Applications on my desktop use different dictionaries for spell checking. For example Firefox, Tomboy, and OpenOffice use different dictionaries.

Gnome apps however appear to share the gnome dictionary (If I add a word in tomboy it is also added in evolution)

I hope this isn't a duplicate, I searched and couldn't find anything. I'm also not sure if this is the site to suggest Open Office stuff...

Does anyone remember the good old days, when you could have multiple documents open in one instance of Word? Then around the time tabs started to be used for the internet, windows stopped being used for documents...

I'm on a netbook and try to have as few programs open as possible. I use ubuntu netbook remix, which, if you're familiar, just shows icons and not the titles of programs in the taskbar in order to minimise space, so I often can't tell which instance of a program I'm opening. If all my documents were in the same instance, I wouldn't have to distinguish between repeated icons in my taskbar. Being able to use tabs in office would make me (and my puter) endlessly happy, instead of saving most of my documents as text files so I can tab them in gedit. And the great thing about tabs, is you can choose not to use them! Everyone wins!

Opening OpenOffice program takes way too much for normal use. I have been using Microsoft Office, but it starts way faster then OpenOffice. Can't OpenOffice be made to quickly start-up. It probably starts up too many features that no-one needs.

Working with OpenOffice is like going back 10 years in time to microsoft office 97. OpenOffice's theme is terrible.
2 solutions:
*office 2007 support in wine
*a theme for openoffice, now it seams like there is no theme for openoffice

Office software is sole of professional work and keeping things tidy.
Open office word alternative improvements Glance:
1) Support more paper sizes for printing (word apparently supports more than 25 forms)
2) Quick easy Printing [1 click print option without editing document]
Better previews of actions that can be performed [this is major area open office is lagging behind]
3) Live previews of font changes, print preview [improvements], other actions like applying themes, styles, borders, etc should have better previews.
4) Font manager integration into office, fonts in open office should look professional, uniqueness, distinction, visibility.
5) Clipboard manager for both ubuntu and Open office will make life easier. Storing more snapshots of clipboards, integration into system, revert/apply changes in chain of histories
6) Charts in open office are too outdated and still word has more than 50 chart types, drawing vector and art is mess, hardly updated and old tools. Better support of Inserting International characters (ASCII, character map integration, insert equations?)
7) Allow inserting custom files, images, art etc
8) Backgrounds, watermarks, document colors, mail merge, email, fax improvements(get addresses from other email accounts, system address book, over network, import yahoo, mail email addresses(csv ?) etc)
Better integration of open office writer into calc; impress [spreadsheet, presentation applications] for easy import/export.
Wow can we match Ribbon interface. Better If we can get best fonts rolling for both open office and ubuntu before next major, if possible some way to protect documents, versioning etc.improve compatibility with docx[office 2007],Google docs,zoho word file[?],abw[abiword] file formats. Writer can also be used as source code editor for WebPages, online help and online integration of help into open office, get templates online, more templates and themes
Wow can we match Ribbon interface. Better if we can get best fonts rolling for open office and ubuntu rolling before next Major Release like open office 3 so people expect much more from big releases.

Fonts in OpenOffice are horrendously rendered and look thin and 'scratchy' (Times New Roman in Writer being a good example) and additionally there is no sub-pixel anti-aliasing even when the rest of my desktop is using it.

Some horizontal strokes such as on the small letter 'p' are actually invisible - there appears to be not enough weight in them and makes the document look like it has been photocopied too many times.

Currently this is not an application I would like to spend much of my day using (and thankfully I don't have to) - but if Ubuntu is being touted as suitable in an office environment, this could be a serious problem.

I am pushing for Ubuntu to be used in our company but this sort of thing does not help my case.

Firefox has spell-checking. Word processors have spell-checking and auto-correct. Pidgin has spell-checking and a completely independent auto-correct plugin. Thunderbird has spell-checking but no auto-correct. Some text editors have spell-checking, others don't.

But each of these programs uses its own engine and its own dictionary, duplicating the same overlapping functionality in many different programs, wasting developer effort, and resulting in incomplete dictionaries/functionalities.

Why?? The Linux/Unix philosophy is supposed to have a bunch of small, well-written programs that do one thing and do it well, which are then used as components inside other apps.

I think that it should be the default behaviour if any trash window is open.
To me, it is a waste of time to have to close this window.
Not a big deal but such small enhancements can make your work more productive.

a lot of times i need to convert my .pdf files to .doc but i am not able to do that using openoffice, so i have to install koffice or wine and then "Pdf to Doc Converter" to be able to do it, but i do not like to install those things (it is a lot of work), we just need a simple plug-in in openoffice to do that.

Hello
Some programms like openoffice do not have all the printer options like how many pages to print per side, etc..
Why is it so difficult to provide an identical maksk for every app in ubuntu?