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"Clippy, the bane of all semi-sentient Office users "

Sentient, and semi-sentient, Office users were not the target audience of Clippy, unless it was always intended as annoyance, leaving ...?

Now that OpenOffice is usable enough, for me, I have stopped editing RTF in emacs. At one job, I was asked to explain to a co-worker how to create PDFs. I started with "go to this address

http://www.openoffice.org/

download and install OpenOffice, then call me to come over".

Abiword
OpenOffice
LaTeX

And that Linux box will run iMovie, GarageBand, iTunes, [Microsoft] Office, require no command-line knowledge, and work out of the box with most major peripherals without having to download or install any drivers, right?

My proposal will feature Openoffice. I present to you, Megacorp, a product that will save money on even that 10% of the business that travels. The look and feel is even more similar to Google docs than MS, thereby not confusing the highly intelligent executives any more than necessary.

How could I forget to mention http://www.openoffice.org/ which is a great office productivity suite and http://www.eclipse.org/ which is great developer IDE suite? All OSS, of course.

I don't use StarOffice, but I have used the Russian OpenOffice.org suite has always worked very well for me. And yes, there is a Russian Firefox available too.

At least this software doesn't get random 'updates' that suddenly break part of the dialogs so they appear in English and Russian partially.

and will be very inefficient in a system which places things in other places (say, if there is no way to see the formatting codes - God, I miss Word Perfect).

IT Teacher - Good morning class, today we are going to learn how to install software on our computers. Firstly I want you all to open your web browser and go to http://www.openoffice.org/

OO.org has got to be one of the easiest bits of software I have ever installed, what better place to start teaching kids the basics?

Cry me a river... If you want to use PDF then use OpenOffice, it a free download. ODF and PDF are international standards, it serves you right for using a proprietary product with proprietary formats.

Because it took a chunk out of Open Office's Google ranking starting the very same day MS announced the new name. The same reason that the next MS boondoggle got named Vista, after our esteemed Chairman Gates decided to turn his guns on healthcare systems. He even took a try at RMS.

Don't be a software pirate, stay legal and properly licensed by using the various free open source GPL licensed programs instead that are also available in Windows versions. Many of the best free GPL licensed open source programs which have been developed for Linux users have also been released in Windows versions. Not everyone is ready yet to move from Windows to a free GPL licensed alternative such as Ubuntu Linux. For them, a first step to freedom would be to keep on using a properly licensed copy of Windows, but to start using the various free GPL licensed alternatives to their various favorite programs. Someday, if they decide to move to a totally free operating system such as Linux they will then be able to use the Linux versions of those same programs. There is now an amazingly large complete alternative free software ecosystem of free GPL licenced software legally available for free to everyone.

Here are just a few examples of free (mostly GPL licensed) programs which are also available in Windows versions:

• OpenOffice the free office suite
• Mozilla Firefox web browser
• Thunderbird email program
• Clamwin free antivirus
• Gimp image mainpulation program for photo retouching and image composition
• ImageMagick software suite to create, edit, and compose bitmap images
• Inkscape open source scalable vector graphics editor
• PuTTY: A Free Telnet/SSH Client
• FTP client and server
• 7-Zip file archiver which can handle compression formats such as 7z, ZIP, GZIP, BZIP2 and TAR
• Scribus open source page layout application
• AbiWord the free word processing program
• Gnumeric the free spreadsheet program
• Stellarium free open source planetarium
• Celestia free space simulation and space exploration program

he issue is if you use macros (more probably VBA), you are likely to have code invested in Office with no upgrade path to OO.

Fortunately for those poor shortsighted souls, you are incorrect.

Guess I misread "Word macros" as "word processor macros" in retrospect (Bad me! How many times do I have to tell me to not use "Word" as a generic?!). OTOH, grandparent wasn't very clear, as it seemed heavily to later imply lack of macro capability, namely

If all you need is a standard word processing program, spreadsheet, and presentation maker

emphasis mine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Securi ty

http://groups.google.fr/group/comp.os.linux.advoca cy/browse_thread/thread/86ffeb1d7a68f0f9/177461595 ad705cf?lnk=st&q=open+office+macro+security&rnum=1 #177461595ad705cf
http://groups.google.fr/group/mailing.comp.open-of fice/browse_thread/thread/c57bccbf0eb40efc/be17e0c cb5a3b5ca?lnk=st&q=open+office+macro+security&rnum =2#be17e0ccb5a3b5ca

