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Well, you could go down to some used computer shop and pick up a $50 Pentium or 486 PC with Windows 95 on it, and a cheap 14" sub-$50 SVGA monitor, and put one of these combos on there. As long as you've got those minimum specs, you should be able to do any of these. Except for #3, which requires much beefier hardware.

1) Powerpoint ($$)
2) OpenOffice (Free) with either its Impress component, or Impress plus its built-in Flash movie (SWF) exporter (for which you will need the plugin, which is free) plus Mozilla (Free)
3) Flash development software ($$$) + Flash Plugin (Free) + Mozilla (Free) - note that this would require a much beefier system probably costing $300 or more.

So, you can do this for less than $100. That's about as cheap as you're going to get unless you do the VCR+TV idea someone else had.

Sorry about mentioning Powerpoint, but it's cheaper than Flash Studio for your purpose. Although, why would you use either of those when you can use OpenOffice for free?

The choice is up to you - hopefully my info will be useful in making that decision.

Well, you could go down to some used computer shop and pick up a $50 Pentium or 486 PC with Windows 95 on it, and a cheap 14" sub-$50 SVGA monitor, and put one of these combos on there. As long as you've got those minimum specs, you should be able to do any of these. Except for #3, which requires much beefier hardware.

1) Powerpoint ($$)
2) OpenOffice (Free) with either its Impress component, or Impress plus its built-in Flash movie (SWF) exporter (for which you will need the plugin, which is free) plus Mozilla (Free)
3) Flash development software ($$$) + Flash Plugin (Free) + Mozilla (Free) - note that this would require a much beefier system probably costing $300 or more.

So, you can do this for less than $100. That's about as cheap as you're going to get unless you do the VCR+TV idea someone else had.

Sorry about mentioning Powerpoint, but it's cheaper than Flash Studio for your purpose. Although, why would you use either of those when you can use OpenOffice for free?

The choice is up to you - hopefully my info will be useful in making that decision.

Yeah-- OpennOffice.org can do that.

Get it before its slashdotted!

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1 is here, get slashdotting it! If your lucky, you can get it before it gets a front page Slashdotting!

No BSD version, only avalible for real OSs such as Windows, Solaris and Linux

OOo's FTP site has the 1.1 version for OS X, though I'm not quite sure why it's not on the main page.

Download it at: http://www.binarycode.org/openoffice/contrib/MacOS X/ (or pretty much any other mirror listed on http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo-osx_download s.html#download)

One of the reasons the OS movement produces better software (read more resource efficient, less buggy, more secure) than Microsoft, is that there are a lot more than 20,000 contributors worldwide.

Microsoft is certainly the largest software company in the world, however, the drive for market dominance and profit is not always compatible with producing good software.

One example is that the payoff between releasing software as fast as possible, getting it to the shelves, creating income and the all important user-base, and releasing software that is less buggy.

There are other examples based around software design. Eventually maximising the utility of an application is counterproductive to the mechanism by which the user discovers that an upgrade, or the next most extensive package contains just a little pit of functionality that is required.

But send no money to Trinidad, Open office can be downloaded for free - try it out.

Microsoft does however have a lot more money for advertising that the open source movement, and some of the ways that this is being spent to the detriment of the open source community are undeniably innovative. One of the less creative things that they do is spread FUD everywhere (they even seem to have a community of presumably paid employees posting and moderating here at slashdot). Only a very few members of the open source community could afford the advertising to reach Joe Public baring word of mouth.

Consequently it may be important to reply to a troll, because you never know who may be visiting slashdot for the first time.

3) Lack of roadmap

Lack of roadmap, huh. Tell that to mozilla or open office or MySQL or Gnome or perl or
Fedora I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Of course, I prefer a different term than "roadmap" -- vaporware.

2006 is a long way away. From the site: "The X11 release is about functionality, not looks. This build is meant for the Darwin community and Unix-savvy MacOS X user community and forming a platform for us to build the Quartz and Aqua tracks for the traditional Mac user. " (emph. mine)

I really hope you succeed better than I did when I tried to do the same. End user bug reports are very valuable to make any project better, so I really hope the OOo guys have started taking their bug reporting system more seriously since then.

