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In the mean time, use MS-Excel is you have alot of data to enter. :(

I'll,

Vote for your issue if you will vote for mine

OOo 1.1, and 1.0 for that matter to a lesser extent, loses graphics, such as GIF files, after a couple of edits (cut/copy/paste) and they never come back.

It really stinks to say the least.

I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majority of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.

While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.

I need OO bug #5131 fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.

The hypocrisy of threads like this, where people fall in line to champion the justness of copyright and the Great God GPL, following hot on the heels of numerous anti-RIAA threads where many of those same people claimed copyright was being abused, information wants to be free and so on, is incredible.

<speech length=warandpeace>

Until the recent advent of the Internet, there was no practical way to get your music distributed other than through the RIAA and their ilk. This follows software... outside FidoNet, there was no way of getting your software into users' hands other than the traditional (expensive, cumbersome, backroom-deal-riddled) retail channels, and no easy way of remotely collaborating in real time; and then with academic and later public networks, a different way of doing software arose, people from Alaska to Zambia collaborate on software and get enough direct benefits from the collaboration tha they have no need to charge for the software, and this revolution is currently mowing down the entrenched software providers.

One of the driving forces behind the software revolution is and was the excessive greed of software manufacturers. One of the driving forces behind "music piracy" ("Harrrr! Yer music or yer life!") is the excessive greed of the RIAA-style cartels. As Microsoft worked hard to force all providers to work through their operating system, so RIAA & co work to force all musicians to work through their distribution channels. There are a lot of parallels. Microsoft tries to own your software, the RIAA tries to own your music.

From this, you can see that GPL and anti-RIAA are indeed on the same sides of their respective revolutions (if not exactly parallel: it should be the Creative Commmons licence and the GPL teaming up), so you would expect the same people to be standing up for each.

Make no mistake, by the way, the GPL is totally anathema to Microsoft's modus operandi. Becaus they can't control it, it has no part in Microsoft's corporate life. They're as happy as anyone else to have free product to layer any of their "real" offerings (SFU) on, but bitch like fury when the exact same licence sweeps in and undermines their monopoly cash-cows. It was far more clever of Scott than most people understand to have

bought StarDivision and unleashed StarOffice (and so OpenOffice.org) on the unsuspecting world. Up until that point, the only real GPLed threat to a Microsoft cash cow was Linux, and one of the big things hampering it was a really extensive and complete office suite. For half a billion dollars, Scott bought a lot of pain for his main competitor, and a lot of goodwill for Sun (which they seem to be squandering these days, but you can't win them all).

Now for the difference. With software, you can offer the item percieved as a product for free, and then make money on peripheral factors like support. The money to be made from anciliary music products (T-shirts and other merchandise, concerts) generally isn't there, and nobody's dreamed up a musical equivalent for "support". Musicians still need to be able to make money by making music, and finally people seem to have begun stepping up to that particular plate. iTunes and MusicMatch are just a scratch on the surface. As independent musicians start to realise that, hey, they can get up to half of the retail price of their tracks, and yes, it is possible - even realistic - for MusicMatch to sell two million copies of their track if it's really good, these outlets will take off.

The next step will be when more open methods of creating music hit the mainstream. There's now no particular reason why Joeline (in Chicago, USA) can't lay down a bass track written by Olaf (in Helsinki, Finland) for Enrico (in Ivirgarzama, Cochabamba, Bolivia) and Anastasiya (in her NSTU dorm at N

Open Office

Last time I checked Openoffice was capable of this.

As a professional writer, I use a lot of different tools. Several of my books I've used MS Word, because the publishers had special templates and macros they used in production that weren't easily ported or usable in other software. (I know, I tried it.) On other stuff (aka 'submitted but not published' works) I've used TextPad, OpenOffice, and Power Writer . TextPad lets me write without getting any programming or interface nonsense in the way; OpenOffice lets me compose more complex documents with footnotes; and Power Writer contains plot, character, and idea databases that help keep all my reference details in one place. All good, all for different reasons. Except Word. I'm not very fond of Word.

Use Adobe Distiller or write and OO macro, check this post on OO dev list.

I've been using these XSLT OOo <-> Docbook-XML filters for a little while.

They work pretty well (if you can manage to get them installed with the broken install instructions) but only for a limited subset of Docbook. There's no support for the programlisting tag, and lists are currently broken.

