Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 19227
Envelope printing needs to be easier
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:41:44 UTC
Hi All, I sent a couple of hour this week with a lady helping her migrate over to OO. Her major beef with OO was the way it handles envelopes. And she has a point. So, here are three suggestion that I believe would be easy to implement: First off, before my suggestions: not that there are none, but I have yet to find an operator that actually wants an envelope inserted in their document. There poor soles "suffer" with the current method. 1) In print dialog box, add an additional button on the bottom left, next to the "New Doc." bottom titled "Print." That way, the operator can just zip out a quick envelope. This avoids the wasted time (steps) creating a new envelope document or trying to figure out how to remove an envelope from an existing document. And for those operators that actually want an envelope in their document, they still have their "New Doc." and "Insert" buttons. Make everyone happy and saves a lot of time and steps. 2) If the operator has highlighted an existing address in their document before activating the envelope dialog, automatically paste the highlighted text into the "Addressee" box. Big, big time saver. Especially for the "low skills" operator that doesn't realize they can copy and paste the text or does not know how to manipulate the clipboard when the "Edit" pull down is not activated (those who have not learned to right click or use the Ctrl-C & Ctrl-V). Again, big time saver. 3) As most of the operators I have dealt with are not inserting envelopes, it would make a lot more sense to move the "envelope" pick from the "Insert" pull down to the "Tools" pull down -- especially if you implement my above suggestions. The tools menu will much more closely reflect the actual use of the envelope dialog. Many thanks, --Tony aewell@gbis.com
changed issuetype to enhancement reassigend to bh
For clarity, I'd like to point out that I think the submitter means: "1) In the ENVELOPE dialog box..." I agree with heartily with his first and third numbered points though the second is not particulary important to *me*. I also agree that the insertion of an envelope into the actual document is neither intuitive or desirable to me, though I realize it is probably easier to implement that way from a programmer's point of view.
Having just watched an office worker attempt to print an envelope given an address in the letter they were composing, I strongly agree on all points made by the original reporter of this issue. Printing in OpenOffice.org is very unintuitive. Having a poorly labelled "New Doc" button as well as "Insert", yet no "Print" button on this dialog seems very strange to me (and clearly also to a number of people trying to migrate to OOo here).
Dudes! Would you please consider fixing this before 2.0 gets finalized! This is a stain on an otherwise great project!
*** Issue 89298 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
*** Issue 89299 has been marked as a duplicate of this issue. ***
This issue is like 5 years old at this point and still a major problem in 3.0. What can we do to get movement on this?
*** Issue 19227 has been confirmed by votes. ***
Over a period of weeks, I have wasted over 6 hrs in trying to get a simple envelope printed on my printer. I came to the conclusion that it can't be done on my HP laser printer since its top bay, used for envelope printing, has a sleeve that automatically close in and center the envelope in the bay's center. OO prints an envelope in the left most side no matter what I do. When I tried to feed an envelope on the left side with the sleeve wide open, the envelope gets crooked and jam in the printer. OO pointed me to this link, http://openoffice.blogs.com/openoffice/2005/12/printing_envelo.html, which will attest that many people are having a problem with this simple task. Because of my handwriting, I save a lot of time printing over manually addressing an envelope. I am seriously considering upgrading my MS Office. It is crazy and non beneficial for OO to not be able to print evelopes in a strait forward manner. I used to be a really good (easy to maintain) programmer. Tell me the environment that one will code in and any other basics, and I will have a a go. This is how important the matter is.
I attempted to have another go at printing envelopes, this times after reading fully the OO documentation. After clicking Insert>Envelope, the Format tab has a Preview window that is supposed to help one pick the right size envelope format to print. After trying to get mine to work I went out to the Help Forums and found this http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=11104. It seemed that when OO upgraded versions, something got lost. This post is over a year old and the problem is still in effect. Not being able to do the basics only take away from whatever esoteric things Writer can do and only raise unneeded doubts about the validity of the product.
To grep the issues easier via "requirements" I put the issues currently lying on my owner to the owner "requirements".
Opened: Mon Sep 8 00:23:00 +0000 2003. 2003!!! Not to hurt anyone's feeling, but this bug and other ignored bugs are the reason the general public is rejecting Open Office. It is my impression that you only fix bugs when they block some new feature bloat you want to add. That said, I had to remove yet another OO from a customer's computer and replace it with office. May I share the customer's remarks with you: Can I have Word? I don't like Open Office (i.e. -- can't print out envelopes that easily without a lot of cut and pasting and formatting is all screwed up.) Please fix some bugs? Please fix this. 2003 is long enough. You guys should be completely embarrassed by this! Sincerely, -T
Hi All, If you have been suffering with bug year after year after year, check out what they have done over in LibreOffice. They did a nice clean up. http://www.libreoffice.org/ -T