Patrick's Rants

This is the one where the guy is standing there just talking to the camera and he reveals that Denny’s thinks he deserves sausage and and doesn’t make him choose, unlike his wife.

Just for clarification, not only does my wife make sausage and bacon, it’s links and patties. I guess my wife loves me more than Denny’s loves him.

It’s been one of those weeks in our house. On Wednesday my step-daughter went to the pool with her cousin. Around 5:40 or so my brother called to see if the kids were still here. Hmm… my nephew was, but not my niece or step-daughter. He said they called him around 4:00 when the pool closes to say they were looking for their bag with house keys, etc. in it, but hadn’t heard from them since. The girls are 10 and 11. Now, normally I hate that the 10 year old’s dad gave her and her 9 year old brother a cell phone, but it does come in handy from time to time. This time, it was sitting on the counter. No help.

Dinner was cooking on the stove as I called my wife. She hadn’t heard from them either since before they went to the pool. My brother hopped into his car to look for them. My wife drove around the neighborhood on her way home. I jumped on my bicycle since the girls were on their bikes and I could ride down the alleys like they could. We spent around an hour looking for the kids. I finally figured out how to use my stupid phone for voice commands with all the calling back and forth between the three of us.
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Cindi Lauper just finished singing, “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” on the Today Show. She really sounds like she forgot the lyrics or at least how to sing it the way she used to.

And really, “daddy asks what you gonna do with your life”? Sounds like at forty you should move out of your parents’ house.

Another thing that I found just recently when working on a spreadsheet and then wanting to make some lables is that Office only opens the same document type from the menu. In Openoffice.org I can open any document from the “File” menu. If I’m using a spreadsheet I can click the “New Document” icon and a spreadsheet opens; if instead I click the little drop down arrow I can open any other kind of document. In Excel, it’s only Excel. Forget about working on more than one kind of document without searching for the new(whatever kind) document in the “Start” menu. So to do something that I have gotten very familiar with, creating labels, I had to open a Word document and then use the “Tools” menu. And then the dialog box is a little confusing. I managed to print the labels that I wanted, but did it in the wrong order so I had to type the stinking labels twice. See, Office will allow you to print the labels and then not save your information. In OpenOffice.org, I just use the “New Labels” menu item. It then opens the label dialog box, I can put in my information and it creates the labels that I can then preview (not so with MS Office) before I print. And if I like the results, I can save it.

Lately, I have been forced to use Microsoft’s software for working with some spreadsheets. It’s the employer’s machine and there isn’t much I can do about it. Everytime something takes longer to do in the MS version I have made a comment. Like when I wanted to make some changes to multiple cells in a spreadsheet. I did what I normally do, highlight the range of cells that I wanted to delete. I hit backspace and… only the top left cell in the range was deleted. In OpenOffice.org I would have a range of cells that was now empty. If I chose the delete key instead I get a popup dialog with all the options for deleting the cell content. Now I’m not saying that the cells can’t be cleared you just have to use the mouse and right click for a context menu and then left click on the clear contents menu item. Huh. Maybe that’s why they say it’s hard for people to start using OpenOffice.org when they’ve gotten used to MS Office: people keep using the mouse for the three extra steps that MS made them used to. I know only having to do one mouse/highlight and keystroke vs one mouse/highlight, keysroke (dammit only the one cell is empty now!) right click, left click is so confusing to me

One of my co-workers – more of a supervisor really – has been making note and has asked me where to get OpenOffice.org. I’m expecting that he will be downloading it and trying it out.

I was working with some spreadsheets this weekend for a small project at work. I needed to get the information from the spreadsheet into a plain text file and csv was how I chose to do it since I already had the basics of how to display it. At home I have OpenOffice.org installed and that’s what I use. Since the spreadsheets didn’t have anything “fancy” in them it was very trivial to use programs from more than one company to work on them.

I did find some extremely interesting differences between Excel and OpenOffice.org Calc. The first is that when doing a “save as” to save the file as something other than what I started with (an xls file) OpenOffice.org prompts me for how to format the output, including the options for separating text in the new file. It then warns me that only current sheet was saved due to outut being csv. I can then save each of the sheets as csv and close the program. Trying the same in Excel I am unable to format the output file the way I want – it might be in there somewhere, but there is no prompt asking for the format when doing a simple “save as”. It also pops up three dialog boxes for each sheet that is being exported, Calc only asked on the first sheet and kept the options for each subsequent sheet. I also needed to replace spaces with underscores in the new file names. With Calc I just named the files as the tab name. I did the same thing with Excel, but once the file was saved (after having to hit “Enter” on three pop up dialog boxes) the tab name changed to match the saved file name. I’m sure there’s a good reason for this, but it didn’t make sense to me. Once I was done I hit the close window button at the top right of the Excel window. A new dialog box popped up, “Do you want to save changes to file.csv?” Um, no. I already saved that file with the information that I wanted. Calc never tried to make changes to the file that I was working on, it simply closed when I clicked the close window button saving my original file and the exported files perfectly.

In this simple comparison, OpenOffice.org wins hands down. Each saved sheet needing three confirmation boxes? That’s treating your users as idiots, not to mention reducing productivity. Changing the tab names as the files are being saved? It might be a handy feature if you need to correlate the exported files back to the spreadsheet, but goofy. If I want the tab to have a particular name, that’s what I want it to stay until I change it. In neither case did the original spreadsheet get modified by the export process, but the save dialog that pops up when closing Excel could be confusing.

Oh, and OpenOffice.org is free.