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Seriously though, thats really a function of the app in question. If you don't like the app, then switch! An obvious complaint from the M$ crowd is, "but I need Office!" Thats why there is Open Office
And similarly, there exists alternatives to mostly every other app out there. You don't like it, then switch!

You can get precompiled packages of OO.org. Save yourself eight hours of compiling and download it from http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/

Well, it is an opportunity too, but not to Microsoft.

I'm not an OpenOffice.Org developer, so if someone knows otherwise about this I'm keen to know.

I am an OpenOffice.org developer. Great.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it feels like there's so much legacy code and design in OpenOffice that it's difficult to implement important changes.

I had no idea one could "feel" the legacy code just from using it. Perhaps that was an unfair jab. The fact is that OpenOffice.org is an older application that has millions of lines of code. Indeed, there are several parts of it that rely on deprecated designs or implementations, but for the most part work. Code is constantly being revised and architectures updated. The characterization of ther being so much of it that it is difficult to implement changes, is incorrect in my opinion.

It turns out that making an office suite that is fully functional is very complicated. Unlike writing a POSIX kernel, or web server, there is no specification to follow. There are no college classes one can take or FOSS predecessors out there to build upon. Don't forget, that in addition to being a GUI suite, OpenOffice.org provides API's for office automation work.

Searching further, I discovered that the OpenOffice code was apparently still so messy from the Sun days that it simply hadn't been feasible to port to a 64 bit app in any reliable way, and probably wouldn't be for a long time to come.

The Sun days? Sun still employs the vast majority of OpenOffice.org developers. When it was open-sourced, a proprietary product turned into a FOSS one. An instant community of volunteer developers does not appear out of nowhere. I very much encourage you to become one, though. There is an effort to make it work under 64-bit. Go to the developer wiki and see if you can help (link at bottom)! If you feel that OpenOffice.org is too slow or resource hungry, feel free to help in performance optimization. OpenOffice.org developers are in short supply and your contribution would be appreciated. If you need help or run into trouble, jump on #openoffice.org or the dev mailing list and ask for help.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Main_Page

Progress is being made. The problem is that Apple chose to ditch X11, and in doing so, ditched a whole lot of UNIX software that was made to use X11.

Nope. From the OpenOffice.org about page: The source is written in C++

That is because Ajax, which the Word Processor is based on, has to be "tweaked" for each web browser in order to work. First it is Mozilla Firefox, maybe next they will support Safari, Opera, IE 6.0, etc., but only after writing a modified version for those browsers and have the web site detect the browser type and load the correct Ajax script. I already had this discussion on the Microsoft Atlas story on the limits and compatability of Ajax and Javascripts.

As someone else noted, this is basically a Wordpad type replacement. No spell check, no grammar check, no advanced features that MS-Word users have relied on.

Corel Java Office was once in Beta testing, but Corel removed it. OpenOffice.org is written mostly in Java, but its Word Processing ability is a lot more advanced than AjaxWord.

If you want more than a Wordpad, and you don't mind downloading FOSS try AbiWord it can edit and write Word documents as well. It has been ported to Windows, Linux, OSX, etc. Unlike OO.org, it has a small footprint.

Unless you are willing to put the time into setting up Koha or need more control and granularity of data (subject cataloging, cross-references, etc.), I suggest keeping things simple. OpenOffice 2.0's Base has a built in template for setting up a personal library database. Having done original cataloging of books for a library, I can say that you can spend a LOT of time cataloging just a handful of books if follow standard library practice.

Actually, there are quite a few books on the subject. I've even seen a few at the local Fry's. OpenOffice.org has a web page listing various support options, including books:

http://support.openoffice.org/index.html#oob

Document doc = new Document();
doc.setText("Hello World");

Like all Linux desktops, Ubuntu has limitations. It lacks applications such as Photoshop, Framemaker, Pagemaker, Visio, Access, Quickbooks, a PDF converter, legal DVD players and most importantly income tax preparation software. Without those applications ported directly to Linux, Ubuntu remains a mid-level desktop.

• The GIMP satisfy virtually all "photoshop" needs (maybe not some small part in some graphics shops, but otherwise you're bitching without real knowledge).
• I don't do much in the area of Framemaker or Pagemaker, but most desktops will do fine with the functionality present in OpenOffice.org Draw
• Visio has some nice features, but I've lived for years with Dia managing a network of almost 200 equipments in a variety of multi-level networks
• Access is b0rked by design. PostgreSQL and MySQL are on Enterprise level, and they're at your feet on most GNU/Linux distributions
• PDF Converters? Have you tried printing? Go there. Notice the Create a PDF Document option...
• Legal DVD players? Write your congressmang, senator, whatever favorite politic of choice and influence and tell them how wrong DMCA is.

adding that the big costs come from network connectivity, applications and support

Applications don't have to have big costs associated with them.

