Public Comment

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Comment from: frickmann@nc.rr.com

Please allow me to make the following suggestions. In the case you have already considered this, please excuse my ignorance.

I suggest that the standard allows for more different documents to be gathered into one file, shown in multiple tabs, just like different sheets in a spreadsheet application. The tabs may be visible or hidden.

This is different from embedding documents in the sense that all documents are equal and are edited in their own tabs.

This way, one can have a spreadsheet for producing charts and tables together with a text document in one file, and multiple charts from the same spreadsheet may be embedded in the text document, and data editing is easier because it is done in a tab sheet as usual.

As other examples, database tables or queries can be used as spreadsheets, or as the source for a mail merge text document.

It also makes automation easier. One document in a file may be a script module refering to the other documents using the XML namespace.

Another topic is styles. It would be nice to have more than just text document styles. For instance, in today's MS office, changing styles for equations are saved in the Equation Editors settings; not in the documents' styles. I suggest that the style section also allows for saving things like equation styles. One could also define styles for spreadsheet cells.

I am a long time power user of MS Office, including automation with macros and database connectivity with Active X Data Objects. I have been using Staroffice and later OpenOffice.org at my home PC running Linux for about 3 years now.

Thank you for reading my mail. I hope that you will consider my suggestions. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

Best regards,
Jesper Frickmann
Statistician, MS Engineering