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If you haven't tried out Open Source software yet (shame on you, why are you reading slashdot then) then its time to try some.

Start off by trying an open source web browser, such as firefox. I have personally installed it on several machines, and it works wonders.

Then try some more software, Such as Gimp, OpenOffice, 7Zip.

If you liked that software, then you may Like to try e Linux, the Open Source Operating System! It even works on Macs too! See how easy to use and reliable open source is. Try Mandrake or Fedora as they are both good versions of Linux.

OpenOffice.org's presentation software "Impress" can open and save PowerPoint files:
From http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html
"Of course, you are free to use your old Microsoft PowerPoint presentations, or save your work in PowerPoint format for sending to people who are still locked into Microsoft products. Alternatively, use IMPRESS's built-in ability to create Flash (.swf) versions of your presentations."

The decision was, in the long run, it's just not worth trying to get OpenOffice 1.x to Aqua. The development time is better spent on OpenOffice 2.0. Hey, they have better estimates on the work it takes to do that than I would. :-)

So anyways, to actually answer the question, I quote from the site: August 18, 2003: Development of OpenOffice.org 1.x on Mac OS X has been limited to X11. All development of Quartz and Aqua versions has been postponed to OpenOffice.org 2.x with expected delivery in late 2005 to early 2006. See the timeline for details.

I'm not sure, I mainly use the word processor and spreadsheet, and only in their most basic ways. A good place to start checking out what OpenOffice can do would be here Also, remember that it is a free download. You could grab a copy, and poke around to see if it does what you want, all without having to resort to warez.

Try here.

Karma whore-day

I'd say give it a few months. It has rapidly matured in the last few weeks as developers sort out the bugs and implemented more features. Download the latest version and see it for yourself. I am using it now, and it is way faster and less buggier than previous versions!

Who needs Microsoft Office anymore? OpenOffice is a OpenSource, Free Office suite that is compatible with Micosoft files and it Runs on Linux as well as Windows. Not only that it is completley free.

If you wanted to swtich to Linux but you were afraid you couldnt open your documents you shouldnt Get OpenOffice today!

Download OpenOffice 1.1
Download page

Im FED up of people claiming Microsoft Office cant run on Linux. It CAN! There is a program called Crossover Office that can run not only Microsoft Office, but other top commercial apps such as Internet Exploder, Photoshop, Lotus notes and more!
But with the latest versions of the GIMP (now with cmyk), OpenOffice.org, Firefox (see my sig) and the Kompany there is really is no excuse not to run Linux!

• Cygwin Linux emulation
• Mozilla
• Vim
• XFree86
• OpenOffice
• MinGW gcc
• Apache
• KDE

And not the Office Software market, either.

Microsoft only dominates where it has a monopoly. It's easy to dominate when you have a monopoly, because having a monopoly means that you dominate!

For CRM, we use TUTOS.

For accounting, it's SQL-Ledger. Both the CRM and accounting apps are backed by PostgreSQL.

For office suites, OpenOffice.

Web browsing is Mozilla; e-mail is whatever our employees prefer (Mozilla, Kmail, Evolution, Pine, Mutt, whatever...)

We are completely MSFT-free and intend to stay that way.

If it's Office 97 it IS worthwile. That was the last Office that didn't suck, and it loads fscking fast on today's machines. But nooooooooo, now everybody HAS to "upgrade" to Office 2003 and pay up the wazoo. Gaaa. Thank God for OpenOffice.org.

Stop your bitchin and get better tools.

I totally agree!

Most of your problems take just a tiny little bit of effort to overcome.

Excel beats the ever-loving crap out of Kspread.

Have you tried Open Office?

None of the software works well together - Mozilla and Konq have no idea what software to launch when you download a file.

Yeah. If you're that fussed, tell Mozilla what to use by setting the mime type actions under preferences.

And why do I need to be root to burn a disk? Or to install the simplest apps?

That's called security. And if you really want, you can give your user the rights to do those things.

