I'm right there with you. This is actually one of my biggest frustrations with OpenOffice (and any other Office clone for that matter): they aren't just copying the good from MS Office, they're also copying the "bad" (IMHO, of course, hehe). Maybe it's just me and naive hope, but I can't help thinking that if OpenOffice came out with better formatting tools than Office, the kind of thing you mention e.g. select a series of formatted bullets with multiple levels and auto-create a style out of it that you can freely apply to any level of bullet, that it would really gain some respect against word and set itself apart. As it is OOo is left just being an also-ran, always compared to Word, which still has some advantages in terms of UI smoothness and certainly speed. But just imagine if OOo formatting systems were a step beyond Office 2k7 or 2k10 - wouldn't that spark some more legitimate comparison and debate? Wouldn't that be a lot more interesting? Doesn't that serve OOo's goals more?
I'm tired of everyone just trying to do the crappy things MS has done, only for free, or "open source", and somehow that's supposed to be enough. What about different, *better* ways of doing it? When it comes down to it, as you said, the ribbon is really just a different way to interface with the same old semi-broken styling system. There are a few improvements to be fair, but overall it's just a new way to interact with the same old tools. What about new tools, or at least *smarter* tools?
Adobe has just come out with CS5 Suites, and though they really have no major competition, they've added a pretty nice array of new features, including Content Aware Fill (which arguably had competition from a GIMP plugin well before its release, but let's ignore that for a moment
). Where is the Content Aware Fill equivalent in MS Word? Come on people!
- Oshyan
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). But it has the same problems as Powerpoint, and - in my experience - the templating is even harder to modify, apply, and restrict. It's a fantastic free replacement for Powerpoint, but I don't think it quite fits my needs in this case. Indeed, we had been using OOo and Presenter to do our presentations initially, but found even the normal styling functions to be challenging to actually use consistently. Even Office 2k7 was an improvement, though I don't appreciate everything about it to be sure.
I'm sure I could find a "better" source if I spent more than 30 seconds on the search):