It’s The Little Things

I love open source and free software, I really do. I dream of a world in which I no longer have to deal with the likes of Microsoft Office and instead blissfully use OpenOffice all the live long day. Heck, if I could leave behind the Microsoft OS completely forever and ever, I would. I long to ditch Photoshop for a fully-featured and free open source replacement every time I see the price tag.

However, I feel that these blissful days are a long way away.  Because even though programs like the OpenOffice suite and GIMP emulate the non-free programs in broadstrokes, it’s always some small, seemingly marginal function that’s missing or doesn’t work as well that puts me right off.  I find myself even angrier, because I want to shake the open source community and scream “Why do you tempt me with a brave new world and then smack me in the face?!”

For example: OpenOffice Writer.  In many ways the parallel of MS Word.  I can create and format documents just the same in both programs as far as I know.  When I’m doing basic to intermediate tasks, Writer serves me well.

But then.

I want to do something that is really easy to do in MS Word: find paragraph marks and replace them with two sequential paragraph marks, thereby inserting a line between every paragraph. This is especially useful when posting things to blogging software. In plain text mode, two line breaks means insert a p tag.

In MS Word, it’s very easy and quick to do this.  You click Find & Replace and, if you don’t know the code for “paragraph mark” by heart (it’s ^p) then you click More>> and you’ll see a dropdown for special characters — paragraph marks, tabs, em dashes, a whole long list.  If you want to insert two breaks, you put ^p in find and ^p^p in replace. Simple, easy.

Not so with OpenOffice.  Not only is there no helpful dropdown in the Find & Replace window, the method for doing the operation I described above is completely counter-intuitive and flawed. After over an hour searching I was able to learn a bit about Regular Expressions and how they applied to the Find & Replace process. In order to get something approximating the simple process of finding one paragraph break and replacing it with two, I had to look through 7 web pages and I still did not find a method that produced completely satisfactory results.

And forget about doing my other oft-used Find & Replace maneuver: find all text formatted a certain way (ex: italicized) and put certain text or characters on either side of said formatted text (like HTML code). This is another fairly simple process in MS Word. I spent 3 hours trying to find a way to do this in OpenOffice one day. I gave up.

Another aspect of OpenOffice that bugs a lot of users (though not so much me) is the inability to have a “normal” page view. Not the Print Layout or the Web Layout, just straight text all the way down with a little dotted line indicating the page break. MS Word has this and OpenOffice users have been clamoring for it since 2001, apparently. And yet there is no satisfaction. Sad.

This kind of thing means that I can never use OpenOffice as my primary office suite. I will continue to need Word. I don’t want to need Word! And  I should not need to take a course in programming in order to do really simple tasks.

I could spend another 1000 words talking about the problems I have with GIMP over Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro 6. I feel like every intermediate or advanced function of GIMP takes more steps or requires more hunting than is necessary for an image program. And having the tool menu in a separate window from the window with the image is maddening. Every time I have to use GIMP to do something as simple as crop then resize an image my blood pressure rises.

Take those frustrations with individual programs and apply them to a whole operating system – yeah, I’m looking at you, Linux. As Laptop Magazine commenter Gary Reaves so elegantly put it:

How would you like to own a toaster that requires you to design a timing circuit switch every time you want a piece of toast? Try marketing that to consumers. That’s basically what Linux Distros are all about…

Most problems don’t quite reach the timing circuit design level of complication. Still, any time a simple function or feature isn’t there or requires a lot of work and research to do, users are going to be unhappy. Heck, even non-free/open source software and operating systems run into this problem. Windows Vista, anyone? How about Office 2007? (That travesty of an office suite has kept me using Office XP for almost a decade now.) But Microsoft is the dominant force here. They can afford to pull crap like this (somewhat).

If open source software wants to play with the big boys, the programmers need to step up their game. It’s not the broad strokes of functionality that are going to make or break you with consumers, it’s the little things.

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