It appears that OOO doesn't have auto-save turned on by default. I just ran into this with my spouse, who is not very tech savy. She has never experienced(until now) the loss of a document do to a tech glitch or other oddities of computers.
I "assumed" that this auto-save feature would be turned on, I would be incorrect... :)
I enjoy letting my better-half poke around with Linux as it gives me a better perspective on what works and more importantly what does not.
Anyway, fair warning to all OOO users, turn on your auto-save now, before it's too late!
Sean Bruno
man, 22.11.2004 kl. 05.31 skrev Sean Bruno:
It appears that OOO doesn't have auto-save turned on by default. I just ran into this with my spouse, who is not very tech savy. She has never experienced(until now) the loss of a document do to a tech glitch or other oddities of computers.
I "assumed" that this auto-save feature would be turned on, I would be incorrect... :)
I enjoy letting my better-half poke around with Linux as it gives me a better perspective on what works and more importantly what does not.
Anyway, fair warning to all OOO users, turn on your auto-save now, before it's too late!
Sean Bruno
And RH packagers: please turn it on...
Sean: you might want to report this as a bug in bugzilla
On Mon, 22 Nov 2004 11:05:59 +0100, Kyrre Ness Sjobak kyrre@solution-forge.net wrote:
And RH packagers: please turn it on...
Sean: you might want to report this as a bug in bugzilla
does upstream openoffice have it on by default? Whatever argument you could use to rationalize the distribution turning it on by default would also hold for upstream to enable it by default. So instead of every distribution having to take special effort to turn it on by default, file this with upstream with openoffice.org and get auto-saved turned on by default upstream and save every packager downstream the trouble.
-jef
On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 09:40 -0500, Jeff Spaleta wrote:
kyrre@solution-forge.net wrote:
And RH packagers: please turn it on...
Sean: you might want to report this as a bug in bugzilla
does upstream openoffice have it on by default? Whatever argument you could use to rationalize the distribution turning it on by default would also hold for upstream to enable it by default. So instead of
No, its off by default and has been for ages
every distribution having to take special effort to turn it on by default, file this with upstream with openoffice.org and get auto-saved turned on by default upstream and save every packager downstream the trouble.
In fact, the users@openoffice.org/discuss@openoffice.org as well as IssueZilla has heard much about this issue
It is a user defined task - especially in a networked environment, turning on autosave when home directories are NFS mounted isn't the wisest thing to do
On Wed, 24 Nov 2004 22:53:10 +0800, Colin Charles wrote:
It is a user defined task - especially in a networked environment, turning on autosave when home directories are NFS mounted isn't the wisest thing to do
Shouldn't OpenOffice be more intelligent about automatically enabling/disabling it then, rather than assuming the user thinks to switch it on? I have to admit until I saw this I had never considered it might be off. I just assumed it'd be on.
I cannot come up with any argument that justifies the auto-save feature being turned off in a desktop or user-oriented distribution.
I don't see any reason why this would be deactivated(it sure isn't in MS Office, I just checked a new install).
Colin's point of the NFS mounted home directory completely escapes me. If someone can come up with a reason that can sink into my thick head, I would like to know. At this moment it seems a very "elitist" position to think that the average user(my spouse for instance) would have any reason to assume that a feature like this would be deactivated. These types of assumptions will keep all flavors of Linux from taking over decent market share of the home desktop market.
Maybe Fedora isn't the right solution for the average person? :-(
P.S. Is this message over the top? I can never tell when I cross the line! :)
On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 22:23 +0100, Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:
It is a user defined task - especially in a networked environment, turning on autosave when home directories are NFS mounted isn't the wisest thing to do
Why not?
Because the OOo <2.0 way is to overwrite the current file, which can be mighty annoying
The OO. >2.0 way will save it in a temp file, and then only will it write it to a current file the moment you hit Save
Now, my argument over traffic - if you're dealing w/large documents in a large environment (think a university lab), you're getting quite a lot of traffic with autosaves turned on. Also, those USB thumb drive things might not appreciate being written to so often (speculation here)
On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 14:49 -0800, Sean Bruno wrote:
I cannot come up with any argument that justifies the auto-save feature being turned off in a desktop or user-oriented distribution.
Should be fixed in OOo 2.0, I'm not sure if its going on by default, but the "broken" method is definitely going to be fixed
Maybe Fedora isn't the right solution for the average person? :-(
P.S. Is this message over the top? I can never tell when I cross the line! :)
It isn't Fedora, its upstream. Think about working on a document, making some massive changes and then finding that autosave ate your old document up to. No chance of undoing easily. Your wife wouldn't be too pleased as well (as the default undo actions aren't all that high either)
It isn't Fedora, its upstream. Think about working on a document, making some massive changes and then finding that autosave ate your old document up to. No chance of undoing easily. Your wife wouldn't be too pleased as well (as the default undo actions aren't all that high either)
I wonder if this entire time I have been confused by something. Is there a difference between what we are talking about, i.e. auto-save, and recovery from a system crash? Are these different things all together?
