Open Office Writer - Word substitute?

I've often read that Open Office Writer is an equally good and totally compatible program that can go head to head with MS Word any day of the week.

I admit that it is quite good in many ways, and some of my problems with it might be just to do with the fact that I have been using Word since 1992 (Mac version 5 and Windows version 2) and know a lot about its methods and its quirks.

One thing that Word has never done, however, is suddenly change the style of what you have just typed the moment you touch the return key. In Open Office, anything goes. Your text may be turned into a large heading, and the line spacing may be totally altered. This is really, really infuriating. Really.

Don't get me wrong. I'm highly in favour of using styles, but I'd like to be the one who decides which style, when and where.

I've already spent quite a lot of time struggling with this and looking for help. On the help front, it is quite hard to get past the eulogies assuring you that Open Office's system of styles is one of the best word-processing features in the known universe. There is some kind of insecurity at work here. Why do Open Office's devotees have to keep stressing how wonderful it is all the time?

To tame OO's manic styles, my only solution so far has been to change all of its preset paragraph styles (default, text body, headings...) to 12 pt Times to stop them from changing to something else of their own volition. The idea is that I can then create my own styles, ones that I can actually control. This almost works. It's still the case, though, the OO insists on regarding a single line at the top of a document as a heading and interfering in some way. If only it had a switch somewhere to turn its inbuilt style system right off.

Going back to 1992 (on a word processing nostalgia trip), I loved the style system of those old versions of Word. Let's say you wanted to change the standard paragraph style from 12 pt Times to 14 pt something else. You could just make the changes in a paragraph you were writing, then click on the name of the style in the the style window of the toolbar. At that moment a simple dialog box appeared, asking if you wanted to change the style's attributes or not. If you said yes, hey presto, you had amended the style. Some time in the 1990's MS stopped this from working and made changing and creating styles much more difficult.

That's progress.

Ubuntu's Selective Bloopers

It's great how Ubuntu displays plugged-in devices right on the desktop. This is a Mac touch that I'd almost forgotten about after years of Microsoft's shifting drive letters. The only snag - and it's a serious one - is that Ubuntu reserves unto itself the right to decide which devices it will deign to recognize. Some USB sticks yes, others no. My external hard drive is also totally ignored.

The not-always-that-helpful forums seem only to discuss, in their arcane way, the problem of no USB devices being recognized.

Another weird 'feature' is that, sometimes, seemingly randomly, it becomes impossible to drag files on to a USB stick. What's going on here?

And what's all that "Unmount volume" stuff about? How about understandable English - maybe "Disconnect device"?

Tracker loses track

It's happened twice - Tracker just suddenly forgets everything it ever knew. When it works, it's great. Sad I can't rely on it. Searching Google, I haven't found any sign of this problem.

Come on, Ubuntu/Tracker, get your act together!

Ubuntu - Day One

On my aging Celeron M laptop, Windows XP had nearly ground to a halt. I rashly decided to reinstall it. Eek! It reinstalled, sure enough, but it was goodbye to sound reproduction. All my attempts to fix this failed miserably, however much I searched Google.

In a moment of madness (or of inspiration), I remembered that I had a computer magazine cover disk with an up-to-date version of Ubuntu (version 8.10) on it. As I had other Windows machines that were still working all right, I decided that I might risk it.

Whew! Ubuntu installed really easily. I let it take over the entire hard disk. After the installation, the sound immediately worked again. What's more, Ubuntu identified and installed the Logilink wifi USB stick without any special prompting (a feat that Windows had not managed).

I immediately liked the uncluttered, smart-looking Ubuntu desktop with its three self-explanatory menus at the top of the screen. A glance in the Applications menu revealed that several key programs had already been installed (e.g. Open Office and Firefox).

It all seemed great, and was great. Of course there had to be a fly in the ointment. Although Ubuntu appeared to have installed a driver for my HP Laserjet 1020 printer, this did not in fact work.

This was when I had to turn to some of those scary and very geeky Ubuntu forums. If you haven't sampled them, I recommend you give them a look. Typically, some user writes in that he or she has a problem with some piece of software or hardware.

Even the questions can include great obscurities, e.g. this one from a question about USB sticks:

"I've tried running lsusb and this is what I got:

Bus 004 Device 005: ID 058f:6387 Alcor Micro Corp. Transcend JetFlash 110 USB 2.0 Flash Drive (2GB)
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 0000:0000
Bus 001 Device 003: ID 046d:c00c Logitech, Inc. Optical Wheel Mouse
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 0000:0000 "

The first answer to all this said: "Plug it in" -- so far so good -- "and post the last 10 or so lines of dmesg."

So that's clear then. Or, if not, try the next answer:

"Is this a new drive or have you already used it? If it's new you may need to format it.
You can use gparted (found under system-->admin-->partition editor, install with synaptic etc. if not present) to look at what partitions are on the device if any, and what filesystems they are formatted as."

These examples are from an "Absolute beginners forum"!

When I encountered this kind of stuff, it put me in mind of a comment I once read in a review of Linux, to the effect that below the nice graphical interface there is "a world of pain".

Somehow, blindly, without in the least knowing what I was doing, I discovered the 'terminal' in Ubuntu and typed in a long string of seeming jibberish. Fortunately, it worked!