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Comment by DanielBMarkham | Hacker News Reader

Is this a joke?

If you had to ask, they've probably proven their point that there's something wrong with a lot of Open Source software :)

Oddly enough, I never had any problems with OOo. It just works.

On the other hand, when my office's computers got bumped from MS Office 2003 to 2007, I saw a lot of people bitching about how difficult it was to find stuff and making lots of Ray Charles with moving furniture jokes.

I don't really use Office very often, and when I do I find it to be a total rube golberg machine.

I figure that most people are just so used to it that they don't realize it anymore.

"Works like Windows" has been passing for "easy to use" for much too long. My 70-year-old mother migrated from MacOS 9 and Office 98 straight to Gnome without much complain and without any problem.

So where does Windows come in this picture? You have her going from Mac to Linux...

It doesn't. Ease of use has absolutely nothing to do with working like Windows. Unfortunately, that has been passed as the standard because so many users moving into other platforms do so from Windows.

That's because "Renaissance" will only make it in OpenOffice 3.3...

After the initial "people are terrified of change and will resist it" though, the ribbon turned out to be an improvement.

So when can I expect them to stop asking me where this or that function is hidden in Office __2007__.

As soon as you point them to the excellent interactive

Word 2003 to Word 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/word/HA100744321033.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=904...

Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HA101491511033.aspx

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=897...

PowerPoint 2003 to PowerPoint 2007 command reference guide

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/powerpoint/HA101490761033....