Floyd Jones

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Recent posts by Floyd Jones

Linux, Solaris, Monopoly, OS/2, and very shortly on the Mac OS.
23 years ago

Originally posted by Frank Carver:
Would it be possible to turn off [b]all the auto-guessing features?[/B]


You can whack away most of the auto stuff. With a Writer doc open, choose Tools > AutoCorrect, and deselect everything in the Options and Word Completion tabs.

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StarOffice Companion
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23 years ago
Just wanted to thank everyone for all the great posts, threads, and flashbacks to adolescence and foot-long floppies (one in the same thing for many, I'm sure, and not meant as a double entendre ).
Also, to quote Solveig quoting Carl Sagan, billions and billions of thanks to Paul for getting this discussion going, and thanks to Solveig for bartending with her trademark humor, charm, and irreverence. (God love ya, dearie.)
Have fun with StarOffice, buy low, sell high, be well, do good work, keep, in touch, and to throw a little George Carlin in there, may the forces of darkness become confused on the way to your house.
And for heaven's sake, if you don't want to lose any more hair over using SO, BUY THE BOOK!
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StarOffice Companion
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23 years ago
Don't you EVER accuse me of being a good boy! Don't forget, I know where you work.
[This message has been edited by Floyd Jones (edited December 21, 2000).]
23 years ago
The annoying feature I cover is word auto-completion as you're typing. (I really hate that!) Autonumbering is a hit and miss thing that COULD be good from time to time. It's just annoying when you're not sure why it's happening (as with anything, I guess )
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StarOffice Companion
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23 years ago

Originally posted by Marcus Green:
Woah, I can see why the word dummy or idiot was not in the book title


I probably should have included in my sections of the book, "Written BY a dummy, not FOR dummies." Naw, we assumed SOME level of previous Office-type experience as a starting point for our instructions. However, since SO is new to most people, we DO do some good handholding, especially through some of the trickier stuff.

With reference to why I decided to the advantages of Star Office to put together an entire book ....
Word only runs on Windows and I see a very bright future for Linux. Also one of it's greatest proponents Woody Leonard says that its management of compound documents leaves a lot to be desired.
As the book is not graphics intensive I didn't feel I needed the fine grained control of DTP (I assume Frame that Solveig refers to is Frame Maker?).
Star office is not perfect, but it seems better than any other paid for or free alternative.


Just a dirty little secret: We wrote the book using FrameMaker, not Writer. I DO feel that Writer handles book-building better more gracefully than Word does. But for long books, nothing can touch FrameMaker. If we had done the book in Writer, I felt I could have worked around and tweaked some of the master document stuff. But one of the most important things Writer lacks is the ability to cross-reference across files (like, "see 'Predicting Earthquakes With Sheep's Bladders' on p. 253"). Much documentation I've read says you're supposed to be able to do it, but that dog just don't hunt. We wanted to use a lot of cross-references in the book, so that wouldn't work for us.
As far as the "Running heads" concept, I'd go into it more here, but it's just way too long for the space we have here. I will, however, quote from the beginning of the section that explains how to set up this functionality: "This feature is one of the most confusing and non-intuitive in StarOffice; and if it didn't play such an important part inhow other features in StarOffice work, you'd be wise to ignore it altogether."
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[This message has been edited by Floyd Jones (edited December 21, 2000).]
23 years ago
Mark -
My expertise with Adabas D stops at creating them in SO and setting up relations between tables. I don't know how you'd access them from an outside app. Sorry I can't be more help.
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23 years ago
It appears you can no longer just order a CD from the Sun site for $9.95. BUT, you can go to the following site and order a 5.2 CD for $1.50 (and that includes shipping)!!
https://www.justwebit.com/cgi-bin/e/eprodsdb.cgi?9713+24+m
P.S. Solveig and I tried very, very hard to get the CD bundled with our book, but it was not to be.
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23 years ago
Chris -
I checked back on Sun's site, and you're right. The offer for getting an English CD only seems to be gone! That really stinks. But the better news is that I found the following URL where you can order a copy of the 5.2 CD for a grand total (includes shipping) of $1.50!
https://www.justwebit.com/cgi-bin/e/eprodsdb.cgi?9713+24+m
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StarOffice Companion
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23 years ago
DOH! You had to go and ask "the question":

If I buy (or win) a copy of your book, does it come with the full version of StarOffice on CD?


Solveig and I (and our agent at Sun Press) fought like the dickens to get the CD included in the book. We nearly had it, but at the last minute the product group asked us not to do it. We never got a clear explanation about that. So no, it doesn't come with the book.
Looking at the download numbers for SO on sun's home page www.sun.com (something like 4 million), I wonder how accurate that is. Lord knows I account for probably half of that trying to download it with my 56K (it even took a while with my new DSL at 50K throughput). So I finally just forked out the $15 or whatever it is and ordered a CD.
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StarOffice Companion
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23 years ago
I'm running Monopoly 98 on an Athlon 650 with 128 RAM, and SO behaves well--most of the time. There were a couple of times when the system froze while using SO, but that might not have even been SO. I have, however (especially at work running SO over a network) gotten into the habit of hitting the save icon about once every minute. It's saved my arse a couple of times.
Just as an FYI, if you ever do lose something you were working on, SO has a default backup directory. To find out where yours is, choose Tools > Options > General > Paths, and look at the path next to the "Backup copies" item. Then go look in that folder while saying your Hail Marys.
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StarOffice Companion
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23 years ago
Sounds like you found the Bouncing Betty feature. That kind of Random And Mysterious behavior happens to me from time to time. You pistol whipped that one good.
One other trick I've found when RAM behavior happens is using the repair feature. Run the SO Setup option (from the desktop and select the repair option). I have no idea what the heck it does, but danged if it doesn't do the trick 52.7% of the time (44.2% I do something like you did, and the remaining 3.1% of the time I end up reinstalling (and having to reset all of my #*#&@&*^$ options).
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23 years ago
It's probably because you're pasting beginning at a paragraph that has numbering turned on. After the numbered list you DO want, hit Return/Enter twice to turn auto numbering off for that paragraph. Then paste beginning with that new, non-numbered paragraph.
See if that works. If not, repost and we'll work through it some more.
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23 years ago
If for no other reason, SO is an EXCELLENT FTP client for maintaining Web sites. It lets you access multiple Web sites from a single window, and you can drag and drop files from your system onto the FTP server. It's great stuff.
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23 years ago
Howdy, Marcus -
I burned the beans and had ta ride inta town for another can. Sorry about the pokey response.
When you talk about headers and footers not coming over, I assume there are special things in the headers/footers that aren't being maintained. The things that control headers and footers unique are the page styles they're attached to. For example, left pages can have unique headers and footers from right pages. In the master document, you can create separate page styles just like you can in individual documents. But if you're getting really tricky with multiple types of page styles (p.211 of the book), you may need to first create the page styles you want in the master document, then import them into your individual documents (p.221 of the book), and create the exact page flow you want in your individual documents, so that the master document reflects all the page styles/breaks.
There's a whole chapter in the book on dealing with books and longer documents. This chapter shows you how to keep things simple and get the maximum flexibility you can, such as using running heads in the header or footer that display the current heading in a section.

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23 years ago