On 08/25/2017 05:19 AM, Dave Howorth wrote:

As I understand the situation, no, there is no offline help package. There is help available online but its quality is patchy. The developers and documentation writers are in the middle of a plan to make maintenance easier and appear to have decided that users are not useful during that process but are in fact an inconvenience to be ignored.

They are part way through converting the offline help to online help in a wiki. They say the wiki will be easier to edit than the existing offline help. Afterwards, they then intend to develop a process to convert the wiki contents back to offline help. But the plans are not firm and there is no timescale.

See https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Wikihelp

There have been various threads about the subject both here and on the libreoffice list, so plenty to read if you want more information.

Why the hell didn't they just leave the existing offline help in place until this was done? At least it explained collaborative annotations. We are dealing with some real "Rock-Scientists" in this new crop of developers... Let's just ditch the help while we change everything around, and then when the users are really lost, we will let them know there will be a wiki sometime in the future while we leave them to hunt and peck in the dark for whatever period of time it takes us to get around to finally worrying about the wiki..... We need a hippocratic oath for new software devs.... -- David C. Rankin, J.D.,P.E. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 08:24:59 +0100 Dave Howorth wrote:

On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 00:21:47 -0500 "David C. Rankin" wrote:

...

We need a hippocratic oath for new software devs....

That's not a bad idea actually.

And the Hippocratic oath starts with... 'First, do no harm.' Quite appropriate, I think. Bob -- Bob Williams System: Linux 4.4.79-19-default Distro: openSUSE 42.3 (x86_64) Desktop: KDE Frameworks: 5.32.0, Qt: 5.6.2 and Plasma: 5.8.7

Istvan Gabor wrote:

3. Why these office programs has to be developed at all? I mean openoffice 2.x/3.x already had all the features required to normal office work. I think anything beyond it needs professional document processing programs. We don't need new "features" and changes which always accompanied with new bugs too. What we need is a stable reliable program with a standard feature set, development only should fix bugs and make the program work in new systems.

Very few people/developers want to do maintenance only, it's just not fun. -- Per Jessen, Zürich (25.8°C) http://www.dns24.ch/ - your free DNS host, made in Switzerland. -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 2017-08-26 13:04, Daniel Bauer wrote:

Am 26.08.2017 um 12:41 schrieb Istvan Gabor:

...

On Sat, 26 Aug 2017 00:21:47 -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:

...

On 08/25/2017 05:19 AM, Dave Howorth wrote:

...

...

Why the hell didn't they just leave the existing offline help in place until this was done? At least it explained collaborative annotations.

We are dealing with some real "Rock-Scientists" in this new crop of developers...

Let's just ditch the help while we change everything around, and then when the users are really lost, we will let them know there will be a wiki sometime in the future while we leave them to hunt and peck in the dark for whatever period of time it takes us to get around to finally worrying about the wiki.....

We need a hippocratic oath for new software devs....

Yeah.

...

1. openoffice/libreoffice always had an offline help system, that's the normal way. Removing it and redirecting to a website - it's ridiculous.

...

Maybe they oriented themselves on Mac's. If you search on a Mac "how to connect to the internet" it tells you to connect to internet to find out how to connect to internet.

Crumbs. -- Cheers / Saludos, Carlos E. R. (from 42.2 x86_64 "Malachite" at Telcontar)

On 26/08/17 11:41, Istvan Gabor wrote:

1. openoffice/libreoffice always had an offline help system, that's the normal way. Removing it and redirecting to a website - it's ridiculous.

I agree ... I wish they hadn't got rid of paper help, but unfortunately it's a case of "new, shiny, internet!" - Except in London I still get rubbish connectivity of an evening ... and can't upgrade to fibre (FTTC) because I live too *close* to the exchange ...

2. Never understood why openoffice was replaced with libreoffice. In my experience openoffice is more reliable and has less problems than libreoffice. The only thing I don't like in it its user interface.

Because it's terminally broken? It took OpenOffice SIX MONTHS to do a single build to fix a "you've been pwned" bug. Meanwhile LO gets rebuilt every night in a whole variety of configurations for testing and debugging (let alone getting rebuilt all the times by devs, and people on gentoo, etc etc ...)

3. Why these office programs has to be developed at all? I mean openoffice 2.x/3.x already had all the features required to normal office work. I think anything beyond it needs professional document processing programs. We don't need new "features" and changes which always accompanied with new bugs too. What we need is a stable reliable program with a standard feature set, development only should fix bugs and make the program work in new systems.

As other people said, MS keeps changing things. IMHO WordPerfect 6.x for DOS/Win3.1 is *still* the best word processor available, it's just an absolute pig to try and run it on any modern system :-( Cheers, Wol -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org

On 8/26/17 12:21 AM, David C. Rankin wrote:

On 08/25/2017 05:19 AM, Dave Howorth wrote:

...

As I understand the situation, no, there is no offline help package. There is help available online but its quality is patchy. The developers and documentation writers are in the middle of a plan to make maintenance easier and appear to have decided that users are not useful during that process but are in fact an inconvenience to be ignored.

They are part way through converting the offline help to online help in a wiki. They say the wiki will be easier to edit than the existing offline help. Afterwards, they then intend to develop a process to convert the wiki contents back to offline help. But the plans are not firm and there is no timescale.

See https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Wikihelp

There have been various threads about the subject both here and on the libreoffice list, so plenty to read if you want more information.

Why the hell didn't they just leave the existing offline help in place until this was done? At least it explained collaborative annotations.

We are dealing with some real "Rock-Scientists" in this new crop of developers...

Let's just ditch the help while we change everything around, and then when the users are really lost, we will let them know there will be a wiki sometime in the future while we leave them to hunt and peck in the dark for whatever period of time it takes us to get around to finally worrying about the wiki.....

We need a hippocratic oath for new software devs....

David, I feel your pain here. But I have an OT question on this. Do you use LibreOffice for online legal filing? Does it work well for that? I'm not an atty myself but I hear filing issues being discussed from time to time, so just wondering if LO works for that. Thanks, Jim F -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org