Slashdot Mirror

The OpenOffice.org architecture does not support dynamically loaded plugins.

Apparently OpenOffice is going to include import filters for the OpenXML format.

If anything Novell is jumping the gun and getting ahead of the competition by including it into their version of OpenOffice before it hits upstream. I wouldn't call such a thing a fork.

well, those reports are just stack traces, which can and can not be helpful to determine the cause.
you can register at oo.org qa project (http://qa.openoffice.org/) and submit your bugreports to issuezilla - this way you will know what is the status of your problem.

if you don't feel like doing it yourself, you can send the document to me and i'll try reproducing the crash.

i promise to handle the document appropriately if it is confidential, but you probably know that you should not trust random persons in the internet forums ;)

You might be glad to here that OOo 2.0.4 just became a brand new extension installation
mechansim and that OOo developers are currently working on improving that even further.

http://extensions.openoffice.org/

>Presumably the best defense against claims of stolen code is to do what the Linux kernel folks are doing and require contributors to certify that they have the right to provide the code. Here are the current rules [lwn.net] for submitting code for the kernel, and here is the Developer's Certificate of Origin [osdl.org].

OOo has the JCA and every OpenOffice.org developer contributing serious code like Noel signs that.
The JCA contains a quite similar clause. So what you request is already there and well was there at the very beginning.
http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/jca.pdf
http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-licensing.htm

And neither code from Noel nor any other existing code for compatiblity features in OOo like those things contributed by Sun developers suffers from being infiltrated by MS code.

Folks, stop being paranoid, get some coding done and if youve got some time just have a look here:
http://noelpower.blogs.ie/2006/11/21/laugh-or-cry/

>Presumably the best defense against claims of stolen code is to do what the Linux kernel folks are doing and require contributors to certify that they have the right to provide the code. Here are the current rules [lwn.net] for submitting code for the kernel, and here is the Developer's Certificate of Origin [osdl.org].

OOo has the JCA and every OpenOffice.org developer contributing serious code like Noel signs that.
The JCA contains a quite similar clause. So what you request is already there and well was there at the very beginning.
http://www.openoffice.org/licenses/jca.pdf
http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-licensing.htm

And neither code from Noel nor any other existing code for compatiblity features in OOo like those things contributed by Sun developers suffers from being infiltrated by MS code.

Folks, stop being paranoid, get some coding done and if youve got some time just have a look here:
http://noelpower.blogs.ie/2006/11/21/laugh-or-cry/

Of course, but how is it more likely to occur in this case than in any other open source project?

Because Novell and MS are both involved (although only Novell directly)?

I'm just not ready to take that as proof of poison.

This module was first documented a year ago from what I can tell. See the history on this wiki page: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA

While it seems that Novell does maintain and develop the code now, I'm sure somebody familiar with the ooo-build repository can track down the original author(s).

Why bother? Patent violations can exist in either. Even copyright violations can exist in either.

Of course, but how is it more likely to occur in this case than in any other open source project? Because Novell and MS are both involved (although only Novell directly)? I'm just not ready to take that as proof of poison.

Given the recent events, a higher level of caution would be advisable. Whether you agree or not.

A higher level of caution does not justify the baseless accusations present in the slashdot summary.

This module was first documented a year ago from what I can tell. See the history on this wiki page: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA

While it seems that Novell does maintain and develop the code now, I'm sure somebody familiar with the ooo-build repository can track down the original author(s).

• Want to listen to mp3s? XMMS or Songbird.
• Want to watch movies? VLC. Ports installs a heap of cd ripping software with VLC too, and I package managers for Linux do as well.
• Want to share files? KMLDonkey.
• Want to play some free games? Here.
• Want to do office stuff? OpenOffice.

Yes, actually.

http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/OOo2.x /user_guide2_draft.pdf

At a svelt 587 pages, it is exactly 496 pages longer than the Office 2003 Manual, located here: http://download.microsoft.com/download/0/f/1/0f1d5 b1f-53bc-47c3-bf6f-ac6d67cf9766/Office2003Guide_WP .doc .

I know size doesn't count for everything, but still; it's there, it's significantly better than the OEM MS Office manual, and it is accompanied by fantastic community support, including developer feedback.

OpenOffice doesn't need any damn validation or any crap like that. And unlike Microsoft Office, it actually supports the OpenDocument Format (ODF) which is the ISO standard.

