'Note from a satisfied user: Congratulations for all efforts of the past!'

Category: blog

We received the following mail from Mr. Ziegler on the developer mailing list [1] and we want to share it with all of you:

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I was encouraged to leave my aoo forum post directly in the dev mailing list so that you all can read what I wanted to express. I am not a software developer in any sense--only a user.

Dear developers,

there may be little positive feedback for your work, I guess. So I created an account for the forum (and now subscribed temporarily to dev@aoo) to leave a big THANK YOU!

The  first version I used must have been something like StarOffice 4.3, the  first I owned was SO 5.2, and then I shifted to OpenOffice(.org) when it  introduced the XML file formats. So I am a convinced and longterm user  since then and hardly ever regretted my decision.


OpenOffice  gave me the possibility to mostly do what I wanted to (with writer,  base, calc, impress and draw - in that historic order) in an efficient  way, and the only thing I don't like is, that it always tends towards following  MS Office although it already was better in many ways. I understand that it is  crucial to get as many users as possible, so I acknowledge the decisions  towards MS Office.


What I like most is the long term usability  and stability, and I do not only keep my office files from more than 10  years ago, I also use and re-use them. And if one crashed in the past, I nearly  always could recover them by opening the zip bundle with an (hex) editor.


By that, I  enjoyed the progress in LibreOffice, but didn't really need it. Although  I switched to LibreOffice on some machines, I am always glad that there  is OpenOffice, too. In my eyes, it is the more stable and efficient  branch of the project. This year it was my fallback tool and salvation  in a book project that I started with LO Writer;   I first invested hours to get my pictures back to the place they  belonged to when they got more and more (as others did decades before  with MS Word) and then had to give up as it didn't open the file anymore  without crashing. Apache OpenOffice (standard and portable) solved the problem. It got a nice book, by  the way, for our church jubilee.


So if you get the software  maintained, I will probably continue to use OpenOffice for another 20  years. And I won't switch to DTP software (Scribus) for the next book  project neither like I regularly do for magazines, brochures etc.


OpenOffice is a great, great software, even if it didn't evolve much in the last years! (maybe even: because..)   Powerful enough for both private and standard business use.


Keep patience and persistence!


A very satisfied and content user

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[1] Archived message in the developer mailing list