If anyone out there has superior XSLT kung fu, getting those two things working would be most appreciated : )

(I know the basics, but I don't yet have time at work to justify it. Maybe if this project gets done on time...)

Poor Man's Photoshop Elements and Poor Man's Office do only cost a dollar once I've burned them onto a CD-R disc.

Your department should really look at staroffice or openoffice.org. It opens almost any ms office document, and has database support as well. It's a free download....

(*) something like 70%, google knows.

"In my opinion, this makes OpenOffice unusable for complex documents, and makes its use for interoperability somewhat limited (although interoperability is less likely an issue when dealing with complex documents)."

I hope you reported it over at oo.org and not just here ;-)

OpenOffice.org is available under the terms of the GPL. It is, therefore, completely, 100%, open source.

StarOffice is based on OpenOffice but has Sun's own extentions. That's one of the things about open source software, you can go off and extend it. In Sun's case, they've opted to dual license most of OOo so people who are part of the main development group also give Sun the right to produce a closed version with Sun's own extensions, but there's nothing preventing you from releasing changes not available to be used in this way. You'd probably have to fork OOo, but that's about it.

Providing OOo to the free and open source communities was a good thing of Sun to do. They've also been forthright in providing other code in the past where they can, for example NIS, NFS, OpenWindows, etc. They haven't done so with Solaris, but then Solaris's copyrights are dubious and certainly do not belong in entirety to Sun. AIX, True64, IRIX, and HP/UX also languish unopened.

Sun is not wonderful. All businesses have a bottom line they have to meet. Sun is, however, better than most. Much as I like what IBM is doing at the moment, I think Sun's contribution to free and open software is much greater. Arguably, if it wasn't for their defense strategy concerning Java, where the thing is effectively "Shared Source", something I think is regretable but understandable, I think they'd be one of every FOSS zealot's (of which I am one ;-)'s favourate companies.

This is flat out wrong. I use SO on my work machine and OO on my home machine. The only significant difference I encounter is in the standard fonts bundled. More information on the differences can be found in the OO FAQ.

You are correct in that the database component is only included in the StarOffice version, but is that really so bad? If it's such a problem than try this command: "rpm -ivh postgresql". It's not like Adabas is a MSAccess killer at this point anyway.

Let's put this in perspective: Sun bought StarDivision, and opensourced it immediately - that was pretty nice in my book. If you remember, SO 5.2 was entirely free until the business customers of Sun expressed doubt in the longetivity of the SO business model and requested that it be for a fee. Sun complied, and left OO in place as a free alternative for those of us less concerned about the business model. Oh, and SO was free for educational use.

I have trouble believing that someone who claims they are not very similar has spent much time working with them, but I suppose it is possible. It always bothers me to see FUD in the open source world; Don't let the dark-side cloud your judgement young Jedi.

And its not easy to deal with ms office documents better when those documents have been engineered to make reverse engineering as close to impossible as difficult can get. It's a feature SO/OOo shines at compared to other Office suites.

Maybe the openoffice Database Access Project is a better link. Sad to have to point this out to myself. Oh well!

OpenOffice does include some kind of MS Access like database forms interface that connects to JDBC, ODBC... Probably soon native MySQL support. I haven't dug far into it but it should be good enough to build basic forms visually and actually make them do stuff. Very nice!

I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majoirty of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.

While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.

I need OO bug #5131 fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.

But it is X11, not native

-- ac at home

Star Office has Star BASIC, which handles all of the internal automation crap. Then there is Uno, which handles all of your external programming automation stuff.

Seriously, I use Windows and OOo, and there isn't anything I can't do with them as far as I know.

Same here. I actually find Open Office more usable than MS Office. Open a document in MS Word, leave it open and untouched for 15 minutes, then try to close it out. It warns you that your changes have not been saved? Uhh... ok? I find that very annoying. It makes me feel like Word corrupted my document just by being open.

That fact aside, what do *most people* really need with MS Office that they can't get from some free alternative? Granted *most people* probably just pirated their copy of MS Office anyway so they don't care about the $300-$500 pricetag, but with software gaining online intelligence, those days are going to come to an end soon enough. So many programs check for automatic updates when you start them now. Now that people are good and use to that idea, the next phase is to have said software application verify that it was paid for.

Is Ability open source? (OOo is, SO is not.)

OpenOffice.org is well known, has third party books available, and third party training. If you want a commercial counterpart, there is StarOffice. Seems to me like the best of both worlds.