* http://www.openoffice.org/
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org

Might want to check the openformats site and tell your noob friends about it.
* http://www.openformats.org/

If you want a legitimate and genuine office suite, without the handcuffs.

http://openoffice.org/
-or-
http://abisource.org/

Open Office?

Let's say you have a five-hundred-fold bibliography: how are you going to port it between publishable papers if not in BibTeX

http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.3/index.html

So the big green area doesn't say download ?

Yes it does, and it was not a link, but it did have a big green arrow pointing down at the bittorent and edonkey links. Thus the only working links on that site did not lead to a download for the software. Clicking on the green area did nothing.

I was able to make the green area do something later. When I had tried before hovering on the aforementioned green area did not produce the mouseover changes associated with links, and you could click all you wanted but it was not going anywhere. So I basically assumed, although I think I have run into this before because there was some deja vu here, that the image was just that, an image, with a big green arrow pointing to the normal links, which did behave as expected, pointing to ed2k or bittorrents. After looking again at the code for the page I suspect some kind of java strangeness was involved, and given that I was looking at the page in Windows the fact I recently rebooted to clear some other oddities must be weighed in.

But it does beg the question. Especially given how much the open source community decries fanciness such as flash (which I initially suspected as the culprit given the behaviour of this embedded object) at the expense of compatability, why did the designers of the oo.org page decide to use strange java objects when a good old fashioned html link would have done better? And you have to admit a big green arrow that says download, pointing to links where one might download something, would generally be expected, well, to point to the place where you can download it. And so it does, to the ed2k and bittorrent links.

As far as the speed goes for bittorrent, I have found that you can only get something as long as other people are getting it as well because once they do they are going to shut down their clients. The typical linux distro ends up having like 3 semipermanent seeds with a blossom of others if your timing is just right. But whether you get in on the torrent when everyone else does or you end up on the tail of the dog with 3 sources to pull from that you cannot give back to, you end up with very very very slow downloads compared to straight ftp/http, or hell even scp.
I have never downloaded anything off bittorrent the size of a cd in less than 3 days, and usually what I end up with is a file that is 35-75% complete and no seeds to pull from, at which point you have to start over completely or just give up. This is exacerbated by the fact that most linux distros that are distributed primarily via this method have about 6-8 cds to download. I've even had normal pdf files take 12-20 hours through bittorrent when it would take seconds otherwise. This is with unlimited upload speeds and number of downloaders, and again it does not matter in the bittorrent protocol that you are declaring an intention to allow people to download if no one else is downloading anything from you. And as I understand it they have to be downloading the same file as you are from you or it does not count, and this meshes with my experience. Which is basically why it is going to take forever; you're almost guaranteed by probability to end up being treated the same as a leecher. And meanwhile you basically cannot use the system for anything else network related. So while I am downloading something at 2kbps and maybe one person is getting 0.5kbps download of a chunk I happen to have managed to get, I can't even get out on a web browser. Yes I am aware that the settings for how much bandwidth is allowed are the culprit here, that is rather the point. bittorrent is supposed to reward greater upload maximums with greater download maximums, and at the maximum possible, it is still sucking.

And ed2k ... I mean could they at least have proposed [EAX]mule? I mean I know it's the same network standard, but still.

And let's not forget OpenOffice, which *also* runs on a Mac. and it's free.

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/index.h tml

So the big green area doesn't say download ?

Because the kind of person that will buy anti-virus software in a supermarket is not likely to know what to do with downloaded zip or rar file they will get from sourceforge.

Last time I checked, you could not even download oo.org anymore. You have to get it from bittorrent or edonkey, which is probably where most people here get MSOffice. I think it's a ridiculous requirement to ask the user to install a P2P program, especially something as notoriously slow as bittorrent, to install your program. :P The easiest way to get oo.org and install it now is to download a Linux ISO ( which requires a 30 minute straight ftp/http download versus a 7 day bittorent download that never completes ) and install Linux. Which is fine, but it defeats the purpose of replacing MSOFFICE.

Not to mention the problems with useless note function, which is another show-stopper.

It has also passed the 5 year mark a long time ago.

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=6 193

I am also in need of good citation support & am a bit of geek about it (I am a co-developer of refbase).

There are a few issues with your post.

An office suite is A LOT more than a bibliographic management system & it would not be a small task to implement it in XUL in Firefox. There have been a number of online word processors & they haven't yet seen great success.