Yup, I remember that. I grew up in that. And I, ever the agent for change, was one of the principle students actively working to break the Apple monopoly and get Windows computers installed as well, mainly because at that time Windows tended to piss me off just a little bit less.

Now, of course, I am learning that life has a wicked sense of humour, and have spent the last 5 years or so prying the beasty Microsoft fingers from my family and friends, mostly in the area of moving them off IE/OE and onto Mozilla, or maybe even off Office and onto Abiword or OpenOffice. And of course, I am still personally a bit of a geek - my entire music collection is in Ogg Vorbis, and I usually run some distro of Linux on my home box. But I'm much more even tempered - I keep Windows and Office around for my wife's grad school studies, because that just makes more sense, and try to stick with the battles that win themselves (Mozilla vs IE/OE) rather than those that are uphill (Linux vs. Windows) with others.

According to this ZDNN article Jonathan Schwartz says that they will be exactly addressing importing of Excel macros. I haven't seen any specification on it yet, but the people working on it may have preliminary stuff or discussions going on in the "sc" project. Generally, anything added into StarOffice that isn't encumbered by licensing or copyright restrictions makes its way into OOo...most all SO development is done right in the OOo CVS repository.

ed

If I can figure out how to actually submit comments to bugs on the OO site, I will feedback Impress religiously in hopes that it becomes as facile an alternative as the others.

That took me all of 12 seconds to find. If you don't count the time I spent writing this comment.

Counter to what the competitive points claim, Sun provides fee based support for the top-tier platforms (Linux-x86, Solaris, Win32) for OpenOffice.org, not just for StarOffice. It's right in the "Commercial Support and Training" portion of the OOo support homepage next to the Sun logo. There are also some other firms and independent consultants listed. Gee, not only can you get paid support from Sun, but price around your support needs as well! You'd think that if MS is trying to sell Office with support as a major bullet point they could at least have given the webpage a look!

While I can't speak for other places, on trinity where I host and answer OOo OS X support forums there's usually a Mac OOo expert answering questions within one day of asking. There are non-programmers who volunteer their time to help new people with installation, deployment, how-tos, etc. It seems unfair to belittle one-on-one expert help just because it's done for free :)

ed

• Glow is an OpenOffice.org project to develop a full-featured groupware client application using Java, eventually covering group calendaring, mail, instant messaging, folders & web whiteboard and P2P content exchange (see Feature Plan below). Glow will function as a network client as well as provide full offline support, including synchronization.

Just imagine: running OpenOffice.org on the ReactOS (a free Windows NT clone), with Mono (a free .NET implementation). A completely free replacement for Windows.

As much as I hate doing it, I sit down at Word and Excel in campus computer labs every time I have to write lab reports. OO.O could almost do the job, but not quite. The two biggest missing features (in my opinion) are the user-definable error bars and the clunky formula editor.

The error bars, in particular, have been a common gripe for 3 years. I find it absolutely amazing that no one has fixed it. OO.O is USELESS to science people without them.

I use openoffice as much as I can but one of the pains i often run into is accessing a spreadsheet with more than 32000 lines. Excel handles this no problem but openoffice still needs work

Yes, thats almost 15% of the market. It may not sound like much, but that is potential billion$ not being made

Article here!

Plus if you haven't downloaded Openoffice.org, download it here

I'm sorry, X11 is a pain in the ass. For now anyway a real office app for Mac means Microsoft (even as old-timers still pine for the days of Word 5.1 and its elegant simplicity).

Powerpoint is at least a stable app which I, a linux user, need. I cannot get around it because presentations are often done on someone elses computer.

It could be forked into a great standalone DTP program by tearing out the spreadsheet and PowerPoint stuff and combining features from Draw and Write. Needs spot color support, chaining of text boxes in the Draw component, ability to specify element values in 100ths-point increment, a couple of other things. It is really, really close -- just not close enough.

a) find a company to make a powerpoint alternative which saves to html files

OpenOffice can save to HTML and Flash files from Presentations.