There is one major feature of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice that don't seem to get as much play as they should in a forum like Slashdot. It is programmable in Basic, Java, Python. If you install the scripting framework then is is programmable in BeanShell (i.e. interactive Java), JavaScript, and others in the future.

The OOo document format is well documented . XML in a Zip file. The DTD is available. KDE has announced that KOffice will be standardizing on the OpenOffice.org document format. So in theory, a Windows user running SO or OOo could exchange documents with a Linux user running KOffice. (Not that both OOo and SO don't also run on Linux.)

Developer documentation is readily available, and also a large downloadable SDK. Third parties can develop new components that run within and seemlessly integrate into OOo or SO.

There are lots of resources for OOo.
Won
Too
Free
Fore
Phive
Sicks
Sevin
Ate
Nighn
Tin
Eleven
Twelve
Firteen
Foreteen
Fifteen
This is by no means an exhaustive list.

I have personally taken an interest in OOo and written a Java program (and other tools ) The java program draws Mazes on a running copy of OOo, but the java program can be run on a different computer, over the net. (Win -> Linux, Linux -> Win, etc.)

Is Ability open source? (OOo is, SO is not.)

OpenOffice.org is well known, has third party books available, and third party training. If you want a commercial counterpart, there is StarOffice. Seems to me like the best of both worlds.

There is one major feature of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice that don't seem to get as much play as they should in a forum like Slashdot. It is programmable in Basic, Java, Python. If you install the scripting framework then is is programmable in BeanShell (i.e. interactive Java), JavaScript, and others in the future.

The OOo document format is well documented . XML in a Zip file. The DTD is available. KDE has announced that KOffice will be standardizing on the OpenOffice.org document format. So in theory, a Windows user running SO or OOo could exchange documents with a Linux user running KOffice. (Not that both OOo and SO don't also run on Linux.)

Developer documentation is readily available, and also a large downloadable SDK. Third parties can develop new components that run within and seemlessly integrate into OOo or SO.

There are lots of resources for OOo.
Won
Too
Free
Fore
Phive
Sicks
Sevin
Ate
Nighn
Tin
Eleven
Twelve
Firteen
Foreteen
Fifteen
This is by no means an exhaustive list.

I have personally taken an interest in OOo and written a Java program (and other tools ) The java program draws Mazes on a running copy of OOo, but the java program can be run on a different computer, over the net. (Win -> Linux, Linux -> Win, etc.)

Is Ability open source? (OOo is, SO is not.)

OpenOffice.org is well known, has third party books available, and third party training. If you want a commercial counterpart, there is StarOffice. Seems to me like the best of both worlds.

There is one major feature of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice that don't seem to get as much play as they should in a forum like Slashdot. It is programmable in Basic, Java, Python. If you install the scripting framework then is is programmable in BeanShell (i.e. interactive Java), JavaScript, and others in the future.

The OOo document format is well documented . XML in a Zip file. The DTD is available. KDE has announced that KOffice will be standardizing on the OpenOffice.org document format. So in theory, a Windows user running SO or OOo could exchange documents with a Linux user running KOffice. (Not that both OOo and SO don't also run on Linux.)

Developer documentation is readily available, and also a large downloadable SDK. Third parties can develop new components that run within and seemlessly integrate into OOo or SO.

There are lots of resources for OOo.
Won
Too
Free
Fore
Phive
Sicks
Sevin
Ate
Nighn
Tin
Eleven
Twelve
Firteen
Foreteen
Fifteen
This is by no means an exhaustive list.

I have personally taken an interest in OOo and written a Java program (and other tools ) The java program draws Mazes on a running copy of OOo, but the java program can be run on a different computer, over the net. (Win -> Linux, Linux -> Win, etc.)

Is Ability open source? (OOo is, SO is not.)

OpenOffice.org is well known, has third party books available, and third party training. If you want a commercial counterpart, there is StarOffice. Seems to me like the best of both worlds.

There is one major feature of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice that don't seem to get as much play as they should in a forum like Slashdot. It is programmable in Basic, Java, Python. If you install the scripting framework then is is programmable in BeanShell (i.e. interactive Java), JavaScript, and others in the future.

The OOo document format is well documented . XML in a Zip file. The DTD is available. KDE has announced that KOffice will be standardizing on the OpenOffice.org document format. So in theory, a Windows user running SO or OOo could exchange documents with a Linux user running KOffice. (Not that both OOo and SO don't also run on Linux.)