The other thing is that Endnote is not that great of a bibliographic manager & there are more serious attempts to replace it. Zotero for Firefox will be worth watching. The new MS XML format has metadata support for citations. And OO.o has the bibliographic project to add citation support to OO.o. Bruce D'Arcus's blog is worth following.

Okay, here's the source so start helping instead of looking like a whiny baby! :D

Examples: Gallery import between versions, or the all-time champion outline view -- the longest-lived request with a huge votecount, declared by quite a few professional writers and educators as the show-stopper keeping OpenOffice.org out of their offices and schools. Apparently the team has other priorities.

Examples: Gallery import between versions, or the all-time champion outline view -- the longest-lived request with a huge votecount, declared by quite a few professional writers and educators as the show-stopper keeping OpenOffice.org out of their offices and schools. Apparently the team has other priorities.

The actual announcement is here. Its got all the details on licensing (LGPL), prizes, criteria (originality, usability, artisitc merit etc)

Is why OpenOffice is rarely mentioned when talking about free alternatives to MS Office. OpenOffice if free to download and I have never found it wanting when compared with MS Office. Is it just not "cool" enough when compared to snazzy AJAX apps?

What we really need is a Red Hat High or OLPC High. The school could be a remodel of an intercity school and could maximize the use of donated computers and systems. It should support the OLPC initiative by providing each student with an OLPC. Text books should be mostly replaced using electronic, open electronic text books.

This would demonstrate several items that contrast with the Microsoft school:

1) A very useful and functional school can be wired with very good, but donated/reclaimed gear at low cost.
2) Techniques such as Linux Terminal Server Project provide more value than Microsoft:
      -- k12 LTSP
3) Open source can accomplish what Microsoft can't -- a technology-oriented school at a reasonable price
      (no shiny new electronic whiteboards or brand-new Dell computers, just use modern white boards).
4) OLPC is very useful in the US (yes, it's not just for the 3rd world):
      -- OLPC
5) Many digital texts and E-books are viable and ready for school use:
      -- Wikiversity
      -- Wikibooks
6) The cost to rewire such a school is more than made up through the use of e-books and through the
      use of donated/reclaimed equipment.
7) The students can make contributions back to the education process (text books, software,
      school architecture, etc.).
8) Open source can interoperate with those that have MS Word/Excel at home and can provide full,
      unrestricted access for those that can't afford to pay for MS software.
      -- OpenOffice
9) The ongoing costs to maintain such a school would be far lower than for Microsoft's proposed school
      (text books, software licenses, hardware support, etc.).

Key points are: Availability, OLPC, free/inexpensive digital text books, student contributions,
lower up-front costs, and lower maintenance costs.

Of course, the down side is that much of the windows-only learning software won't run on Linux, like Magic School Bus (TM). Also, you can't play a DVD on Linux without illegal software (or is it gray-area software?).

Questions: How well do those applications run under Wine? What software really is required for a school?

Note, here in VA, we still have a school board rule that kids can be suspended for 10 days if they "alter, destroy, or erase computer data, or remove computer data or programs". They technically can't boot a computer (altering the logs), erase a file they created (destroying data), copy a file to a floppy (remove computer data), etc. Basically, the school board is clueless....

Oh. My. Pants. I saw that oo.org bug referred to in one of those posts that you link to.

Paraphrasing:

User: If you use the KDE save dialog, oo.org doesn't check before clobbering your files. Here's a simple three-line method to reproduce a bug that can cause users to lose data.
Developer: Works for me if I use the GTK or oo.org dialogs. *closes bug*
User: I said the *KDE* dialogs.
Developer: But oo.org uses its own dialogs. That's KDE's problem. *closes bug*
User: There's an option for using native dialogs! Right here! Also, no other KDE app has this problem. You're not using the filepicker correctly.
User 2: I can confirm this. Something's definitely up with the code interfacing with KDE's filepicker.
[five months pass]
Developer 2: Have you tried a newer version? Maybe it's fixed in the point release. Re-open if you're still having the problem. *closes bug*

I have to laugh, to keep from crying.

Put it this way: I've been thinking about getting a MacBook but haven't wanted to run NeoOffice on it while running OpenOffice everywhere else.

It is pretty difficult to see how any serious business would use Google Spreadsheets. I reckon most businesses would find OpenOffice to be a more attractive option. As a side-note... I loaded up OpenOffice Portable on a computer I was working on today, and a few people who saw it commented that MS Office wouldn't survive now that there's OpenOffice Portable. I found that interesting.