Rather than sitting around going "bitch, bitch, bitch, Linux doesn't work like Windows", why don't you take your questions to google and get the solutions.

If even that is too much effort for you, stay with Windows. Enjoy MyDoom.

It seems to me that Open Office is trading on the success of Microsoft Office.

This could get interesting.

First of all, just read the first few chapters of MySQL & mSQL by Oreilly and you'll be on your way with "all that database theory" stuff. It's pretty easy actually. I learned how to manage an RDBMS at a fairly young age, especially for a simpler database. If worse comes to worse, Open Office does have some Databasing possibilities. In the end, the tools are out there, you just didn't seem to look to hard. There isn't that much to learn, and you would have found that out if you had tried to learn. The database that you seem interested in making (which I hope is simple, because you can't get away from something like MySQL if it's even just a mid-sized) shouldn't cause you any problems with all of the tools available.

(noting that Microsoft doesn't offer a PowerPoint reader for Linux)

It's a symptom of the monoculture that you only thought to look for a PowerPoint reader from Microsoft.

HTML isn't at all suited to a discrete page format. Acrobat makes some sense, but is getting worse with every new version. Neither can reproduce animations that were created in a presentation application, which are sometimes useful or necessary to convey meaning (sure, they're massively abused, but you can really communicate by covering up one image with another, bringing in the answer after you've asked the question, etc.) *.ppt, however, thanks to a certain OS project, is pretty much universal.

Well, the OO.o and KOffice people are working toward a single file format, which will be shared between them, and hopefully become the next standard, cross-office-suite format. The KOffice people are currently working on adopting this format as their native format.

The result of this will be that all open source office suites (and all office suites who wish so) will be able to seamlessly open each others' documents. This is a step in the right direction: You standardise on the file format and choose the tools freely. More information at the OpenOffice XML page.

This will also bring all the OpenOffice import filters to KOffice, which has so far been its biggest problem. For most light office work, I find KOffice to be much more enjoyable than OO.

OpenOffice.org is constantly improving their filters. Try the latest snapshot version from the Developers section of the OpenOffice site. And in the very unlikely chance that it dosent import right, then the OpenOffice developers would love to know about it, so they can fill in the remaining gaps in the filters.

So which should I use? KDE Based OpenOffice or KOffice?

Previous versions of KOffice left a lot to be desired. And I was finding OO a bit too sluggish on old computers. Abiword seemed to be pretty decent though.

yes is does

For example, word processors. Imagine if the people who made WordStar were able to take out a patent back then on the concept of word processors, or the idea of using an editor to format documents. We either would still be using html-like command tags to do thing like

^PBmake a few words bold in a sentence,^PB

What would happen if other industries used/abused patents in such a way? Imagine if only one pharmaceutical company were allowed to patent the concept of treating cancer or other diseases. Our life expectancies would be 10 or 20 years less. Thank goodness this isn't the case. But hold it, maybe they should be able to patent the idea of taking a pill? Just kidding (for the overly literal minded people), but only just... software patents are like patents on the idea of fighting cancer with chemicals, and many times like the idea of patenting the idea of taking a pill when really, it is the active ingredient (for want of better terminology) of the pill which is patentable.

The idea of patenting concepts like shopping carts, score tallies, ranking, etc. is ridiculous, and will ruin competition and innovation, and hurt the average citizen immensely. Patenting the algorithms and the inner workings I can understand. i.e. If you want to do it, do it, but don't steal my code. JUST DON'T STOP ME FROM BUILDING A BETTER MOUSE TRAP!!

Ya, this might be redundant, but I just had to rant on this one. :-)

But can they? It's one thing to file a patent, and even get the courts to uphold it. But with technology as simple as this, there's always a way around it. That's what Thomas Edison discovered when he tried to use IP law to give himself a monopoly on motion picture film. He couldn't get a patent, but he did manage to get an enforceable copyright that prevented his competitors from making film with the right kind of sprocket holes. Solution: competitors designed cameras that punched the sprocket holes as the film was being shot.