Even if they accomplished that, people's stupidity and ignorance has proven time and time again that whether microsoft's software is better, worse, or just as good as its competitors- people will buy microsoft's software instead of others. Look at openoffice.org, mozilla (most people use ie)/opera/konquer/galeon/netscape/etc, linux, amd a bunch of other superior software.

People buy Microsoft software because they are
a.) not familiar with the competitors
b.) worried about compatibility with the rest of their microsoft software
c.) do not want to retrain staff
d.) need feature X which competition lacks
e.) work for Microsoft or are otherwise affiliated with them.
f.) do not trust an unproven product (in their eyes) and don't want to be the guinea pigs

Point being, as other software matures it will be harder and harder for Microsoft to release sub par software and expect a solid buy in. If you look at Mozilla it's growing speed very fast now, I know a number of Windows users that aren't even very technical that use FireFox and/or Mozilla. Look at OpenOffice, Microsoft is killing themselves with their own Doc standard. They can't move future iteratios of Office to abandon or morph the compatiblity of .doc too much or they break compatiblity with themselves, and this allows the competition to reverse engineer and support those standards.

As far as Opera's voice operated browser goes I think this is great, especially for disabled and handicapped people. I also think there's a certain appeal to be in front of a board and say Next slide to your openoffice html/flash presentation and have it progress. I mean what a way to impress.

MS-Windows and MS-Office are still MS' only two cash cows. MS' high market share is the result of choices made by hardware manufacturers, which make up 90% of Windows sales and 68% of Word and Excel sales. Unlike MS-Windows which gets 90% of its sales from OEMs, only 68% of MS-Office sales come from OEMs, presumably leaving 32% who buy it separately. This 32% has a choice, at least in theory. Hardware sales have been flat for a while and if the U.S. does more outsourcing or tips into a full depression, then it will be flat for a while longer. There is the risk for MS - market choice and flat hardware sales.

If you look back at the 1980's and 1990's there where many options for productivity packages, even in different languages. These have all been crushed through various monkey business. For example, Quattro and Lotus 1-2-3 weakened after MS-Excel and MS-Word started being bundled together, though at the time both Quattro and 1-2-3 appear to have been much better products. So the choice since then whether you buy a different version depends on which versions you can read. Which in turn has pretty much limited which version of files you write ... until recently.

OpenOffice.org not only has an open, well-documented file format, but also runs on multiple platforms and has full support for many languages. All of which means less work over time, which means lower cost over time, both of which are highly attractive to both businesses and public agencies.

One example of this is provided by Call Center. I think I can setup individual voicemail boxes with it, but reading the site has left me thinking perhaps not. [I want about 10 000 voice mail boxes, each of which describes a specific product, or set of products. I can do it with some incredibly hceap winodws software. i just don't want to use windows.]

A second example of this is provided by Open Office Org.

now to find a *Nix equivelent of Peachtree Accounting 2004, or Quickbooks Pro.

What makes you think you have to be adobe whore to use pdf documents?

You can switch to linux today. Get a distro with KDE 3.2! Its so more user freindly than Windows XP its not even funny anymore. There are THOUSANDS OF GAMES FOR LINUX with HUNDREDS preinstalled on most distros. There is also WineX to run propreitery Windows Games on Linux. There is crossover office to run those apps you need, OpenOffice 1.1! Its fast, its free, it is a good Office Clone for linux, plus if you really want office you can use crossover.

So make that day today, grab a distro such as Mandrake 10 and be part of the future, today!

what the hell is in ms office that the previous version didn't have that's of huge value?

The ability to open office files from all the other suckers that bought a copy of it? It may sound like a trollish answer, but really the only reason I know people to upgrade office in most situations is because their old version suddenly can't open files made by their co-workers, clients, etc.

Probably a good reason to spread the word about the joys of OO, though DRM'ed documents may eventually kill MS-Office compatability.

Wonder what would happen if we all sent OpenOffice.org CD-ROMS to not only the Army, but to other government agencies? Seems like a fantastic marketing idea to me, and I dont think (?) that employees would be breaking ethics rules, since it is free software.

