Tim Retout's www presence

Posted by Jon at Mon Feb 9 13:26:17 2009
I've never really liked OOo: I've never felt that the MS Office approach to productivity was the right one, and the effort invested in OOo to clone it virtually 1:1 was a damn shame. Latest case in point: I was wondering at the weekend, what's the point of having multiple work sheets in a spreadsheet, vs. multiple spreadsheets? There's the need to reference cells on a different sheet, I suppose, but I bet there is little consistency between people who use multiple spreadsheets and multiple worksheets in a spreadsheet, for different use-cases. Of course OOo has to do whatever MS O does. There are many other examples where I've thought "yup, OOo does what MSO does here. But why do either do it?" When MSO11 came out, I thought "finally, someone brave enough to try and re-invent or re-invigorate office suites". That's what OOo should have been :/

OOTH, you've got to consider the investment of knowledge in the MSO workflow and UI. I still feel there's a hole in the market, file-formats aside, for an office suite experience that better fits modern people's needs.