TerryE
Super User
Joined: 16 Jul 2006
Posts: 554
Location: UK
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 Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 7:41 am Post subject: |
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Sorry, it isn't
In fact the one announcement that I really needed was hidden in the api mailing list. The mailing lists are a veritable rabit warren. Yes, there is the General & Project Mailing Lists which then points to the general mailing list and the project mailing lists, and it does posses a search facility.
I am forming these strange love / hate bond to the OOo community. On the one hand I admire tremendously the concept of the OOo product, a truly functional Office automation suite pro bono, and the active community that surrounds it. On the other hand there seems to be this cult of the esoteric: entering this OOo world is positively user hostile. I really feel like Capt Yossarian and my Catch-22 is that I can only find anything once I know what am are looking for. Here are two cases in point. - OOo Basic is different to VBA but there is no coherent and complete discription of the delta.
- OOo Basic had some important upgrades at OOo version 2.0 but there is no easily navigable route to finding out what they are. I doubt whether 1% of the active participant of this forum are even aware that these changes have been made. (That was the 23/01/04 API announcement, albeit in a format that makes me nostalgically rememnber 1980s Unix systems.) Here is a readable version for those who are interested.
Two simple and practical steps would really help the usablility of the announcements - Adopt the practice that Microsoft follows in its knowledge base of using a set of standard keywords in all their articles to help you to search for info that you are looking for (e.g. kbVBA for the MS equivalent of OOo Basic).
- Enter the Third Millenium and make your mail archive understand HTML (or a restricted HTML subset for security reasons) so at least announcements are readable.
Whatever the comunity feels about Microsoft, and whatever you feel about your own product, most of the worl today runs MSOffice and if you want to attract some of this audience then you need to make the path smooth. I am an extremely experienced IT professional, and at times I feel as if I am wallowing through treackle, so goodness how the general user or macro developer feels. So here is my challenge to the experts and adepts: give me a simple query or url to track all of the material changes that a OOo Basic / UNO Calc developer needs to be aware of.
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Terry
WinXPSP3, OOo 2.4.1, Ubunto 8.04 for development
Also try the Official OOo Community Forum where I mainly post now. |
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pitonyak
Administrator
Joined: 09 Mar 2004
Posts: 3152
Location: Columbus, Ohio, USA
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| Posted: Fri Aug 04, 2006 9:12 am Post subject: |
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Terry, you have many excellent ideas...
| Quote: | | OOo Basic is different to VBA but there is no coherent and complete discription of the delta. |
I would be surprised to find a complete description of the "delta" between VBA and StarBasic, especially if you include the underlying object model.
I created a "delta" document at one point between the standard commands that are not related to the API and how their behavior differs.
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Andrew Pitonyak
My Document: http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt
Free Info: http://www.pitonyak.org/oo.php
Most hated bug: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=84159 |
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