That having been said, it's a frustrating experience. There is no good way, for instance, to have proper-looking scientific/exponential notation on a graph in either Excel or OO.o calc. These are the types of things that I think OO.o could really be *ahead* of MS Office... It wouldn't take much programming (compared to what has already been done), and it would make OO.o immediately more useful than MS Office for certain tasks.

Why don't you document what you need in the OpenOffice Issuezilla?

i haven't heard term 'column blocking' - usually it is called 'vertical selection', 'selection of a rectangular block/region' or some other combination of these words :)

http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=15 96

One of the few things I can think of that I like about MS Word over OpenOffice Writer is that MS Word's word count feature understands the difference between space-separated, word-counted Western languages and non-spaced, character-counted CJK languages. In a mixed-language document, MS Word's word count function will tell you how many Western words there are and how many Eastern characters there are, whereas OpenOffice Writer will return what are effectively garbage values, a total count of all characters (Western and Eastern together) and total count of all "words" as it tries to count blocks of CJK text as single words.

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1 7964

This is the sort of thing that one could write a macro to accomplish, though.

Aside of that I still believe Microsoft Office 2000 is better than OpenOffice 2.0 at thesaurus, dictionary,

that probably depends on language used, as oo.org has made quite a lot of progress in this area (and in a lot of languages) - see
http://native-lang.openoffice.org/ and http://l10n.openoffice.org/

macros,

what exactly ? i'm not a programmer, but from what i have heard, oo.org supposedly has a much better model overall (though it is not so easy to use) and much broader access to internals. and that is not counting the ability to use basic/java/javascript/python and, i think, ruby and whatnot for macros.

multilanguage suport [I use Español],

this is probably in the same cathegory as dict and other native language components. i believe es community was pretty active in oo.org, wasn't it ?

change tracking, notes,

agreed ;)

overal confort 'feeling',

um, what ? :) isn't that just because you have used one more than another ?

versatility[Excel],

my requirements for a spreadshet are very, very minimalistic, so i can not comment much on this, though i have heard that excel still has more functionality. i also have heard that gnumeric beats them both :)

Formula support[excel],

hmm. care to elaborate ? i have heard exactly the opposite, meaning that oo.org formula is much better both in functionality and compatibility

speed, memory (I hate having to load a spreadsheet+drawing program+presentation creator+word processor when trying to write a letter).

this has been a problem for quite some time, and has gotten much better lately. and work on making oo.org faster continues by modularizing it even further.

btw, you do not load everything to write a letter - only components that are needed are loaded (though it still is not modularized as much as maybe is possible), meaning there are basic components and then writer part is loaded only if you write text document, calc part only if you edit a spreadsheet and so on.

and btw, draw and impress share a lot of internals, impress is based on draw ;)

Aside of that I still believe Microsoft Office 2000 is better than OpenOffice 2.0 at thesaurus, dictionary,

that probably depends on language used, as oo.org has made quite a lot of progress in this area (and in a lot of languages) - see
http://native-lang.openoffice.org/ and http://l10n.openoffice.org/

macros,

what exactly ? i'm not a programmer, but from what i have heard, oo.org supposedly has a much better model overall (though it is not so easy to use) and much broader access to internals. and that is not counting the ability to use basic/java/javascript/python and, i think, ruby and whatnot for macros.

multilanguage suport [I use Español],

this is probably in the same cathegory as dict and other native language components. i believe es community was pretty active in oo.org, wasn't it ?

change tracking, notes,

agreed ;)

overal confort 'feeling',

um, what ? :) isn't that just because you have used one more than another ?

versatility[Excel],

my requirements for a spreadshet are very, very minimalistic, so i can not comment much on this, though i have heard that excel still has more functionality. i also have heard that gnumeric beats them both :)

Formula support[excel],

hmm. care to elaborate ? i have heard exactly the opposite, meaning that oo.org formula is much better both in functionality and compatibility

speed, memory (I hate having to load a spreadsheet+drawing program+presentation creator+word processor when trying to write a letter).

this has been a problem for quite some time, and has gotten much better lately. and work on making oo.org faster continues by modularizing it even further.

btw, you do not load everything to write a letter - only components that are needed are loaded (though it still is not modularized as much as maybe is possible), meaning there are basic components and then writer part is loaded only if you write text document, calc part only if you edit a spreadsheet and so on.

and btw, draw and impress share a lot of internals, impress is based on draw ;)

oo.org base also has .odb format. using embedded hsqldb, i think.
http://dba.openoffice.org/miscellaneous/dba20.html
http://www.hsqldb.org/web/openoffice.html

Look for yourself: http://api.openoffice.org/

Yup, that is why OpenOffice has spent such time improving the load time.


