Thursday, January 29, 2009

Thank you, Doris!

I know that many people are involved in a project like OpenOffice.org, but my today's personal favorite is Doris... :-)


On the German users mailing list, Doris asked why the new Notes functionality in the OpenOffice.org Writer behaves in this or that way. It soon became clear, that she is a kind of hardcore notes user - at least I don't know many people having more than two dozen Notes on one page, some of them originally created in WordPerfect 5.1 (DOS), imported via Microsoft Office 97 and edited in OpenOffice.org 3.0. Phew, this is real-world testing for scalability and stability!


We ended up in a nice discussion, uncovering some bad issues like 98002 and improving other behavior, e.g. the person editing the document (you) will always get yellow notes.


Not everything could be resolved so far - some things are still on our roadmap (even for volunteers, resources are somehow limited *g*), but it was a very pleasant experience, especially since this was very constructive criticism. I hope she will further contribute to OpenOffice.org - as she already does for Wikipedia.


A big thank you!

Max & Christoph

2 comments:

Miguel said...

Speaking of notes...how good is the new notes code in OO? Could the review functionality be enhanced to take advantage of this code? The Review panel in oo is a bit user-unfriendly, perhaps we could discuss this?

Christoph Noack said...

Hi Miguel!

Unfortunately it is rather unlikely that change tracking can be *really* easily changed to use the Notes Side Pane. The reason is: the change tracking is completely separated from the Notes code, so the integration needs to create the 'illusion' that it's the same :-)

There are also other open questions concerning the interaction with those Change-Tracking/Review-Notes - they are just too big for that. You may have a look at the following page (scroll down a bit and search for 'Change Tracking Integration'):
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Notes2_OtherIdeas

But I know, it is a request we hear very often. I think your only chance is to use the OOo Issue Tracker voting functionality.

Bye,
Christoph