The obvious workaround here is to write and distribute the necessary plugin in a country that doesn't recognize the patent. Or simply distribute it with the same kind of guerrilla tactics that work so well for DeCSS. Lawyers can shut down one big conspicuous server, they can even put individuals in jail, but you can't stomp out simple bits of technology with a C&D letter. There are just too many informal distribution channels.

Of course, many big companies will avoid this software for fear of DMCA prosecution. But they have an alternative -- one which I personally rather prefer to simple Microsoft format transparency. The problem with WordProcessMLis that it's fundamentally as unstructured as RTF and the .DOC formats. If I wanted my OpenOffice users to be able to interoperate with my Word users, I'd prefer a format that's a little better structured. So rather than a OO plugin for Microsoft's XML, I'd want a Word plugin for OO XML. Or better yet, a truely structed document type specially designed for whatever documents are being shared.

Note that binary data embedded in the XML was explicitly REJECTED by OpenOffice.org.

I don't know when the discussion first surfaced, but I'm pretty sure encoding binary data within the XML file in base64 and similar formats was being discussed on the Open Office mailing list well in advance of Microsoft adding it to their file formats. If that is the case, then the only problem would be if Microsoft have used an encoding that could be protected.

Because it is threatening its biggest cash cow. The Windows cash cow has already been slaughtered by Wine and Crossover office since people no longer need windows to run windows programs. Plus, the growing number of Native linux programs are also reducing this need for Windows. You can right now run Office under linux and other applications so there is no need for Windows.

Now Office is threatened by OpenOffice.org. A fully functional Office suite that is compatible with Microsoft files, and for free! OpenOffice 1.1 came out recently, and it is becoming insanley popular. It dosent have the speed problems that 1.0 had, so if you hated OpenOffice because it was slow, try it again and see that 30 second start up times are no more. Id be surpised if anyones machine takes more than 10 seconds to load on this version. Also the latest snapshot builds are even faster, so grab a copy and live fast.

The file format inport and export is very excellent, and of production quality. I have worked on documents that are 100s of pages long and they are PERFECTLY exported into doc foramt. I really applaud the OpenOffice team for reverse engineering all these file formats.

So yes, this quality Office Suite is Scaring microsoft. They know they cant use their usual tricks, so they need to use other methods, such as FUD and patents.

So, if you havent tried the latest OpenOffice.org yet, try it today, and see why Microsoft is trying to patent it away. Plus it has two killer features, PDF creation for Documents and FLASH (SWF) creation for Presentations.

Download
Version 1.1
Development Version 680_m20

Because it is threatening its biggest cash cow. The Windows cash cow has already been slaughtered by Wine and Crossover office since people no longer need windows to run windows programs. Plus, the growing number of Native linux programs are also reducing this need for Windows. You can right now run Office under linux and other applications so there is no need for Windows.

Now Office is threatened by OpenOffice.org. A fully functional Office suite that is compatible with Microsoft files, and for free! OpenOffice 1.1 came out recently, and it is becoming insanley popular. It dosent have the speed problems that 1.0 had, so if you hated OpenOffice because it was slow, try it again and see that 30 second start up times are no more. Id be surpised if anyones machine takes more than 10 seconds to load on this version. Also the latest snapshot builds are even faster, so grab a copy and live fast.

The file format inport and export is very excellent, and of production quality. I have worked on documents that are 100s of pages long and they are PERFECTLY exported into doc foramt. I really applaud the OpenOffice team for reverse engineering all these file formats.

So yes, this quality Office Suite is Scaring microsoft. They know they cant use their usual tricks, so they need to use other methods, such as FUD and patents.

So, if you havent tried the latest OpenOffice.org yet, try it today, and see why Microsoft is trying to patent it away. Plus it has two killer features, PDF creation for Documents and FLASH (SWF) creation for Presentations.

