New Year, New Calc Guide for Brazilians and Portuguese-speaking Users

I tried to make some comments but was put off by the extensive use of Twitter and the fact that most of the tweets had nothing to do with Libre Office. I have used Libre Office since Version 4 and have had to transition to Word 365 because of the bugs. The worst set of bugs is related to “templates”. I was happy to see V 7 documentation, but the functionality has not changed. For a program that claims to be based on templates it leaves much to be desired. Even the “wizard” is lacking. Dialogs are misordered, misconstructed, and do not function properly (try EDIT and tell me what you can edit with the responding dialog) You can only ADD to a path that is labled as “internal”. Worse, the path concept doesn’t even function. If I set a path using Tools/Options there is no functional difference that I can find. I’m making these comments after spending a couople hours trying to see if V7 has improved. I must conclude it has not, and still needs a complete workover in this area. Why do I care about internal program paths? Basically V7 suffers from a plethora of serious architecture bugs. I thought of joining to help you out but I have a feeling it would be like mixing oil and water. But don’t feel too bad, EVERY word processor has serious shortcomings, especially WORD, but at least it has so much market share there are work arounds for most things – except Sections which have been broken since Version 1. They keep making changes but cannot ever get it right because new bugs (often fixed earlier) pop up again. Word perfect has its share too. Microsoft has caused entire forests to be cut down dealing with their incessent bugs.

On another note your use of Twitter is going to be shortlived. A number of people are working to put Twitter, Facebook, and Gooogle out of business. So far they are down over 50 Billion dollars, and the strategy has not started implementation yet. Just a heads up to save you some down time. You only have to read the alt-news in the USA to find out why.

Anyway, best of luck to you, and good luck fixing the templates issues. Remember 1 simple rule, if you allow users to set options like paths you need to make sure they comply with expectations, and you cannot intermingle developer shortcuts and structure on top of the user’s choice unless you document it, explain why you made the choices, and provide for a way to work around your structure if needed. Right now, Libre is simply not functional using template paradigms. Good news – this should be so easy to fix!!

Oh, and one last thing, system variables in path settings are not consistently documented at Microsoft, so if you use them prepare to cut a lot of trees down.