Sean
yep--over the top, you used 2 smiley/frowney faces.....but some older installs of word perfect and word had default autosaves of every 30 minutes setup. I have used "OpenOffice" for several years and all versions I have used have had the autosave feature turned off on default settings (as I found out by losing 30+ minutes of typing once). I just remember to set the "save" on five or so minutes when I setup ANY word or excel type office program. If you think any office application works just great right out of the box, you or your spouse must not use them much. That's why all of the "options" are in setup. Tune them to YOUR personal likings and operating way. Wonder the cost of your stated "new install" of Ms Office vs Linux and OpenOffice? For the price difference I will continue to support and use Linux personally, even stating that, this is being written on a XP machine with a LOT of windows office "stuff" on it that I use because of old habits which are still being broken slowly by just swivelling around in my chair to a cluster of my personal Linux machines. .....steve
Sean Bruno wrote:
I cannot come up with any argument that justifies the auto-save feature being turned off in a desktop or user-oriented distribution.
I don't see any reason why this would be deactivated(it sure isn't in MS Office, I just checked a new install).
Colin's point of the NFS mounted home directory completely escapes me. If someone can come up with a reason that can sink into my thick head, I would like to know. At this moment it seems a very "elitist" position to think that the average user(my spouse for instance) would have any reason to assume that a feature like this would be deactivated. These types of assumptions will keep all flavors of Linux from taking over decent market share of the home desktop market.
Maybe Fedora isn't the right solution for the average person? :-(
P.S. Is this message over the top? I can never tell when I cross the line! :)
much. That's why all of the "options" are in setup. Tune them to YOUR personal likings and operating way.
Wow...Have you ever taken a standard computer user through the settings of any Office suite? They stare at you as though you are speaking a different language.
Most users really don't care about options and get very frustrated when stuff "just doesn't work."
Wonder the cost of your stated "new install" of Ms Office vs Linux and OpenOffice? For the price difference I will continue to support and use Linux personally, even stating that, this is being written on a XP
As far as cost is concerned, most people don't really care that OO and Linux are free. They get a "free" version of something with their new PC that mostly meets their needs.
Am I underestimating the novice computer user? Am I making too big a deal out of one option setting here? If I am, I'll just drop it and make an "FAQ" on a post-it to change the auto-save setting. Since I am not seeing any opinions from the RedHat folks here, I think we are all wasting out time.
On Thu, 2004-11-25 at 17:51 -0800, Sean Bruno wrote:
It isn't Fedora, its upstream. Think about working on a document, making some massive changes and then finding that autosave ate your old document up to. No chance of undoing easily. Your wife wouldn't be too pleased as well (as the default undo actions aren't all that high either)
I wonder if this entire time I have been confused by something. Is there a difference between what we are talking about, i.e. auto-save, and recovery from a system crash? Are these different things all together?
Auto-save is turned off by default, yes. When turned on however, and given a time (say every 5 minutes), it overwrites the file thats being worked on every 5 minutes (as opposed to saving it in a temporary location, and then only overwriting the file when the user clicks Save)
Recovery from a system crash happens when autosave is turned on, yes. But what if your system *does not* crash, and AutoSave is turned on, and you made changes, and it ate your old file up? Wouldn't you be pissed?
Lots of users would be, so OOo 2.0 will fix this. Trawl IssueZilla if you'd like more information about this
yes I have taken several "novices" thru the setups/options of OO and Ms windows stuff too. some couldn't setup a cup on a saucer, but most can and do most office personell are rather computer savy after just a little work, but I do think the setup of saving the work in any office suite should be closely controlled in this day and age. Just turning on the "auto-save" feature doesn't help without where it should go, so there are 2 points of interest here. Where to allow office people to save and if they should be allowed to carry home data if they use a thumb-drive, cd, floppy or whatever. Seems to me that in a secure data site, like a doctor/lawyer office it should go back to the server. Point is---where do you save or allow it to be saved after turning on the auto-save feature on everyone's computer? May as well not have it turned on in an office environment as to have maybe sensitive data going soneplace the admin wouldn't ever dream of allowing it. even in the home, where my usual usage is, I use particular directories of my own choise, not the default directories. I like to copy them to a data cd, or thumbdrive and take them with me--I don't like waiting to find them through a search of my hard drive, even Ms winders likes to bury them inside a directory or 4. and we are making a lot to do about just a minor point--just publish this default setting "problem" somehwere that newbies can find and list other ways to use the auto-save feature---Hay! a info page? I do have a small network (7 computers)going here at home and my wife likes me to be handy sometimes to FIX her computer once in a while. She uses Excel/word but I can't get her to change to OO/Linux. She won't allow me to even upgrade her computer to XP-let alone Linux Fedora Core-SHE SAYS SHE FINALLY GOT THE HANG OF ME Windows--yeah--right! .....steve
Sean Bruno wrote:
Wow...Have you ever taken a standard computer user through the settings of any Office suite? They stare at you as though you are speaking a different language.
Most users really don't care about options and get very frustrated when stuff "just doesn't work."
As far as cost is concerned, most people don't really care that OO and Linux are free. They get a "free" version of something with their new PC that mostly meets their needs.
Am I underestimating the novice computer user? Am I making too big a deal out of one option setting here? If I am, I'll just drop it and make an "FAQ" on a post-it to change the auto-save setting. Since I am not seeing any opinions from the RedHat folks here, I think we are all wasting out time.
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