Download
Version 1.1
Development Version 680_m20

Abiword has always been the best stand-alone Linux wordprocessor. Sure, OO.o Writer is slightly more featureful, but Abiword is lightning-quick, and does almost anything I'd want it to do (aside from writing major treatises, but you'd use Latex for that anyway).

As for OpenOffice, Ximian has already done some GNOMEification, and more is on the way. KDEification is also happening.

GAIM's ugliness is subjective. I think it's both better-looking and more featureful than Kopete. Your milage may vary.

Nothing I described in any way limited what you could do with your computer.

Maybe I misread something, but that's not how I read your words. You are talking about putting legal limitations in place so that only properly signed content can get distributed through peer-to-peer networks and then outlaw the distribution (and thereby effectively also the use) of clients that do not include such checks. That would seem to be a limitation on what one can do with their computer to me at least. Maybe I am missing something?

By the way, peer-to-peer networks do not "broadcast" content. They allow someone who has a piece of digital information to share it with someone who doesn't, but wants it. That's more like having someone ask a question and then you answer it. If you ask a question you have to expect an answer. Pretty simple.

As for the copyrighted == non-distributable section, that was not directed at you specifically. My apologizes if I did not make that as clear as I should have or intended.

This is all beside the fact that another good thing about peer-to-peer networking is that content can be untraceable. Once a few people have downloaded and made available for download a file, regardless of its content, it's pretty hard to find out who first distributed it unless the originator or author steps forth. Which in itself helps guarantee free speech.

(I also put up both OpenOffice 1.1 and the Linux kernel for download from my Gnutella node. Within days several people had downloaded copies of both (not necessarily the same people, obviously). It certainly proved my point, that peer-to-peer networks have perfectly legal uses, and can help take some of the load off the official distribution servers. Before anyone comments that the files may have been altered, that's when the cryptographic hashes come in handy. Downloading a file of a few hundred bytes certainly puts less load on a host's Internet connection than downloading tens of megabytes. Given appropriate checks of public key authenticity by the recipient, the hash files can easily get distributed over the same P2P network as the data they are used to verify.)

Try OO 1.1 (the latest stable version) if you haven't already. The memory footprint (like 100mb -> 10mb) and speed are much improved from 1.0x.

People pass around Word documents because its what they know how to do. I know people who put even very short memos in Word files, then attach them to email to distribute them!

We've been talking about the paperless office for a couple of decades now, but we're actually further away from it than we've ever been -- PCs seem to create new kinds of paperwork. If we're ever going to change that, we need to get away from word processor formats (Word, FrameMaker, etc.) and page description languages (PDF, PostScript TeX) that simply reproduce the physical page on a computer screen. That means training people to change their way of thinking and stop thinking purely in terms of how a document looks. It's more imporant how a document is structured. And yeah, I'm talking the XML Party Line.

Oddly enough, Microsoft seems to be moving precisely to this model -- all the Office 2003 apps emphasize using XML to share information instead of the traditional RTF. When I went to the Office 2003 launch D&S show, one of the demos had a user writing a purchase order in MS Word. But the document wasn't DOC or RTF or even HTML -- it was an XML purchase order document type, defined in an XML Schema. Violations of the schema were flagged with those little squiggles, like for grammar and spelling errors.

This is cool because it allows people to migrate to XML document types without changing their tool set. Of course, you can't just sit down and create a random XML document -- an XML expert has to have designed the workflow, programmed the business logic, and defined the document types.

I have to wonder if Microsoft sees the full implications of this approach. I rather doubt it. Because eliminating the messiness of Microsoft proprietary formats also eliminates the need to standardize on Microsoft tools. Given a well-designed schema, that PO could have been written in any XML editor.

I especially don't think that Redmond has considered that schemas can describe ordinary word processor files too, provided only that the format is well-structured and well-documented. So if you were to just tell all your Word users to use a schema that defines the XML document type used by a competing product, then there's no longer any format-gap between the two products.

If these things happen, Microsoft's could blunder away from OS dominance in much the same way they blundered into it!

