many people cling precariously to their slight computer literacy. they know how
to use a program merely through their familiarity with the positioning of menus
and toolbar icons. there are an awful lot of such people who've been trained to
use Microsoft Office perhaps on one of the free or cheap courses that are being
offered everywhere atleast in the UK currently. atleast in the non-profit /
charitable sector people receive funding to buy MS Office precisely because this
is what many people are being trained to use.
OOo has this great feature of completely configurable menus and other user
interface (look and feel) aspects. much of its user interface can be made to
resemble other office applications. to help people move from using other office
applications to OpenOffice.org it would be helpful if they could have the option
of configuring the user interface to look like their current application.
hopefully people will be able to replace Microsoft Office with OOo without much
incident.
to this end I have begun creating configuration files that will make parts of
the OOo interface resemble the most common office applications used by the
people I would like to move to OOo. these files can be easily loaded from within
the application.
this first such configuration file is a first draft at resembling MS Word 97.
I'm not saying that making OOo's menu options resemble Word's isn't a retrograde
step in terms of sensible menu structure, but it should be positive in these
other respects I've mentioned