Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 59687
Text rotation should be eased
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:38:57 UTC
Side by side, with Microsoft Office, the OO user interface for doing text rotation is so clumsy and ineptly designed as to be nearly useless. Please let me explain: In MS office, you just tell it "rotate text" (in a top-level menu item, if I remember correctly) and you're done. In OO, it's buried do deeply in menus so you can hardly find it. Then, once you do, it doesn't really work. The character rotation doesn't work, because it doesn't respect newlines. You have to use manual break instead, which is really tedious because OO (unlike MS office) doesn't provide a hot key to insert a manual line break. (yes, you can set up a hot key for the dialog, but then you still have to select "line break" -- it doesn't remember your last choice -- and hit enter. Very boring) If one can be content with 270 degree rotation, one can select "table properties" (deceptively named, since what you're really adjusting is the table CELL properties) and change text flow/text direction, which works the way the "character / properties" OUGHT to work. I am sure there is some fancy-pants XML/object-oriented philosophical reason for doing thing this way, but from the standpoint of user experience, it sucks.
Reassigned to requirements.
SBA->mzarathustra: Thank you for your masterpiece of political correctness concerning "I have an idea how to make things better but I am far from able to find the right words". We do not exactly love to be bashed with "You are worse than MS Office and you do so on purpose in order to toture the users by making the product useless.." - At lease this is what I take as a suumary of your initial description. In my opinion, such descriptions as this one - are useless - are not a contribution to this OPEN SOURCE project that COMES TO YOU FOR FREE - do NOT make people want to read your "next case of nagging" at all. - Makes us want you to stick with MS products and give them your valuable feedback Changed summary from "Text rotation UI is so poorly designed as to be nearly useless" to "Text rotation should be eased".
Maybe we should also clarify whether we are talking about "rotated characters" or "rotated layout". Yes, there is a difference. Think about it. Btw a manual line break can be inserted with SHIFT+ENTER.