{"id":137,"date":"2009-10-19T10:30:51","date_gmt":"2009-10-19T17:30:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/kai.mactane.org\/blog\/?p=137"},"modified":"2009-11-28T14:02:21","modified_gmt":"2009-11-28T21:02:21","slug":"openoffice-writer-ux-warts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/2009\/10\/19\/openoffice-writer-ux-warts\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenOffice Writer UX Warts"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The more I play with OpenOffice.org&#8217;s Writer, the more confused I am by some of the odd UI\/UX warts in it. Here are the ones that are on my mind this morning:\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>When I press F11 to bring up the Style Picker list, why does typing letters not navigate me through that list? Why do I have to use the down-arrow to navigate to &#8220;Heading 1&#8221;, rather than just typing &#8220;he&#8221; and then Enter?<\/li>\n<li>Once I do hit Enter to apply the style I&#8217;ve chosen, why does the picker window remain open even though my cursor focus has returned to the document? This is the worst of both worlds: part of the document I&#8217;m working with is obscured by the picker window, and now I have to hit F11 <em>twice<\/em> in order to apply another style. If the window went away, I could just hit F11 once to bring it up the next time I wanted to apply a style.<!--more--><\/li>\n<li>And, for the love of all that&#8217;s sane, why are the styles not sorted correctly? Seeing this:\n<p>Heading 1<br \/>Heading 10<br \/>Heading 2<br \/>Heading 3<br \/>&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>is not just cheesy and amateurish, it also costs me extra work every time I want to select a heading style other than Heading&nbsp;1.<\/li>\n<li>When I&#8217;m trying to set up a new keystroke shortcut, why is that I can use Ctrl+[digit] and Ctrl+[alpha], but I can&#8217;t use the Ctrl+. or Ctrl+, combinations? Nor can I use square brackets. Ah, but I <em>can<\/em> use Ctrl++, Ctrl+-, and Ctrl+\/ if I want&#8230; and I can use Ctrl+* and Ctrl+Shift+8. (I haven&#8217;t yet checked to see what happens if I have those assigned to different things.)<\/li>\n<li>And I can&#8217;t use any combination that involves the Alt key. Not Alt+[digit]; not Ctrl+Alt+[key], and not Shift+Alt+[key]. This means the number of available keystroke shortcuts is painfully small compared to what I&#8217;m used to in MS&nbsp;Word.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Okay, I just finally made a reference to MS Word. I know OO.o Writer is not MS&nbsp;Word, and there are things that I should expect to be different. I haven&#8217;t said a thing about using F11 instead of Ctrl+Shift+S to bring up the Style Picker. But honestly, having fewer than half as many possible key-bindings? That&#8217;s not a case of &#8220;we do it differently here; get used to it&#8221;, that&#8217;s a case of &#8220;this is flat-out <em>worse<\/em> than the competition&#8221;.\n<\/p>\n<p>Or is there a good reason for ignoring the Alt key that I haven&#8217;t thought of? If so, please let me know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The more I play with OpenOffice.org&#8217;s Writer, the more confused I am by some of the odd UI\/UX warts in it. Here are the ones that are on my mind this morning: When I press F11 to bring up the Style Picker list, why does typing letters not navigate me through that list? Why do [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[75,39,44,57,53,8,10,9],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":154,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137\/revisions\/154"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kagan.mactane.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}