I don't know about that.. DBA is a lot like Access, and writer/draw have most if not all of the functionality of publisher/frontpage. I'm not sure what exactly Project is, but I doubt there's too many people who would miss it short of a few much disliked suits. Does Office come with a counterpart to OO's Draw program? I honestly don't know, the last Office version I used was Office '98, which had a similar, but much crappier version.

Try Open Office.

The person forcing you to use MS can be placated knowing that it uses XML somehow and you get an excuse to install perl on the servers!

(are there places on this fancy intarweb that don't have access to google?)

Am I seeing this correctly? (screenshot #6 Does The GIMP 2.0 support SVG? HALLELUJAH!!! That's fantastic! I Googled around and found this article (translated from German).

This is wonderful, but a bit strange. I once inquired around about why The GIMP was so lacking in vector art tools. Why wasn't there a tool for making basic shapes, for instance? The answer I found (by Googling around) was that The GIMP is based on the old Unix philosphy, which focuses on small, reusable components. Designing in this way made components highly portable, and separated the work of creating a GUI from the core work. The GIMP did not support vector art because that was the job of a vector art authoring tool. The GIMP was a rastor image manipulation tool. This answer didn't satisfy me, because the GIMP itself is a huge conglomerate of tools, some of which are hardly related. The GIMP is the GUI wrapper which coordinates all of the little components (which are individually accessible through script-fu). So why insist that it was only for rastor image manipulations?

OpenOffice.org Draw can import/export SVG, but I don't like the interface very well. I prefer the spartan interface of a text editor for SVG. :) But I'd be willing ot try a GIMP tool.

There was a GNU project (which apparently failed) that was trying to create a vector art authoring tool. I can't remember the name of it.

The fcc order was publsihed in Micro$oft .doc format. So I have converted it to PDF with OpenOffice.org's one click PDF technology.

Read it here

Seems like you will be able to choose for the next major OpenOffice version whether you want a Gtk2 or a Qt/KDE version. And guess which will have the higher integration into its desktop. :-)

I'm not holding my breath.

You might not need to. See The State of the Aqua Port 2004 message from developer Dan Williams.

W

Since partially completed ports apparently count, I recommend checking out the developer Aqua release of OpenOffice.org, Neoffice. Downloads of a test binary have been here for awhile.

Moreover, just yesterday, lead developer Dan Williams posted this state-of-the-port message on what still needs to be done to have a complete port of OO.o in Aqua:

All in all, these aren't problems that require all that much technical expertise, just a lot of trial and error, and a bunch of debugging. A lot of the issues that we have had for a long time, like the widgets and menus and the event loop, are actually solved; we simply need to convert our old hacks over to the new frameworks or clean up the code as it is. We can of course do this, but as always it requires more manpower.

So? Volunteers?

W

The last I checked, it's not native. Take a look @ here for more info.

A KOffice native port is a Very Big Deal. With Konqueror and this now ported (thanks to the kdelibs patch), many other KDE apps will be forthcoming (I've seen the screen shots of them running natively with the pre-release libs). More apps is a Good Thing.

Projected OS X native availability of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is currently Q1 2006. - from porting.openoffice.org. I'm not holding my breath.

OpenOffice is the best! I use it in my office every day to produce tons of heavily formatted documents. It saved me. I'm never going back to Microsoft Office. Koffice was not as useful as OpenOffice when I tried to switch before. Why not just concentrate on making OpenOffice better and better?

We need application integration. Some of our custom apps are written to integrate with Word and that integration doesn't function. Asking for OOo intergration? Not gonna happen.

Try this. We have many of our apps inhouse that use Word and Excel via automation that I'm strongly considering moving over to OO, especially our one vertical app that we sell that requires Word 2000/XP/2003 in order to function.

Companies with apps that integrate with Word will likely not be candidates for either OpenOffice or the latest version of MS Office.

The advent of the MS Office Convertor Pack isn't going to make your Office 2003 upgrade all that comfortable for downlevel compatibility, especially if you can't afford to upgrade everyone. MS is expecting that you will adopt a new compliment of technologies, so you will need to consider retooling app integration if you really are considering upgrading to the newer version of Office.