"Hey, boss, Microsoft gave you nothing for something. Now check out this OOo stuff, where you get something for nothing."

In case anyone is intrested, there is an enhancement request for Word Perfect like reaveal-codes in Open Office. Issue 3395. Hopefully something comes of this soon.

1. How many times have you called Microsoft to find out how to use a feature in Office? Most help is built-in, or web-based at this point, making it a function of easily replicable software. Incremental improvement at exhorbitant prices.
   
2. Not sure what you're going for here, but yea, sure. You get to install the software.
   
3. This works for me, out of the box, so to speak.

A better example may have been, say, OpenOffice.org's License strategy. They *do* dual-license for a very similar reason.

Microsoft is going to implode because of their attitude towards the consumer. If they can manipulate us to make more money, they will.

Look at their document formats. They get more and more proprietary and more and more locked down. This is bad for businesses.

There was a time when you would send a word or excel document to someone via email, and if they didn't have Word or Excel, they couldn't open it.

Microsoft it still fighting very hard to make that a reality again. Fortunate for us there are great open source alternatives like Open Office (which rocks!). Open Office is brilliant, all of the functionality (that matters) of Office, in a 35 MB free download.

Things are tight fisted because Sun wants a solid, CONSISTANT platform. This was a MAJOR REASON for the lawsuit that they fought and WON against Microsoft and their VM implementation

And, open-source software would be inconsistent because.......?

Inconsistent, like Apache?

or, perhaps, MySQL?

I get it. You mean inconsistent like this, this, or this?

Oh, the above aren't languages, like php or perl?

Eh, wait a minute. These are all *successful* projects, that are consistent?

If Sun were to open Java sources, it would be trivial to introduce a license (EG: GPL) that would largely offset forking of the codebase. Their best bet would be to pull a "QT" - open the source as GPL, then sell commercial licenses.

OpenOffice.org - for when Microsoft Office documents refuse to open in Microsoft Office!! It's not like you love Microsoft anyway is it? I mean, you're using an Apple....

• #1. Get FlashDesktops, you have to pay for it, but it is utterly wonderful. Multiple desktops on windows as fast as Xwindows.
  http://flashdesktops.com/
• #2. Get UxUtils, NATIVE ports of lots of great unix apps.
  http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
• #3. Get The Bat!, it is a wonderful email client, fast, simple, can be totally driven by keyboard. http://www.ritlabs.com/en/products/thebat/
• #4. Get FireFox, it is a wonderful browser on linux AND windows (I actually prefer the windows version). http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/
• #5. Get gVim, vim is great on linux, great on windows too! http://www.vim.org/
• #6. Get OpenOffice, great on both platforms. http://www.openoffice.org/
• #7. Get WinSCP, a wonderful SCP/SFTP client for windows. http://winscp.sourceforge.net/eng/
• #8. Get Putty (and friends), wonderful ssh client and other utils. http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/
• #9. Get everything from sysinternals, a ton of wonderful stuff here, too much to mention, but will let you track every file access, every registry write, every debugging message. Look around, it gives you control of your box like you expect on a *nix. Ton of great command line tools too. http://www.sysinternals.com/
• #10. ClearTweak, a tool to let you customize your ClearType settings (a must for LCDs). http://www.ioisland.com/cleartweak/
• #11. Daemon Tools, lets you mount up to 4 ISO's as drives, and can emulate security protection. http://www.daemon-tools.cc/portal/portal.php
• #12. Memstat XP, lets you monitor memory usage in tray, small and simple. http://memstat.sourceforge.net/
• #13. NetMeter, lets you monitor network usage in the tray, small and simple. http://readerror.gmxhome.de/
• #14. TrayMeter, lets you monitor cpu usage in the tray, small and simple. http://www.thmundt.com/traymeter/
• #15. TweakUI, get control over some things you might want (like hover-to-focus, autologin, other). http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/pro/downloads/p owertoys.asp
• #16. WinRoll, lets you roll up windows just like in lots of windows managers on linux. http://www.palma.com.au/winroll/
• #17. XP Log Reader, lets you watch the XP firewall logs. http://www.winxpcentral.com/windowsxp/fwlog.php
• #18. WinRAR, unzip anything you want, supports tar.gz, zip, rar, arc, and much more. http://www.rarlab.com/
• #19. Beyond Compare, best tool for comparing directories or files, great for syncing backups. http://www.scootersoftware.com/
• #20. Nero, the best CD writer for windows. http://www.nero.com/us/index.html
• #21. WinDVD, watch movies! http://www.intervideo.com/jsp/Home.jsp
• #22. WinImage, create images from CDs, very