Faster Load Time

OpenOffice.org developers have streamlined the code to improve upon the time taken to initially load the suite. Also, a progress bar has been added to the splash screen.

A progress bar? Not sure if I was in 1.0 or 1.1. I sure don't remember a progress bar. But, I love the Linux user's response to a complaint: You are full of it.

I do use Linux on a very limited basis -- GeexBox for some multimedia... works nicely on old hardware... but I'm tired of the "our shit doesn't stink" syndrome that permeates the culture.

There are better languages than JavaScript. Stop with this AJAX/DHTML buzzword wankery. You're talking about rewriting an office suite, an enormous platform used by millions of people daily to integrate with all order of business practices and third-party applications, in JavaScript. You're talking about running this business-critical application in a web browser, a program which is so hyperextended that even "good" browsers crash and burn under the weight of 10-year-old bugs.

I really think you need to buddy up with someone who uses an office suite on a daily basis. I've used spreadsheets since the days of Lotus 1-2-3 and there isn't a web browser in this world I would trust to be any faster or more reliable than a 386 running 1-2-3 in DOS.

You haven't shown that JavaScriptOffice would be any cheaper for mobile access ($500+ per year for an internet connection just so you can edit static documents wherever you go? MS Office is cheaper than that). You have only shown me that JavaScript can be used to do all sorts of distracting shit in a web browser -- good for you. Oh, it supports keyboard shortcuts sometimes! Fantastic. Tell me, when does it support automation? How about JavaScriptOffice interoperability with third-party products using a published API? How long is it going to take for JavaScriptOffice to match even one tiny portion of Microsoft Office's functionality?

I can tell that you're getting ready to blogback your flashpost to your delicious, and so all I can say to the Web 2.0 master is: won't you think of the wikiwikiediting?

(End of JavaScript love-fest thread; it's been a pleasure.)

If you do decide to go for this laptop insanity afterall, please please please move to the Open Office format for all documents. It is bad enough to pay what is essentially a $900 lab fee every 2 years, but to pay a $250 Microsoft Office fee is just too much. Student license fees aren't as bad as full retail prices but free is the best price of all.

OpenOffice.org runs on legacy systems like MS Windows as well as most any other system. So, if you decide to move on, either for good or for just specific tasks or projects, you'll have the same program regardless of the platform.

The format, OpenDocument, also increases flexibility in that you can more easily exchange documents with users of other packages, or parse and make a searchable index of your work. If you later on decide to switch office software, you probably won't have to convert the files. Even MS is free to implement OpenDocument, though don't hold your breath -- the tricky bit there is if the new versions of MS Office really can handle arbitrary XML documents. If so then OpenDocument works. If not, then MS was just yanking your chain and you can add that feature to the long list of promised-but-not implemented features like WinFS.

PDF is free as in speech and beer. The specs are published and free and nobody has to pay Adobe to use it.
Fonts aren't free (few are freely given).

You might want to ask these companies how much they pay Adobe to create PDF tools ($0).
http://pdflib.com/
http://activepdf.com/
http://www.fastio.com/
http://www.openoffice.org/

If Adobe folds up tomorrow, PDF will survive.

according to the download page Here the source tarball for OOo itself is 230 megabytes, the windows binary is 82 megabytes. i suppose it all depends n the nature of the program.

Does anyone here still prefer and use older versions like Office 2000? At home, I use 2000 version and it still does fine for my needs. I don't do fancy editings in Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Sometimes I use OpenOffice especially in Linux and Mac OS X v10.2.8 (NeoOffice), but that's rare. At work, I have to use Office 2003 since it is required by IT. I don't like these newer versions (2002/XP, 2003, etc.).

Did you read the OO.org faq?