Funny how I shrugged at the rash of thumbdrives out there, that is, until recently. They keep getting cheaper and cheaper and I kept buying them. I have since, stopped, however, it was only after the 12 step program.

Now, what do I keep on mine? Slax - Kill Bill, of course it really has brought me the level of standardization that I need from one computer to the next and it can do all (like many other small distros) the things that I need. I would however recommend something like Truecrypt for ensuring the security of your information. I would also recommend that you back your drive up on a regular basis, these things can be a bit unforgiving.

I could go on and on about the various apps, it really all depends on what you are doing. I do find the following though, very useful: Wireshark (Ethereal), Open Office and the usual suspects, samba, Etherwake, NVU, Thunderbird, rdesktop, various vnc flavors and other well known management utilities.

If I did not emphasize enough earlier, if you are going to rely on these little gems, I think you should always have an identical spare, and additionally, perform a backup on a regular basis. You might want to get creative and build a library of tools which could be easily accessed remotely to keep your drive lean. I would also highly recommend encrypting data you wouldn't want public.

If they didn't assign copyright, yes. That's one reason the GNU project wants you to. Sun asks for this, too. Many projects, especially smaller ones, don't.

"I need my macros - this is useless without my macros"

That must be OOo offers so many different downloads ... http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.3/index.html?fo cus=download

I know at least one (okay only one) person who needs to use MS Excel because of features it has over the OOo counterpart. He's an accountant. I expect that there are other business users in the world who run into the same kind of thing.

And hey - OOo is open source, right? So if it doesn't do something that you want it to do, you can contribute your own code! Oh ... you're an end user and not a developer? Oh well, too bad then.

FTFH: Lessig Defends Free Culture in Keynote

If he's going to be defending "Free Culture," then shouldn't he really be doing it in Impress and not Keynote???

You can use several languages for scripting in OpenOffice.org:

- java and python - both via UNO-bridge (UNO is something like COM)
- starbasic - internal basic-like language

For detailed information, see:
- OO.org development pages: http://development.openoffice.org/
- OO.org SDK: http://download.openoffice.org/project/development /index.html

You can use several languages for scripting in OpenOffice.org:

- java and python - both via UNO-bridge (UNO is something like COM)
- starbasic - internal basic-like language

For detailed information, see:
- OO.org development pages: http://development.openoffice.org/
- OO.org SDK: http://download.openoffice.org/project/development /index.html

Or just run NeoOffice on the Mac. This is really an OpenOffice.org port to the Mac so that it doesn't require an X windowing environment to run (though there is a Mac version of OO.o that runs under X). It does a pretty good job of reading & writing MS Office files (not perfect), it stores docs in native OpenDocument standard format (these are really .xml files which have been zipped and saved as a single open-doc file -- which means you can get external software to parse the docs & integrate with them), AND it runs on Mac, Linux, Solaris, & Windows. Did I mention it has a much more attractive price tag than MS Office?? =)

When I read the headline about Microsoft not making a virtual PC port, my first thought was "Does anybody really care?" It would be a completely irrelevant product.

Hmm, in one of these discussions I had I think four feature shortfalls that I had run into with things that I use, but I can only think of two of them now, as it's been a while sice I used OO. (My Word use is also declining as I do more in LaTeX. Which, BTW, while better than Word in many respects, doesn't come close to being a replacement; it's in too much a different category to say that.)

The first is the quality of the track changes feature. This is what I was referring to with the versions in my last post. In Word 2000 and before, and in OO, deleting text turns it red and strikethrough. From Word 2002, it removes the deleted text and puts it in a bubble in the margin, with a marker pointing to where it was removed from. The latter strategy not just is a lot more aesthetically appealing, but also gives a correct impression of what the modified version will look like. The older strategy -- OO's strategy -- disrupts line breaks, pagenation, etc. because the deleted text isn't actually removed and still takes up space. On a few occasions I've used the track changes feature as somewhat of a non-linear undo method. I'd turn it on, remove a few things in different areas of the paper, then decide that I wanted something I deleted in the middle restored, so I could just right click and choose to reject the change. When stuff like the length of the document matters (as it does for many school papers) you can't use the older method to do it.