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=de v&msgNo=17386
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=de v&msgNo=14458

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Securi ty

http://groups.google.fr/group/comp.os.linux.advoca cy/browse_thread/thread/86ffeb1d7a68f0f9/177461595 ad705cf?lnk=st&q=open+office+macro+security&rnum=1 #177461595ad705cf
http://groups.google.fr/group/mailing.comp.open-of fice/browse_thread/thread/c57bccbf0eb40efc/be17e0c cb5a3b5ca?lnk=st&q=open+office+macro+security&rnum =2#be17e0ccb5a3b5ca

http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=de v&msgNo=17386
http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=de v&msgNo=14458

This is a known problem and a powerful re-implementation is well under test :
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html

Did you think Open Office was only for Linux? It works just fine on Windows, so no need to switch to Linux on that account. Check it out: http://openoffice.org/

The other point is that without the wireless mesh, an access-point and an internet connected server on the other end of the radio link its functionality would be serverely compromised.

Screw the Office and filesystem formats, those have been mostly reverse engineered. What they could do is publish complete API documentation, so it doesn't take Wine years to catch up.

Except we're talking about a productivity suite here. Mostly that means a word processor and a spreadsheet. Those are mature technologies which in practice haven't changed that much in about 15 years, but just for the sake of argument we'll say 10. The basic functions, those that are used daily, have been around that long.

Speculation. Any reason why the changes in this version will not decrease productivity instead of decrease them ? It's kind of hard to know until it's been tested on larger populations, more than just the pundits, reviewers and marketeers. Even if it's about the same to use, it's more likely that the obstacles to productivity lie elsewhere in the system.

The new software also introduces new levels of complexity with Information Restriction Management technologies. Love it or hate it, it means more parts, and more parts means more complexity and complexity means chances for users to muck things up. It also introduces single point of failure twice: once in needing an external server for the Restrictions Management, once more in the network connectivity needed to reach that Restrictions Management server

Depends on the source. In most of the cases, the new software come out so that a new, slightly incompatible file format can be spread and hopefully (from the vendor's view) gain enough market share to drive around of upgrade purchases. However, that hasn't been happening lately.

Better off just sticking with OpenOffice.org, though I hear rumours of KOffice for legacy systems, also, sometime.

And for this we have to pay hundreds of dollars every two years? Bah. I'd rather get it free

Sweet! Radical change to the interface away from the comfortable and familiar to the regular user sounds like a sudden and abrupt shock to me. Open Office has served me well for several years now, replacing MSoffice, and costing about zip. Same style of interface, same functionality - and the open document format.

This is probably a good time for OSS advocates in the corporate enviroment to bring the alternative up. Radical changes mean retraining, and retraining means wasting money. You might also push the "free" as in beer angle, or the faster development cycle producing new versions faster. Open Office dosen't have as many (known) exploits. Any other good selling points I'm missing?

-GiH

That's the nice thing about Open Source and Free software -- It doesn't cost you anything to do a quick test, (and you always have th choice of fixing any deal-busters on your own dime).

Just out of curiosity how well do OOo Basic and Calc handle Excel documents with hevy duty VB content?

Which is what everyone says. That shows that you don't know anything about the present-day Linux desktop. Question: what mainstream app is missing from the business computing desktop environment?

1. Microsoft Outlook?Evolution and Kontact replace Outlook quite handily. Evolution can use the Evolution-Exchange Connector to communicate through Outlook Web Access (which many Enterprises enable anyway) and provide full Outlook functionality in Evolution. Kontact can use full Outlook functionality if configured correctly (not so user-friendly, but still quite possible). In addition, the junk mail filtering is better, using the locally installed SpamAssassin filter.
2. Microsoft Office?All but the most complex spreadsheets and Word documents can be handled by OpenOffice without any problem. I doubt that the complex ones even pose that much difficulty in migration. Microsoft Access is still used in some minor applications, but it's trivial to import the data to another, better RDBMS. There are several free GUI clients for managing the new database. MySQL has good desktop database solutions. You'd have to use pretty much every proprietary feature in Access to have this be a sticking point.
3. Internet Explorer?Ah, yes. The basis of the antitrust suit. I admit that if your organization went out of its way to find webapp software that worked only in IE, you might have some migration issues. However, IE6 runs quite well under emulation on recent versions of WINE, so unless that ActiveX component they chose is really screwed up, there's a good chance you can even emulate that. JavaScript migration issues are less of a problem than they used to be (another favourite sticking point) so Firefox will likely work well for a lot of apps that weren't designed to protect Microsoft's monopoly.

