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List:       abiword-user
Subject:    RE: Re earlier message 'tear....'
From:       James White <james () resolutionit ! ca>
Date:       2006-04-18 11:54:38
Message-ID: 1145361278.10705.26.camel () thorn
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> Under 'Help' in the top bar.
> In fact, if you click on 'about abiword', and then 'abiword', it'll
> take you right to the website.
> When I switched to Free/Open, one of the outstanding differences I
> found was in the help facilities.
> It literally doesn't exist in Windows.
> I think I sent about a dozen emails to M$ and never got an answer.

>From the point of view of someone who used to be a team-lead at several
of the Microsoft support lines, I can tell you that the user support
issues were every bit as difficult using Word as they are with AbiWord.

Columns in AbiWord are more intuitive and powerful than columns in Word
- hands down.  It's worth the effort to make a practice page, open the
abiword help web page and do some testing:

Make a fresh doc and type a paragraph, then insert a continuous section
break - set it to 3 colums and type some more.  

Then insert a continuous section break and set it to 2 columns and type
some more.  Nothing to it.  Microsoft offers nothing (that I can think
of) more than this.  

Even better, you can set your column properties to, say, 5cm in height
for the second section - now you can see a flawless page with three
unique column layouts.  Try that in Word and you'll be in the funny-farm
in no time (particularly if you delete anything and the "magic"
fails!!)  

Advice: click on the little "show/hide formatting marks" button when
working with columns.

Look here:
http://www.crazy-wormhole.com/AlinaMeridon/AbiWord/abidocs/interface/dialogcolumns.html
or look here:
http://www.abisource.com/help/en-US/interface/dialogcolumns.html
----------------------

Here's a bit of a rant that is at least 50% aimed at myself - I give
myself this talk weekly - but it applies here:

I know that in Gentoo Linux there is no help installed for most programs
unless you choose the -doc flag during compile.  It took me a while to
realize that all of these programs DID have help - I just had not
compiled the option in.

It is so easy to look fondly back on the things that did work in M$.
The "first-level" help documentation was excellent and the Linux world
lags far behind.  However that "first-level" help was only useful if you
wanted to know how to make your text bold, or how to save a document.
Remember trying to find an answer to a question that was NOT in the
help?  Do you remember your company paying $250k for one year of support
that turned out to be a group of pimply-faced geeks on the phone who
knew less about the product than you did?  Or do you remember the
document that had worked just fine for months - suddenly it just won't
open?

After a quick review, one can really say that what they missed was the
Microsoft Marketing: that "OOB" that they sell really WAS nice.  But
that's where it all stopped.

I have found a couple of unforgivable flaws in AbiWord and I curse the
developers for their willingness to allow these flaws to make it into
the finished product (Cannot set Page-break-before in your Styles - for
several versions!).  But there are less than a dozen of them and they
are volunteers.  The most excellent thing about open source is that if
you get pissed that a feature is missing, it costs less to pay a
programmer to fix/upgrade an open-source product that the world will
benefit from, than it would cost to buy that one-year Microsoft License.

Any company looking at productivity and bottom-line should see how
perfect the Gnome-Office is for them.  But we have to give something as
well as demand it.  Even a user can donate the cost of a Microsoft
Office license to the AbiWord team and then ask if a particular bug get
higher attention - I bet it will be fixed!  Even a non-technical user
can write a help file.  There is no "them" in open-source, it's all
"us".

</rant>



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