Re How do I mend OpenOffice?

[Donn]

> "Either another instance of
> OpenOffice.org is accessing your personal settings or your personal
> settings are locked." (I think they are somehow still locked.)
Hoo boy, that's always a pain in the butt. It's prob. a wee file somewhere 
that OOO is looking for and you need to find it and kill it. Can't help 
beyond that, try the OOO forums!

> Finally I take Graham's point that Gnumeric and Abiword are far simpler
> and more elegant applications able to do most of what one needs to do
> with Calc and Write. I will try to use them more.
They also, AFAIK, support some of the MS formats.

> However I'm a scientist and I have to interact and write articles with
> colleagues who mostly still use µSoft-Office standards, and so I have to
> remain cross-platform to avoid incompatibility (please understand).
As a scientist, you should have a look at a system called LateX and an app 
called LyX in particular - it's simply fabulous for crafting documents of all 
kind (math and so forth too). It's *really* worthwhile going up the learning 
curve on that stuff. You get to export to PDF and HTML and so on - and I 
would not be surprised if it could go all the way to OOO and MS formats.

(It's not a spreadsheet, so that's still up to other apps, but it can totally 
replace word-processors when one creates documents like books, letters, a 
thesis, magazine articles, etc.)

> I hope the discussion may help developers to integrate OOo better into
Not much chance there, unless you make a fuss where the devs will see it :)

> Happy New Year, Folks!
Same to you, good luck.

\d