Well, the list goes on. Custom-written software (could work well under emulation unless designed specifically to thwart WINE), IP Telephony (Skype has a Linux client), and so on. My point is that any business that's interested could switch today if they wanted. There's no missing killer app (unless you're trying to make excuses). The roadblocks to migrating entirely to Linux on the business desktop are all artificially created by Microsoft to protect their monopoly. The most difficult part is convincing your users that it's a good choice. They've been brainwashed by years of Microsoft marketing, and believe pretty much every word that comes out of Steve's and Bill's mouths blindly. Many organisations will encounter significant resistance during training as belligerent, brain-washed Microsoft junkies demand that things go back to the way they were. That's unfortunate, because I can finally say after almost 15 years of using Linux, that using a Linux desktop is a joy, not an arduous task that requires command-line hacking to accomplish everything it can do.

I did a presentation at the Atlanta Unix Users' Group this month that is a more up-to-date comparison. It's available in Open Office format. You can also get to it from my home page. I did a similar talk almost four years ago. My conclusion is that MySQL has closed the feature gap with PostgreSQL in recent years. I still give PostgreSQL the edge in features, and MySQL the edge in out-of-the-box untuned performance. I also discuss replication and clustering.

The article is poorly organized. Slashdot's story about the article does not quote the most important parts. Slashdot readers have commented on the Slashdot story with numerous irrelevant points.

The article is a description of what is reasonably, in my opinion, called fraud. Quote: "After a half decade of being presented as a legitimate competitor to NeXT's object oriented development tools and various other products, Cairo was revealed as a complete hoax."

The author is trying to stop the "Fraud as a Business Plan" practiced by Microsoft. (There is also a need to stop incompatible file formats as a business plan. Open Office is excellent, and free, and uses an ISO standard file format.)

It's my hope that the developers will see this and create a suite that people can use. Most of them have used Word-Perfect or Microsoft Office and should not find it hard to see what we are talking about. (emphasis mine)

I'd like to agree with you, but my experience from following a number of bugs suggests otherwise. All of these are quite old, and prevent OOo from being much more useful than it presently is. Take the word-count issue, for instance: just about everyone I can think of that makes a living by writing absolutely fucking requires an accurate word count, configurable for different counts -- such as only the selected text, all text minus footnotes, all text everywhere in the document. And yet OOo does not seem to provide this. How blooming difficult can this be?

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) support in this area is completely non-existent. OOo is aware of double-byteness at some level, so why can't it discern CJK text from other types? Take the seventh paragraph from this page in Chinese as a good example. OOo seems to think the text has 7 "words" and 60 "characters". WTF is a "word" in this context? If I were to stretch the rules and actually count the Chinese words, I'd get something like 26, not 7. Hmm. But then, Chinese writers don't count words, they count characters (not including spaces). But then, OOo's "character" count is also useless in this regard, as we can't tell if this 60 "characters" includes spaces or not. Moreover, a lot of editors insist on having the Chinese character count and European word count -- this sample text includes two English words, so 60 "characters" here is beyond useless. AFIACT, no one dealing with CJK languages can use OOo exclusively for their business needs. And given a potential Chinese userbase of around a billion, that's a glaring shortfall.

Given that all of the bugs linked to above are easily handled by MSO (and if memory serves by WP), and that they have been languishing in OOo's bug tracker system for several years, I can only conclude that OOo devs either just don't give a shit, or that they are woefully ignorant of the competition's capabilities. I suspect it's a combination of the two -- coding this kind of functionality just isn't as sexy or fun as some of the other stuff, and so it's allowed to linger. And if this tendency continues (which is looking more and more likely as time passes), OOo will whither on the vine.

Forgive me, I am actually a bit bitter about this. I haven't the coding skills (nor time to acquire such skills) to help, or I'd just fix these damn issues myself. OOo is so close to useful. "OOo -- It's almost a good idea!" (TM) And therein lies some very intense frustration on the part of the OOo would-be userbase. Ah, well...

