Ok so I have been using OpenOffice for some time now actually a few years.. The two main reasons is cost of other options and the ability to be platform independent. This is not to say that I don’t like Microsoft’s products its just that there is no way in hell I can justify the cost when I don’t use all the features but still need access to a decent set of tools.
When I went to the update option with Open Office the version I have installed 3.0x or something suggested that I upgrade to 3.1 before updating to 3.2 … This in its self is unacceptable and performing incremental upgrades of any product should be an option not a requirement.
First you are wasting people’s time and bandwidth and second .. you are wasting my time…
So instead of doing the incremental update that would have been required by updating within OpenOffice I decided to download the installer.
After downloading the package and launching it I was presented with another problem the installer did not see that I had already installed an older version on a secondary drive and decided to perform a complete install on my root drive.
If you are like me you keep your root drive for your OS and a few specific tools and put your software on a second drive. For me doing so improves performance and stability.
So now I am faced with a few more minutes of uninstalling the older version of OpenOffice before I can install the new version.
Since the Installer couldn’t read the registry and see the older version I am not going to take the chance that using the installer to copy over old files won’t end up in some type of corruption or orphan files that remain… and registry settings that are inaccurate…
Ok so it has been over 20 minutes since I first tried to upgrade within OpenOffice and I am ready to do the clean install of the new version.
The only thing left in my OpenOffice directory is a MySql Thingy that lets OpenOffice connect to my DB … its kinda useless but I installed it long ago ..
Since I have to do a Custom Install to move the files to the Secondary Drive I deselected Draw, Impress and Math because they are pretty useless…. Well if you need to use them every day I guess they are not useless but for most of us they are.
I decided to install the XSLT sample filters and not the ActiveX Control.
It is now an Hour and 20 Minutes since I first downloaded Open Office and I just Launched Writer to see that it did remember my recent files but could not identify the location the OpenOffice was suppose to be installed in…
Thats sad…
Well an hour and a half of my life to update OpenOffice…
Is it worth it????
Probably not… but if I didn’t have it on my system an hour would be ok I guess.
This is a real world example of what I had to do to upgrade from 3.x to 3.2…. your experience may differ but probably not a lot…
The one main problem that I have with Open Office is its lack of support for MySQL.
The fact that both projects had previously been under Sun’s control and are now under Oracle’s control and they can not talk to each other easily and allow people to generate reports, organize data and export it easily is just sad.
sure there are always the plugins…
but that should not be required.
So you figure all the millions of hours wasted by people downloading and installing the upgrade could have been put to use doing something actually significant if only the automatic updates or the installer worked without issue.
sad
