It still looks butt ugly but at least this bug was partially addressed in the latest beta release of Open Office. The opening date for this one, “Dec 19 19:13:00 +0000 2001”. That’s more than seven years ago! This show stopper has prevented me from writing my thesis, any scientific articles, or in fact anything serious in open office since writing such things requires proper cross reference functionality. But finally, they implemented the simple feature of actually being able to refer to paragraph numbers of something elsewhere in the document using an actual cross reference. This is useful to be able to refer to numbered references, figures, tables, formulas, theorems, sections, etc.
The process for this bug went something like this “you don’t need cross references” (imagine star wars type gesture here). Really for a bunch of people implementing a word processor the mere length of the period they maintained this point of view was shocking and to me has always been a strong indication that they might not be that well suited for the job of creating an actual word processor. Then they went on to a infinite loop of “hmm maybe we can hack something for open office 1.1 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.0” and “we need to fix this because imported word documents are breaking over this” (never mind that real authors might need this for perfectly valid reasons). This went on for a very very long time, and frankly I have long since stopped considering open office as a serious alternative for doing my word processing.
I just tried it in 3.0 beta and it actually works now, sort of. Testing new OoO releases for this has become somewhat of a ritual for me. For years, the first thing I did after downloading OoO was try to insert a few cross references before shaking my head and closing the window. The UI is still horribly unusable but at least the feature is there now if you know where to look for it.
Six years ago Framemaker was the only alternative that met my technical requirements of being an actual word processor with a UI and features that support the authoring process (unlike latex, which is a compiler), the ability to use cross references, and flexible but very strictly applied formatting. Theoretically word can do all of this as well but I don’t recommend it for reasons of buggyness and the surprising ease with which you can lose hours of work due to word automatically rearranging & moving things for you when you e.g. insert a picture, pasting a table, etc (and yes I’ve seen documents corrupt themselves just by doing these things).
The last few years, I’ve used open office only to be able to open the odd word/powerpoint file dropping in my inbox at home. I basically have close to no office application needs here at home. For my writing at work needs, I usually adapt to what my coauthors use (i.e. word and sometimes latex). Framemaker has basically been dying since Adobe bought it. The last version I used was 6.0 and the last occasion I used it was when writing my phd thesis.