OTOH I suspect that nothing they could do about OO.org license would make you feel safe that they won't doublecross you.

they do not relicense anything. actually, you could take oo.org code, add something and sell it as ohmygodoffice right now. there are companies/individuals that are/were doing this.

actually, having all copyright dually assigned allowed sun to drop sissl (that is, dual licensing) at launch of oo.org 2.0 an thus oo.org is licensed as lgpl only now.

http://www.desktoplinux.com/news/NS3294924491.html

there also is a faq linked from that article (and you probably could find a lot of info in oo.org mailing list archives / website and other places)
http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/license-change.html

You can have a desktop linux NOW. Fetch a modern commercial distro (http://www.ubuntu.com/>Ubuntu, Mandrake, etc) or any of the free ones and you'll have an excellent desktop with little issues, if any.

    The people that bitch about the "linux desktop" haven't normally ever tried Linux and want something that feels like their WinXP desktop. If you're looking for that, yes, there's nothing like it now and probably won't be for a while. If you want an useable Unix desktop, there's a lot of excellent ones arround.
    You have a wide choice of desktops and window and managers, and there's a lot of excellent software for them. A linux desktop is useable today, and by anyone - i had Ubuntu on a desktop for a while and my mother, who's 'computer-imparied' had zero issues using it. Besides being unable to find the blue E icon ;)

When the grandparent poster asked you about extensions, maybe you should have told him that you were able to reproduce a bug using a clean installation. I'm not a member of the Mozilla development team. Your implication that I'm trying to "divert" you - with standard debugging practice, no less - is unwarranted. But then this is Slashdot, so what should I expect.

You want bad bug handling? Check out this one that I submitted to OpenOffice.org. The bug triager WORKSFORME'd it three times on me before he realized he was out of his depth. It's a DATALOSS bug, it's probably trivial to fix, and it's still in the latest version.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=57 274

This just in: Both OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox are now available for Linux
In other news, I'm not a troll but parent's point is 2/3rds incorrect.

Operating systems?
Office suites?
Web browsers?

Clippy says, I appears that you are trying to create a presentation. Your request seems to be asking for Microsoft's Power Point. If Open Source is your religion then, have a look at Impress, part of the Open Office suite.

On a side note, what are all the unemployed professors going to do when they are put out of jobs because of Computer-Assisted Instruction applications. What a crock of marketing dribble.

Sun 'almost' gave us OpenOffice.org?

upgrade to faster connection, switch to kubuntu (free AND secure), or anything else equally secure.

If you need (unsecure) windows for anything, use vmware player (free), or wine (free), or if you need to play games with 3D acceleration then cedega (nonfree).

Remember about http://www.openoffice.org/ for office work, http://www.gimp.org/ for drawing, http://www.k3b.org/ for burning DVDs... and the list goes on and on.

ps: I've got some karma to burn, so here I'm whoring ;)

actually, this feature works relatively well between msoffice and oo.org (no help from microsoft, of course =) ).
there are some small problems with transferring of changes that contain deleted numbering, but these cases are rare.

what probably is the biggest thing for most people, the management of comments/changes actually is more intuitive and better in msoffice :)

technically, they are very close, but display of comments and changes at the side of the document makes it easier to work with this functionality.

there is an issue about this functionality :
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=23 465

maybe you should consider registering (if you haven't yet) and voting on this issue :)

I know of several:

Office Suite
Operating system
Software

They don't may a Star Office branded version. But OpenOffice.org runs on the Mac just fine. I use it all the time:

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_download s.html

The new OpenOffice.org2 for OSX is very nice. Just drag and drop install if you've got Apple's X11 installed. It's still not native OSX graphics, but I like it better than NeoOffice/J. OO.o2 is better than OO.o1 in general, but especially on the Mac.

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_download s.html

Ok, so it's true that they're allowing people to use Apple laptops and computers while still receiving the benefit of Microsoft's Office Suite. But let's consider that the average Apple user just plain doesn't like Windows. Sure, there's some people running both Windows and OSX in their homes right now but I'm guessing that's pretty rare. I would say these users are about as polarized as the last U.S. presidential election.

So Microsoft is still charging a lot of money for this software so it's not like they're taking a profit hit or just handing this out.

On top of that, they may be quashing any possibility of an Apple user being forced to seek alternatives. What I mean is that, without this alternative, Microsoft Office fans (who are also Apple operating system advocates) would be forced to look for an alternative. Maybe even a free open source alternative such as OpenOffice.org or selecting other free word editors?

I see this as a smart move for Microsoft in that it allows them to still maintain a dominant control on these people for publishing suites even though they might have lost them on the operating system level.

Furthermore, I don't think it's fair to compare Office on the Mac with Explorer on the Mac. There are a large amount of benefits that Microsoft Explorer gains from staying on top as the number one used browser. One of them being that Microsoft gains more clout in determining standards for webpages and the communications through the internet.