The second thing I miss is an equivalent of either Word's normal mode or the ability to collapse the top and bottom margins in page view. I often find myself changing to normal mode or collapsing the margins because the spaces between the bottom of the text on page i and the top of the text on i+1 is distracting or causes me to not be able to fit as much on the screen at once.

The other comments I have are about the interface. First, I'm not sure how I feel about the location of Format->Page. (Where you set margins and stuff.) I agree that it makes a lot more sense to put it there rather than File->Page Setup if you consider it by itself, but when most other programs that have an equivalent put it at File->Page Setup, I dunno. I'm not gonna begrudge them this though, but it did cause a bit of hunting the first time I wanted to change margins. The other thing is that on Windows, the controls seem just a bit off. It feels like I'm using something like a Qt application trying to mimic the host OS look but not using native controls. If it isn't using native controls, then it is just a tiny bit off, and if it is (as I've heard), they're doing something a little weird with them. (Maybe owner drawing the menus for instance to put the icons there.) I can't quite put my finger on the difference between it and a native app, but it's a bit disconcerting. The other thing is I like the Word approach of using the sidebar for, say, the styles bar instead of a separate window like OO uses, because it ensures that it won't cover the document and will readjust the zoom of the document when you open and close the sidebar if you have it on fit width.

Like I said, OO is getting better, and I'd like to see that continue. I don't know if I have the coding skills and I certainly don't have the time to actually help contribute, but I have at least gone and voted on a few feature requests on their bugtracker. (In case any one is curious or has the same wishes I do, issue 23465 is a stepping-stone towards the track changes wish, 4914 is normal mode, 6191 is another big track changes improvement letting you right click on changes to accept or reject them (I had forgotten about that!), 35088 is another small thing I ran into once (I had to fill out an application using one of these forms; I was in Gentoo at the

Hmm, in one of these discussions I had I think four feature shortfalls that I had run into with things that I use, but I can only think of two of them now, as it's been a while sice I used OO. (My Word use is also declining as I do more in LaTeX. Which, BTW, while better than Word in many respects, doesn't come close to being a replacement; it's in too much a different category to say that.)

The first is the quality of the track changes feature. This is what I was referring to with the versions in my last post. In Word 2000 and before, and in OO, deleting text turns it red and strikethrough. From Word 2002, it removes the deleted text and puts it in a bubble in the margin, with a marker pointing to where it was removed from. The latter strategy not just is a lot more aesthetically appealing, but also gives a correct impression of what the modified version will look like. The older strategy -- OO's strategy -- disrupts line breaks, pagenation, etc. because the deleted text isn't actually removed and still takes up space. On a few occasions I've used the track changes feature as somewhat of a non-linear undo method. I'd turn it on, remove a few things in different areas of the paper, then decide that I wanted something I deleted in the middle restored, so I could just right click and choose to reject the change. When stuff like the length of the document matters (as it does for many school papers) you can't use the older method to do it.

The second thing I miss is an equivalent of either Word's normal mode or the ability to collapse the top and bottom margins in page view. I often find myself changing to normal mode or collapsing the margins because the spaces between the bottom of the text on page i and the top of the text on i+1 is distracting or causes me to not be able to fit as much on the screen at once.

The other comments I have are about the interface. First, I'm not sure how I feel about the location of Format->Page. (Where you set margins and stuff.) I agree that it makes a lot more sense to put it there rather than File->Page Setup if you consider it by itself, but when most other programs that have an equivalent put it at File->Page Setup, I dunno. I'm not gonna begrudge them this though, but it did cause a bit of hunting the first time I wanted to change margins. The other thing is that on Windows, the controls seem just a bit off. It feels like I'm using something like a Qt application trying to mimic the host OS look but not using native controls. If it isn't using native controls, then it is just a tiny bit off, and if it is (as I've heard), they're doing something a little weird with them. (Maybe owner drawing the menus for instance to put the icons there.) I can't quite put my finger on the difference between it and a native app, but it's a bit disconcerting. The other thing is I like the Word approach of using the sidebar for, say, the styles bar instead of a separate window like OO uses, because it ensures that it won't cover the document and will readjust the zoom of the document when you open and close the sidebar if you have it on fit width.