Simple answer: download and install Mozilla Firefox on the workstations, then go into Control Panel->Add/Remove Software->Windows Components, and remove Internet Explorer (I thin you have to have some service pack that was released in the last 12 months for this option to be available). Windows 2000 (the operating system, not the software that comes with it) is reasonably secure when behind a firewall (and what company doesn't have all their workstations behind a firewall?). To keep it secure, ditch the insecure userland applications. There are alternatives out there

You forgot this little program...

Considering that OpenOffice IS a pretty major piece of IP, that Sun DID dual license under their community license AND the GPL, I'd say they're not guilty of the issue on #2.

Since when is Sun a friend of open source?

Sun pays for NFS v4 port to Linux.
Sun supports Xemacs.
Sun donates internationalization code to X.org.
Sun buys StarOffice and donates the code to OpenOffice.

Sun support development and porting of TCL.
Sun donates elliptic curve technology to openssl.org.

Etc., etc., etc.

Sun established open standards, such as: NIS, NFS, etc., etc.,...

Sun is a much bigger friend to "open source" and *nix than just about any other corporation.

So, are you trolling, or uninformed? Maybe just abusing a friend to open source?

Check again in the latest version (1.1.0), you'll find the data import in "Insert"->"External Data", it has many options/formats including comma/tab/whatever separated and can take data from a url not just a local file. Also do a search for RSQ in relation to regression (have a look at the see-also results on that too) im not sure if that helps or not? check out this plug-in aswell.

One of the plugins that have to be bought in addition to WYSIWYG textprocessors mostly used in educational environments (read: MSWord) are bibliographic tools (Endnote etc.) Although there are already quite some mature OS bibliography tools and formats available (BibTex, RefDB, DocBook). Unfortunatly most of them are somewhat awkard to use and keep many non-professionals (students, undergrads etc.) and profressionals from using them (This is especialy trough for the non-technical sciences, belive me, and many of them have a far greater need for these tools than tech.sci). There has been a bibliography project for OpenOffice for some time now whith many well written requirements. Unfortunatly though they are lacking at least one or two people with good programming skills to help them out (and get them started). Unfortunatly SUN does not seem to plan throw in some manpower. I think that providing an easy to use, GUI-driven and _free_ alternative to the commercial packages used nowadays could be one of killer aspects to convince people to shift.

It will be.Just ask those guys:

-Tim Morley (timsk@openoffice.org)

-Joey Stanford (k0fcc@openoffice.org)

They are "Revising Glossary & Translating Files"

Though more likely is the fact that their 'itch' is likely internationalization/localization issues which we [dumb Westerners] don't care about.

There are plenty of i18n/l10n projects out there. Gnome, KDE, Mandrake, OpenOffice and Mozilla all have active projects going. The FSF has the Translation Project. Get out there and localize!

Without a Microsoft monoculture, he said, most of the recent progress in information technology could not have happened.
Really? Could someone more familiar with Microsoft and their products kindly give me examples?

• Samba
• FreeDOS
• WINE
• The XBOX Linux Project
• Ximian Evolution
• Open Office
• Mozilla
• etc...

Don't forget that this is the same Microsoft who cooperated with the same IBM over OS/2: The Next MS-DOS, then walked away in favor of its own Windows NT: The Next VMS, bashing the OS/2 it once supported as the bastard child of a dinosaur company.

IBM may be slow to catch on to a lot of things, but I believe their OS/2 wounds are still not healed enough yet that they trust the "Micro"computer-"Soft"ware behemoth farther than they can throw it.