Now, back to the original article, who the hell is Directions on Microsoft? And, more importantly, what do they have to gain from authoring and publishing Microsoft's Top 10 Challenges for 2006?

If you check out their About Us page, they seem to paint themselves as a resource in understanding the greatness that is Microsoft. I know this is just speculation but I smell Microsoft cooking up a website devoted to thrusting themselves even further into the limelight (since 1992). If this site was a little less biased, I'd be inclined to enjoy it.

I can certainly see your point, but I also think that getting it on the shelves at a book store is really important. Especially if it come with a CD that contains the installation files. As strange as it may seem, I think more people would be willing to grab a book and office suite for $50 and actually use them then a book and operating system (also including the same office suite) for that same $50. I'd imagine that many people would find something like this on the shelf and Barnes and Noble (or whatever bookstore) that would never think to go to openoffice.org or even so much as search google for free office suite.

• Wikipedia
  
• Firefox
  
• OpenOffice
  
• BitTorrent
  
• MediaWiki
  
• Xvid
  
• phpBB
  
• Outfoxed
  
• Dyne:bolic
  
• GIMP
  
• Apache
  
• SourceForge
  

Why would they bother with building a Google Cube when they could just take over the application layer of the existing almost-ubiquitous operating system - if it doesn't matter what kernel you're running (NT/Linux/Darwin/etc.) then why not use what's already there? Perhaps this is 'GooOS'? The most important component is the Google Updater and it should come as no surprise that this 'will display notifications when there are updates or new software available' (emphasis mine). It's not so much a question of what's in the Google Pack now (most of which is just fluff to get the unwashed masses interested), but what will be slipstreamed in the future - add OpenOffice.org and you've got everything your average user needs.

I've only OS X and Linux at home and I'm told 'Google Pack is only available for Windows XP' where I imagine the download would be, but I'll be sure to check this out at work next week.

I think Linux, Firefox and Openoffice are great, and having a lot of eyes look upon source code may make all bugs shallow, but it still leaves finding bugs to chance rather than systematically preventing them.

These people produce code with defect rates better than CMM level 5 (most companies aren't even at CMM level 2). Firefox, OpenOffice and Linux aren't anywhere near zero-defects.

They'll bundle it with their own "Office" suite, like a branded version of OpenOffice, and bing-bang you have an open source PC that can play nicely with the market dominant MS world.

If, of course, this happens. :)

The challenge will be end user support. Must have a strong support structure, or it won't fly. Typical users won't know how to post a question to usenet, and will have no patience for email support. The biggest challenge to the changes that are possible today is end-user paradigm, not technolgy.

http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-other.html#4

The trademark for "OpenOffice" belongs to someone else. Therefore we must use "OpenOffice.org" when referring to this open source project and its software.

It wasn't em-dollar-sign that forced the name change; it was "someone else." hope this helps.

I HOPE Microsoft dumps M$ Office for the Mac.

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_download s.html

OpenOffice,org will only gain more ground and the need for vendor lock-in will go away as more and more people switch to OOo. Oh, and OOo will improve as well.

Once again, OS X is being given short schrift with this release. 2.0.0 never made it past RC3, and all the download links still point to it with not even a link to a 2.0.1 RC or Final.

I need it in order to solve the 0.05pt/0.50pt lineweight issue. (issue 52047)

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5 2047

Surprising that TELUGU (Italian of the East), the largest spoken Dravidian language, and the language spoken by majority of the Indian techies is not yet available for download.
http://te.openoffice.org/

Guess the Telugu software techies in USA should do more than just minting money, and forming associations.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=14181474&sid=1 70151

http://www.telugutanam.com/italianofeast

I don't know about Terminal Services, but last time I checked, the instructions for multiuser setup worked well for my computer with more than one non-admin user. But that's the instructions for OO.o 1.1...

Ahh, found it... Do you believe you have to get the 2.0 setup guide from CVS??? In the PDF it seems that the 2.0 installer has a checkbox to Install for: "Anyone who uses this computer (all users)". Hopefully that will work for you, seeing that 1.1 worked for me.

I don't know about Terminal Services, but last time I checked, the instructions for multiuser setup worked well for my computer with more than one non-admin user. But that's the instructions for OO.o 1.1...

Ahh, found it... Do you believe you have to get the 2.0 setup guide from CVS??? In the PDF it seems that the 2.0 installer has a checkbox to Install for: "Anyone who uses this computer (all users)". Hopefully that will work for you, seeing that 1.1 worked for me.