OOo has a reasonably good SDK http://api.openoffice.org with Java, C/C++ and BASIC-like support. You can prompt the user with forms, integrate with a database, etc... Although not an ideal workflow solution like Lotus Notes, it can be constructed in a similiar fashion to MS Office.

In any event, it seems plausible that MS will be losing a substantial revenue stream as users either remain on "legacy" MS Office environments or consider open solutions for document management.

Though I'm pleased with the Konqueror port (for the geek value, if nothing else), I'm particularly excited about the intentions to port KOffice as well. I have a 15" PowerBook and I was dismayed to discover that there just isn't much in the way of free office suites for OS X :-/.

Sure, there's OpenOffice.org for OS X, but it feels more like a halway-port since it requires X11 and it's stuck with Unix widgets. Really, I like OpenOffice.org as much as the next guy -- I run it exclusively on my Windows box -- but it just feels halfway-finished on the Mac (and a native OS X port is only coming in 2006 or so).

So, after setting aside OpenOffice.org, I looked to other options.. and it appears that MS Office is just about the only other choice. And that's about $200 (and, no, I'm not going to cheat and buy the academic or government editions). So, a native port of KOffice to OS X would be a real breakthrough.

GNUWin are great projects to point folks at Win32 GNU apps, but you should point folks directly to the source, and not to GNUWin sites which haven't been updated recently... rather point them at the source. Faster mirror too.

Oh, ack, just as I was double-checking my facts, I see that GNUWin II updated to OOo 1.1.0 today (Dec/29th), but still, my point is valid if this article was posted yesterday or a new version of OOo came out tomorrow.

I also recommend for Win32 users my own list of [L]GPL apps that I use daily .

I have used PowerPoint upteen times over my career as I occassionally speak on Computer Security issues from general to specific audiences. I have always been forced to use PowerPoint simply because there seems to be nothing better out there at the moment. I have looked at KPresenter , Prosper, OpenOffice's Impress, and maybe one or two others. I love Keynote's features and gloss, but the expense of buying a very powerful 15" Powerbook to get it to work smoothly is somewhat of an obstacle to me. I'd love to have it, but I need it to run smoothly, and I'm not sure I can justify a $2000 expense for something I do about once a quarter.

Seriously guys - is there something out there I don't know about? I hate to open PowerPoint, but there doesn't seem to be anything even close to it right now. We have one Mac for checking web sites (G3 iBook), and otherwise run Linux and WinXP. I'd prefer to avoid WinXP if at all possible!

Suggestions? I'll look at ANY alternatives to PowerPoint!

I'm sorry, but isn't a DVD that requires PowerPoint just like one big ad for powerpoint?

No.

You can download the PowerPoint Viewer or (gasp!) OpenOffice.org

David Byrne (and by proxy, the Talking Heads) are now on my do-not-play list.

I'm sure that made him cry.

I have used Powerpoint upteen times over my career as I occassionally speak on Computer Security issues from general to specific audiences. I have always been forced to use PowerPoint simply because there seems to be nothing better out there at the moment. I have looked at KPresenter , Prosper, OpenOffice's Impress, and maybe one or two others. I love Keynote's features and gloss, but the expense of buying a very powerful 15" Powerbook to get it to work smoothly is somewhat of an obstacle to me. I'd love to have it, but I need it to run smoothly, and I'm not sure I can justify a $2000 expense for something I do about once a quarter.

Seriously guys - is there something out there I don't know about? I hate to open PowerPoint, but there doesn't seem to be anything even close to it right now. We have one Mac for checking web sites (G3 iBook), and otherwise run Linux and WinXP.

Suggestions? I'll look at ANY alternatives to PowerPoint!

Impress

KPresenter

Keynote

Any others out there?

Impress

• Mozilla, for firebird and thunderbird
• Gaim
• OO.o