Developer documentation is readily available, and also a large downloadable SDK. Third parties can develop new components that run within and seemlessly integrate into OOo or SO.

There are lots of resources for OOo.
Won
Too
Free
Fore
Phive
Sicks
Sevin
Ate
Nighn
Tin
Eleven
Twelve
Firteen
Foreteen
Fifteen
This is by no means an exhaustive list.

I have personally taken an interest in OOo and written a Java program (and other tools ) The java program draws Mazes on a running copy of OOo, but the java program can be run on a different computer, over the net. (Win -> Linux, Linux -> Win, etc.)

Is Ability open source? (OOo is, SO is not.)

OpenOffice.org is well known, has third party books available, and third party training. If you want a commercial counterpart, there is StarOffice. Seems to me like the best of both worlds.

There is one major feature of OpenOffice.org and StarOffice that don't seem to get as much play as they should in a forum like Slashdot. It is programmable in Basic, Java, Python. If you install the scripting framework then is is programmable in BeanShell (i.e. interactive Java), JavaScript, and others in the future.

The OOo document format is well documented . XML in a Zip file. The DTD is available. KDE has announced that KOffice will be standardizing on the OpenOffice.org document format. So in theory, a Windows user running SO or OOo could exchange documents with a Linux user running KOffice. (Not that both OOo and SO don't also run on Linux.)

Developer documentation is readily available, and also a large downloadable SDK. Third parties can develop new components that run within and seemlessly integrate into OOo or SO.

There are lots of resources for OOo.
Won
Too
Free
Fore
Phive
Sicks
Sevin
Ate
Nighn
Tin
Eleven
Twelve
Firteen
Foreteen
Fifteen
This is by no means an exhaustive list.

I have personally taken an interest in OOo and written a Java program (and other tools ) The java program draws Mazes on a running copy of OOo, but the java program can be run on a different computer, over the net. (Win -> Linux, Linux -> Win, etc.)

I did an assingment this week for my comparative vertebrate morphology class. It was about scaling and allometry - a very interesting subject. The assignment was to take some measurements from various lagomorph (rabbits and hares) skulls and to plot them against one another to see what sorts of scaling relationships there are between characters in different ages of the same species (ontogenetic allometry) and between different related species (phylogenetic allometry).

The instructor showed us how to do the plots in Excel. I was planning to do my assignment in OpenOffice Calc, and to let the instructor know that there is a free alternative for impoverished students to use, but Calc doesn't do everything that I needed it to do. Calc will add a trendline using various types of functions, but it will not show the equation or the R squared value on the graph. After digging through OpenOffice Help I found a discussion on the OpenOffice forum about it. It's issue #4509, and it's not scheduled to be fixed in 1.1. So I grudgingly used Excel and Word to make my report, and lost a good opportunity to spread the word.

In defense of OpenOffice: I have used it for months now and I dig it. This is the first time I've had any problems with it, and this is actually a pretty minor thing. I especially like OpenOffice's style tools, which have really changed the way I author documents.

http://udk.openoffice.org/common/man/tutorial/offi ce_automation.html

From the API FAQ for OpenOffice.

"OpenOffice implements the API with UNO (Universal Network Objects). Currently there are language bindings for Java and C++. You can implement your own language binding, and in fact we are actively looking for a volunteer to create a C language binding.

Additionally UNO allows control from scripting languages and scripting environments (for example debuggers). Currently StarBASIC (VBA syntax compatible) can call on the API and there is a prototype written for Python integration. "

If OpenOffice can di it, I'd wager StarOffice can too. The StarOffice SDK should have all the details.

You don't understand. XML is meant to improve interoperability, not defeat it. Look at that XML. Can you tell me what any of it means? XML is supposed to describe the data so that another application needs to know nothing about the application that created it. For example, consder the following snippet:

<section>

<name>Dogs</name>

<subsection>

<name>Poodles</name>

<content>
Poodle s are girly dogs, without a doubt. The irony is they are bred for hunting.
</content>

</subsection>

<subsecti on>

<name>German Shepherds</name>

<content>
These guys are badasses and look the part.
</content>

</subsection>

</section&gt ;

(Please forgive some stray characters--Slashcode seems to be fucking up the ecode block.) Now, you can clearly see the structure of that document. You know what each piece of data is and how it relates to other pieces of data.