Like I said, OO is getting better, and I'd like to see that continue. I don't know if I have the coding skills and I certainly don't have the time to actually help contribute, but I have at least gone and voted on a few feature requests on their bugtracker. (In case any one is curious or has the same wishes I do, issue 23465 is a stepping-stone towards the track changes wish, 4914 is normal mode, 6191 is another big track changes improvement letting you right click on changes to accept or reject them (I had forgotten about that!), 35088 is another small thing I ran into once (I had to fill out an application using one of these forms; I was in Gentoo at the

Hmm, in one of these discussions I had I think four feature shortfalls that I had run into with things that I use, but I can only think of two of them now, as it's been a while sice I used OO. (My Word use is also declining as I do more in LaTeX. Which, BTW, while better than Word in many respects, doesn't come close to being a replacement; it's in too much a different category to say that.)

The first is the quality of the track changes feature. This is what I was referring to with the versions in my last post. In Word 2000 and before, and in OO, deleting text turns it red and strikethrough. From Word 2002, it removes the deleted text and puts it in a bubble in the margin, with a marker pointing to where it was removed from. The latter strategy not just is a lot more aesthetically appealing, but also gives a correct impression of what the modified version will look like. The older strategy -- OO's strategy -- disrupts line breaks, pagenation, etc. because the deleted text isn't actually removed and still takes up space. On a few occasions I've used the track changes feature as somewhat of a non-linear undo method. I'd turn it on, remove a few things in different areas of the paper, then decide that I wanted something I deleted in the middle restored, so I could just right click and choose to reject the change. When stuff like the length of the document matters (as it does for many school papers) you can't use the older method to do it.

The second thing I miss is an equivalent of either Word's normal mode or the ability to collapse the top and bottom margins in page view. I often find myself changing to normal mode or collapsing the margins because the spaces between the bottom of the text on page i and the top of the text on i+1 is distracting or causes me to not be able to fit as much on the screen at once.

The other comments I have are about the interface. First, I'm not sure how I feel about the location of Format->Page. (Where you set margins and stuff.) I agree that it makes a lot more sense to put it there rather than File->Page Setup if you consider it by itself, but when most other programs that have an equivalent put it at File->Page Setup, I dunno. I'm not gonna begrudge them this though, but it did cause a bit of hunting the first time I wanted to change margins. The other thing is that on Windows, the controls seem just a bit off. It feels like I'm using something like a Qt application trying to mimic the host OS look but not using native controls. If it isn't using native controls, then it is just a tiny bit off, and if it is (as I've heard), they're doing something a little weird with them. (Maybe owner drawing the menus for instance to put the icons there.) I can't quite put my finger on the difference between it and a native app, but it's a bit disconcerting. The other thing is I like the Word approach of using the sidebar for, say, the styles bar instead of a separate window like OO uses, because it ensures that it won't cover the document and will readjust the zoom of the document when you open and close the sidebar if you have it on fit width.

Like I said, OO is getting better, and I'd like to see that continue. I don't know if I have the coding skills and I certainly don't have the time to actually help contribute, but I have at least gone and voted on a few feature requests on their bugtracker. (In case any one is curious or has the same wishes I do, issue 23465 is a stepping-stone towards the track changes wish, 4914 is normal mode, 6191 is another big track changes improvement letting you right click on changes to accept or reject them (I had forgotten about that!), 35088 is another small thing I ran into once (I had to fill out an application using one of these forms; I was in Gentoo at the

Hmm, in one of these discussions I had I think four feature shortfalls that I had run into with things that I use, but I can only think of two of them now, as it's been a while sice I used OO. (My Word use is also declining as I do more in LaTeX. Which, BTW, while better than Word in many respects, doesn't come close to being a replacement; it's in too much a different category to say that.)

The first is the quality of the track changes feature. This is what I was referring to with the versions in my last post. In Word 2000 and before, and in OO, deleting text turns it red and strikethrough. From Word 2002, it removes the deleted text and puts it in a bubble in the margin, with a marker pointing to where it was removed from. The latter strategy not just is a lot more aesthetically appealing, but also gives a correct impression of what the modified version will look like. The older strategy -- OO's strategy -- disrupts line breaks, pagenation, etc. because the deleted text isn't actually removed and still takes up space. On a few occasions I've used the track changes feature as somewhat of a non-linear undo method. I'd turn it on, remove a few things in different areas of the paper, then decide that I wanted something I deleted in the middle restored, so I could just right click and choose to reject the change. When stuff like the length of the document matters (as it does for many school papers) you can't use the older method to do it.

