with it.
I also had some trouble figuring out how to add/remove lines from a table cell. I finally found them somewhat illogically in paragraph formatting. It doesn't quite make sense to have them controlled there because it IS possible one would want to have paragraph lines on the text inside a cell, and completely separate lines on the table cell itself. So this isn't exactly an improvement in metaphors. It would also help to have an underline shortcut on the toolbar, which in this case IS copying Word, but it's and OK metaphor, so why not do it?
One way Libre Office is improved over WinWord is that it does have an actual menu instead of the tabbed ribbon bar confusion of Word.
I still wish Adobe hadn't bought Framemaker only to sit on it. It was such a nice program, they could have made it a little bit friendlier and released it as a supremely capable word processor, that just happened to be a pretty damn good page layout program too.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