IBM-supported Linux systems might be made to run Microsoft Office with IBM's blessing, but only as a small spite to MS. IBM might be philosophically able to bless such a configuration (MS-Office on Linux), but Microsoft never could. Microsoft Windows will rest in peace next to Microsoft Bob, before you ever see Microsoft Office for any OS Microsoft hasn't invested in.

A true spite would be an OOo install option to be completely MS-compatible, including load/save defaults.

On something of a sidenote, using the integrated database front-end allows more possibilities than embedded (and inadequate) Access .mdb files.

It's an iBook G4. I'm now a happy and proud owner of such a machine, and user of both MacOS X Panther an Linux on it.

The first thing I did when I got my hands on it was to re-partition it's hard drive and install Panther. Then I followed the instructions on setting up the mother of all Linux distributions on it from here.

I did the initial install of the Debian GNU/Linux base system (not without having to use a different kernel image for the ATA support, among other things to fiddle with), but then I started to take a serious look at OS X. It's an impressive operating system, with such a lovely and responsive GUI but the real power of UNIX I'm all used to underneath. I installed lots of open source software that I've get used to and couldn't live without. It all works so smoothly and nicely along other native applications, such as iTunes, Mail.app, Safari, Keynote, etc. - you get the best of both worlds. You have fink, you have darwinports, there's even OpenOffice.org. And if you're a developer, you also got Xcode from Apple. As I said, the both of worlds. And for some extra bucks you can get back some of your most beloved features from the Linux world: WindowShade X is a fine example of it.

Panther is also packed with some neat features not present anywhere else. Finder, for example, if one of the best file manager I've ever used. And Expose - I really miss it when working on Linux. One of the most useful enhancements a desktop environment could have get, it's not only eyecandy.

But then the necessity came and striked me hard. I have a small Linux consulting company. I was in a meeting with a customer the other day, and he wasn't so convinced that Linux could be a _viable_ alternative on the desktop. He thought it was just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such. And there I was, with my iBook with Debian loaded on it but with no desktop environment to show off. Just a black screen with UNIX-y commands and such.

So I spent the whole night that day googling around and finally got my iBook to work nicely with Linux 2.6.2, supporting almost every single feature that's present on it except for Airport Extreme and the sleep functionality, which are not supported: sound, networking, USB 2.0, firewire, the combo drive, the ATI Radeon 9200 with DRI, the special function keys, the CPU frequency scaling. I even configured it to use an hfsplus partition for the /home directory, so now I have a single home for both Linux and OS X. Same desktop, same config for common programs.

There are still some things that Linux can do better than OS X. Like OpenOffice.org or GIMP. Certainly both programs do exist for OS X but their performance and overall integration with the rest of the system is not so good.

The conclusion of it is that, even if MacOS X is one hell of an operating system, Linux is fun. I love to use the same plataform on my x86 desktop I've grown used to for more than 6 years than on my PPC based laptop. And I still have the chance to reboot and use Panther for the amusement of it.

Regards,

OO.o/license.html, licensing FAQ.

"OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code and a separate documentation license for most documents published on the website without the intention of being included in the product. The source-code licenses are the GNU General Public License and the Sun Industry Standards Source License. The document license is the Public Document License."

So it is licensed under three licenses: GPL, LGPL and their own SISSL. Pick the one which suits your need the best and follow it's terms.

define:PHB: Pointy-Haired Boss. A creation of Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame. (Dilbert's Boss)

OO.o/license.html, licensing FAQ.

"OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code and a separate documentation license for most documents published on the website without the intention of being included in the product. The source-code licenses are the GNU General Public License and the Sun Industry Standards Source License. The document license is the Public Document License."

So it is licensed under three licenses: GPL, LGPL and their own SISSL. Pick the one which suits your need the best and follow it's terms.

define:PHB: Pointy-Haired Boss. A creation of Scott Adams, of Dilbert fame. (Dilbert's Boss)

http://dba.openoffice.org really nice and versatile. Can do forms as well.

Why use Microsoft Office when Open Office is getting so good?