It's my hope that the developers will see this and create a suite that people can use. Most of them have used Word-Perfect or Microsoft Office and should not find it hard to see what we are talking about. (emphasis mine)

I'd like to agree with you, but my experience from following a number of bugs suggests otherwise. All of these are quite old, and prevent OOo from being much more useful than it presently is. Take the word-count issue, for instance: just about everyone I can think of that makes a living by writing absolutely fucking requires an accurate word count, configurable for different counts -- such as only the selected text, all text minus footnotes, all text everywhere in the document. And yet OOo does not seem to provide this. How blooming difficult can this be?

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) support in this area is completely non-existent. OOo is aware of double-byteness at some level, so why can't it discern CJK text from other types? Take the seventh paragraph from this page in Chinese as a good example. OOo seems to think the text has 7 "words" and 60 "characters". WTF is a "word" in this context? If I were to stretch the rules and actually count the Chinese words, I'd get something like 26, not 7. Hmm. But then, Chinese writers don't count words, they count characters (not including spaces). But then, OOo's "character" count is also useless in this regard, as we can't tell if this 60 "characters" includes spaces or not. Moreover, a lot of editors insist on having the Chinese character count and European word count -- this sample text includes two English words, so 60 "characters" here is beyond useless. AFIACT, no one dealing with CJK languages can use OOo exclusively for their business needs. And given a potential Chinese userbase of around a billion, that's a glaring shortfall.

Given that all of the bugs linked to above are easily handled by MSO (and if memory serves by WP), and that they have been languishing in OOo's bug tracker system for several years, I can only conclude that OOo devs either just don't give a shit, or that they are woefully ignorant of the competition's capabilities. I suspect it's a combination of the two -- coding this kind of functionality just isn't as sexy or fun as some of the other stuff, and so it's allowed to linger. And if this tendency continues (which is looking more and more likely as time passes), OOo will whither on the vine.

Forgive me, I am actually a bit bitter about this. I haven't the coding skills (nor time to acquire such skills) to help, or I'd just fix these damn issues myself. OOo is so close to useful. "OOo -- It's almost a good idea!" (TM) And therein lies some very intense frustration on the part of the OOo would-be userbase. Ah, well...

It's my hope that the developers will see this and create a suite that people can use. Most of them have used Word-Perfect or Microsoft Office and should not find it hard to see what we are talking about. (emphasis mine)

I'd like to agree with you, but my experience from following a number of bugs suggests otherwise. All of these are quite old, and prevent OOo from being much more useful than it presently is. Take the word-count issue, for instance: just about everyone I can think of that makes a living by writing absolutely fucking requires an accurate word count, configurable for different counts -- such as only the selected text, all text minus footnotes, all text everywhere in the document. And yet OOo does not seem to provide this. How blooming difficult can this be?

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) support in this area is completely non-existent. OOo is aware of double-byteness at some level, so why can't it discern CJK text from other types? Take the seventh paragraph from this page in Chinese as a good example. OOo seems to think the text has 7 "words" and 60 "characters". WTF is a "word" in this context? If I were to stretch the rules and actually count the Chinese words, I'd get something like 26, not 7. Hmm. But then, Chinese writers don't count words, they count characters (not including spaces). But then, OOo's "character" count is also useless in this regard, as we can't tell if this 60 "characters" includes spaces or not. Moreover, a lot of editors insist on having the Chinese character count and European word count -- this sample text includes two English words, so 60 "characters" here is beyond useless. AFIACT, no one dealing with CJK languages can use OOo exclusively for their business needs. And given a potential Chinese userbase of around a billion, that's a glaring shortfall.

Given that all of the bugs linked to above are easily handled by MSO (and if memory serves by WP), and that they have been languishing in OOo's bug tracker system for several years, I can only conclude that OOo devs either just don't give a shit, or that they are woefully ignorant of the competition's capabilities. I suspect it's a combination of the two -- coding this kind of functionality just isn't as sexy or fun as some of the other stuff, and so it's allowed to linger. And if this tendency continues (which is looking more and more likely as time passes), OOo will whither on the vine.

