Grrrrrr. Open Office. I used to love that suite, and recommend it to people left and right - but I've been having to work with it more and more lately - and it keeps doing it's best job to fight me at every single turn. I'm quickly starting to realize just how limited it is at even the simplest and most basic things I've come to take for granted with Office.
Normally run your program in English - International, but have a few documents you need to open in Cyrillic, or Japanese? Open Office will fight you. It can't seem to understand the fact that a person might open multiple documents in different languages at the same time - or want to insert russian or japanese text in an English document.
Want a freely positionable text-block somewhere? After using OOo for over a year, I /still/ can't figure out how to do this very simple little task. (Watch someone come along in 2 posts and say how to do it some way -really- simple.)
Need multiple headers or footers in different sections of a document? The method OOo's help files say simply don't work.
Why has OOo's zooming at 100% never been correct on any systems I've tried it on? It makes it inconvinient when you're visually selecting typefaces and sizes, or inserting graphics, and you're used to your display giving an /accurate/ representation of the size things will print. (On my system, right now - at 100% zoom, OOo 1" to OOo is really 1 3/4" - yes, I just measured ^.^ making all font sizes out of whack. 12pt type shows up like 18pt.) I can zoom out - but I shouldn't have to.
At least it has nice features for Tables of Contents and Indices. Native PDF export is nice too - though it still can't begin to compare to Acrobat - it throws out 3/4 of my formatting.
It's a great program - it's come a long way - but it's still got a long way to go. Until then, Office 2K stays on my system. The few times I'm trying to be productive, I actually need to -be- productive. ^.^
(And The GIMP! GAH!!! Wonderful program. Truly a great achievement - every version keeps getting more and more features - and I'd say it keeps drawing nearer to Photoshop, if PS didn't pull further away with each version - but, the Gimp is more than most home users could ever need as it is. It just... that hideous interface. The designer obviously didn't give the /least/ bit of thought to usability with it. Another program I love, but won't use. It's simply too counter-intuitive.)