The second thing I miss is an equivalent of either Word's normal mode or the ability to collapse the top and bottom margins in page view. I often find myself changing to normal mode or collapsing the margins because the spaces between the bottom of the text on page i and the top of the text on i+1 is distracting or causes me to not be able to fit as much on the screen at once.

The other comments I have are about the interface. First, I'm not sure how I feel about the location of Format->Page. (Where you set margins and stuff.) I agree that it makes a lot more sense to put it there rather than File->Page Setup if you consider it by itself, but when most other programs that have an equivalent put it at File->Page Setup, I dunno. I'm not gonna begrudge them this though, but it did cause a bit of hunting the first time I wanted to change margins. The other thing is that on Windows, the controls seem just a bit off. It feels like I'm using something like a Qt application trying to mimic the host OS look but not using native controls. If it isn't using native controls, then it is just a tiny bit off, and if it is (as I've heard), they're doing something a little weird with them. (Maybe owner drawing the menus for instance to put the icons there.) I can't quite put my finger on the difference between it and a native app, but it's a bit disconcerting. The other thing is I like the Word approach of using the sidebar for, say, the styles bar instead of a separate window like OO uses, because it ensures that it won't cover the document and will readjust the zoom of the document when you open and close the sidebar if you have it on fit width.

Like I said, OO is getting better, and I'd like to see that continue. I don't know if I have the coding skills and I certainly don't have the time to actually help contribute, but I have at least gone and voted on a few feature requests on their bugtracker. (In case any one is curious or has the same wishes I do, issue 23465 is a stepping-stone towards the track changes wish, 4914 is normal mode, 6191 is another big track changes improvement letting you right click on changes to accept or reject them (I had forgotten about that!), 35088 is another small thing I ran into once (I had to fill out an application using one of these forms; I was in Gentoo at the

http://www.openoffice.org/

I guess it sucks if your business requires some esoteric feature in Microsoft's expensive and proprietary office software, but it is outright incompetence for any CTO to not have migrated, in the process of migrating, or planning on migrating their workers to OpenOffice at this point.

A related link: OpenOffice's response

"The first time I tried opening a large .doc file in Open Office, it crashed."

I've had that problem, too. But the latest version of Open Office seems very much improved. My experience has been that OO has done quite well with .DOC files since version 2.

The whole point of the very quirky Microsoft Office file format, it seems, is to be as incompatible and incomprehensible as possible. So, it is understandable that OO would have difficulty.

The Microsoft Office file format is part of Microsoft's unearned monopoly, an effective monopoly attained by trickery rather than caring for the customer and the people of the world. If Bill Gates truly cared about other people, he would have made good software products.

I'd prefer to use OpenOffice wherever possible. I'd prefer to use OpenOffice on our church's laptop, to replace PowerPoint, but we can't do this without HUGE hacks that are really hard to train others. Powerpoint can be displayed on the second monitor just fine. OO's Impress can't.
See http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1 2719 or http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Impress_s imple_multiple_display_specification for more details.

Honestly, you can't say that OO is "really close" when glaring holes like this exist. This isn't some obscure option hidden behind 3 levels of menus. It's a "we can't do something we've been doing every time we used Powerpoint."

We're now using MediaShout instead.

I'd prefer to use OpenOffice wherever possible. I'd prefer to use OpenOffice on our church's laptop, to replace PowerPoint, but we can't do this without HUGE hacks that are really hard to train others. Powerpoint can be displayed on the second monitor just fine. OO's Impress can't.
See http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1 2719 or http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Impress_s imple_multiple_display_specification for more details.

Honestly, you can't say that OO is "really close" when glaring holes like this exist. This isn't some obscure option hidden behind 3 levels of menus. It's a "we can't do something we've been doing every time we used Powerpoint."

We're now using MediaShout instead.

Therefore, in practice, MS Office is less secure.

Bzzzzt! That's the sound of BS alarm - the above does not immediately follow from your A and B. You must also assume C: MSO and OOo are products of comparable quality. They are not. Amuse yourself by checking the number of OOo crashes and hangs in very basic scenarios. And that's 2.0.3 that was around for days. Do you say it is the same quality as MSO 2003? Didn't thisnk so...

It might be helpful now, but I'd say open source office packages will be capable of handling the macros and cruft sooner than MS will make Office cross platform. VBA is already partly supported in Novell's version of OOo, and is under heavy development for the mainstream version. http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA