Openoffice a frustration on Gutsy

[Johann Spies]

My wife does not love computers. She is a science teacher that uses
her computer to draw up notes, exam papers etc. Her most important
programs are Openoffice, an email client and a web browser.  To her it
is just a tool to get the job done.

Her computer with Dapper on was stolen a few weeks ago (IBM Thinkpad
R31).  I installed Gutsy on her new Lenovo R60e.

Today was her first experience of using Openoffice on Gutsy and she
ended the day in frustration.  Two problems (that I could not repeat
on my Debian Lenny computer with the same OO version) was that when
she used the shortcut for subscripts or superscripts (used a lot in
Chemistry papers) she could not get back to normal characters using
the same shortcut (Ctl_Shift_B - e.g. for subscripts) to toggle the
subscripts off.  The same happened when she use bold while typing.
There was no simple way to get out of bold. In both cases the toggle
function did not seem to work.

I have seen that the subscript-thing was a bug but it was reported as
solved.  I did upgrade openoffice to one of a few days ago from Ubuntu
repositories. 

It is just not acceptable that a product that should be ready for
production produces so much frustration.

Fortunately Evolution so far worked without serious problems.  On
Dapper it was so buggy that I replaced it by Thunderbird which is also
not the best email client I have seen. (Unfortunately my wife would
not use mutt :)

If there is no quick solution to this problem I am afraid I am going
to say goodby to Ubuntu.  For my own desktop I have already moved back
to Debian some time ago.

Regards
Johann
-- 
J.H. Spies - Tel. 021-982 2694 / 082 782 0336 / 021-808 4036(w)  
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     "No man can serve two masters; for either he will 
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