Forgive me, I am actually a bit bitter about this. I haven't the coding skills (nor time to acquire such skills) to help, or I'd just fix these damn issues myself. OOo is so close to useful. "OOo -- It's almost a good idea!" (TM) And therein lies some very intense frustration on the part of the OOo would-be userbase. Ah, well...

It's quite big but it'll solve your MS Office security problems.

http://download.openoffice.org/2.1.0/index.html

Has anyone tried Metalinks? They automatically use mirrors, p2p, and checksums. http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/magnet.html

I find that even my accounting department has no trouble doing everything they need to with OpenOffice Calc rather than Excel. This isn't to say that there aren't missing features, or poorly implemented features. It is, however, a perfectly usable, functional, and powerful program. It is well known that charting support is poor, though. The next version of charting will be much improved.

If you still want to use OpenOffice, and need to do fancy charting, you can use Graph on Windows, or gnuplot on anything. Do your chart in one of them, and then import the PNG files to your document. It isn't the most simple and elegant method, but it does work.

This is the OpenOffice Chart module that is under development:
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html

Version 2.1 is available, but as a developer's version (which has so far been pretty stable, but not ready for production use.) See http://download.openoffice.org/680/contribute.html ?idx=0&os=mac

Apparently the submitter has an aversion to useful information, like release notes.

only a bit better than linking to their direct download links...

http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ torrents for Linux, Solaris, and Windows.

A Mac OS X version of 2.1 does not seem to be available yet.

I've been looking for a setting to get the 2003 interface back, but I don't see one.

This is easier for people familiar with older versions of Office than Office 2007 is.

OpenOffice is working on an Aqua version that can run natively on OSX. I suppose that will run faster than NeoOffice.

From their mission statement:

To develop OpenOffice.org on the Mac OS X platform.

At the moment this means producing continued releases of the X11 version of OpenOffice for the Mac, and the removal of X11 as a requirement thus making OpenOffice more Mac like. Once OpenOffice Aqua is released, the team will focus on making OpenOffice adhere to the Apple HCI guidelines.

For me, NeoOffice works, and I've been using it since more than a year. The big problem here is not NeoOffice, but Java Swing I believe, as NeoOffice is java-based. Java is slow on the Mac, and that should be fixed! Try to use Eclipse, then NeoOffice is lightning speed.

Someone get a port of OpenOffice.org up and running natively on MacOS X!

I think it would go something like this: MS Opens Office Suite In surprise news, Microsoft Corporation has announced a new, open source version of Office. MS spokesman, < insert name >, says users can now download the application and source code, free of charge.

buggy...

bloated...

unreliable...

nonintuitive...

clunky piece of dog shit...

A perfect description of printing in vb.net.

And it isn't so much that miker$of buys and mods crapware, which they do, but on top of it they try their damnedest to make it just incompatible enough to cause headaches for anyone who wants to work with them. I have no reason to expect that they will do differently here. They have a very valid reason for doing so. Open Office is getting closer to being good. This is a quick way to muddy the waters before a real standard gets established and undoes them.

Think that my view is unfair? Try to creating (pretty much any standard) compliant websites that play well with internut explunger 7. Without hacks. Bring painkillers and/or inebriants of choice.

That being said, miker$of has a right to make a profit and is under no obligation to make their software compatible with anyone, or if you believe the validity of the EULA, make it work at all.

It is also going to be more widely used because despite the best efforts the OSS community Open Office just can't compete with Office 2007 in the work place.

With Open Office downloads at 76,972,853, I'd say Office 2007 is the looser here. People and businesses are tired of the forced obsolescence and the re-occurring $300 usage fee.

http://stats.openoffice.org/index.html

Enjoy,

They could also use OpenOffice instead, at least temporarily. There are also other free alternatives such as using Abiword to view Word documents that they receive from customers. Abiword a well known alternative for Linux computers, but I see they also have Windows and Mac versions too. I also see that Word 97 isn't on their list of affected software so perhaps businesses could also consider just use their old copies of Office 97 to view incoming documents for the next few weeks (or did they just neglect to mention any version of Word that old).

At home, I use OpenOffice running under Ubuntu Linux, so I should still be able to view Word documents safely.

I'm so glad that I just switched to open office.

Download here.

Download it using the links below:

http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.thinkfree.com/

In the meantime, download and use OpenOffice