I am well known for being a despiser of all things Microsoft and Apple, therefore I need an alternative. My chosen alternative is Linux. At the moment I use the Ubuntu release. It works well and is fairly easy to manage. As a part of this I use OpenOffice, which works really well. B*U*T there are some things which are seriously in need of fixing:
- Word count is broken
- Select, cut and paste is flaky
What do I mean by word count is broken?
It counts all words in a document, even the footnotes. When you do a university paper most profs won't let you include the footnotes in the number of words your document contains. Footnotes can add 1000 or more words to a document. And select and count doesn't work properly either. If I want a more-or-less accurate word count, I still have to use M$ Word to do it.
Now cut and paste is flaky in that when using the mouse you select a block of text, the right click to select often the block you just selected will de-select itself, then you have to re-select it. This is no big deal, if you just remember to use the keyboard shortcut ctl-c/x depending on whether you want to copy or cut.
If the good folks working on OO would fix these two hiccups I would be very happy indeed.
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