Now, look again at a snippet the Microsoft example:

<o:Pages>1</o:Pages><o:Words>3</o:W ords><o:Characters>20</o:Characters><o:Company>Whi te Goat Studios</o:Company><o:Lines>1</o:Lines><o:Paragrap hs>1</o:Paragraphs><o:CharactersWithSpaces>22</o:C haractersWithSpaces><o:Version>11.5604</o:Version> ; </o:DocumentProperties><w:fonts><w:defaultFonts w:ascii="Times New Roman" w:fareast="Times New Roman" w:h-ansi="Times New Roman" w:cs="Times New Roman"/><w:font w:name="Verdana"><w:panose-1 w:val="020B0604030504040204"/><w:charset w:val="00"/><w:family w:val="Swiss"/><w:pitch w:val="variable"/><w:sig w:usb-0="20000287" w:usb-1="00000000" w:usb-2="00000000" w:usb-3="00000000" w:csb-0="0000019F" w:csb-1="00000000"/></w:font></w:fonts><w:styles>< ; w:versionOfBuiltInStylenames w:val="4"/><w:latentStyles w:defLockedState="off" w:latentStyleCount="156"/><w:style w:type="paragraph" w:default="on" w:styleId="Normal"><w:name w:val="Normal"/><w:rPr><wx:font wx:val="Times New Roman"/><w:sz w:val="24"/><w:sz-cs w:val="24"/><w:lang w:val="EN-US" w:fareast="EN-US" w:bidi="AR-SA"/></w:rPr></w:style><w:styl e w:type="character" w:default="on" w:styleId="DefaultParagraphFont">

I think you can see that they clearly missed the point of XML. It's very broken and quite likely, Microsoft are doing this simply so they can say "look, we use XML, therefore, competition can interoperate with us." Cars are great, but the reality of the case here is they've built a car with skiies rather than wheels.

It's not that it's big--it's perfectly fine if the data and the metadata are big. So long as the metadata describes what the data are, everything works out nicely. Then you would have another set of definitions that describe what the data look like. This is what OpenOffice.org does. Their output files are actually tarballs that contain an XML formatted copy of your data and then seperate stylesheets to describe its appearance (sound familiar?).

Hey if you are just after the text then only look for tags. I'm guessing that means Word Text.

And what if it doesn't mean that? Have fun debugging your filter.

open Office

That's the solution, right there. If you want to open Office documents, go to OpenOffice.org. In fact, its .doc import filter seems to work even better than Microsoft's own, especially when trying to recover damaged documents.

-- ac at work

Perhaps OO will see Flash support in the future?

OpenOffice does export as Flash, according to tho OpenOffice.org 1.1beta2 Features Page.

You won't be throwing out Macromedia's product any time soon, I gather, but it's probably a good option for those Impress presentations...

Jay (=

It's a shame that the parent comment is a blatant troll because it does harbour a truth or two.

Gnome Office and OpenOffice.org (I couldn't comment on Star Office as I have not used it) are many features behind Microsoft's latest incarnations of it's Office suite.

However, Microsoft Office has had a head start. It's been going for a great deal longer than any of OpenOffice.org, AbiWord and Gnumeric. It also has many more developers.

Yet the Free Software Office programs seem to be catching up. AbiWord has matured massively between 1.0.x and 2.0 - they're almost unrecognisable from each other.

Gnumeric is the one exception to the 'fewer features' since it actually boasts more functions that Excel. A little bit of polish, tweaking, and a few subtle feature additions and Gnumeric will be superior to Excel - some argue that it already is.

OpenOffice.org is also making great strides. 1.1 is far better than 1.0 in all areas - features, speed, and general polish. The plans for 2.0 are promising - there is a detailed roadmap that makes for interesting reading. Version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org will be a major milestone for the project. 1.0 was the initial release, 1.1 was the produce of a bit of spit and polish, 2.0 will be the first to feel like a true individual project as opposed to a bastard-brother of Star Office.

How is it that these Free Software programs are gaining on the software developed by the software giant?

Since Free Software developers develop for free, I think there's a pride assosciated with their work that inspires them to overcome obstacles insurmountable to a payrolled team. It could also be that we have a superior development platform, but that's just flamebait.

"They will be in an advisory capacity. We're still running the school," said Ellen Savitz, the district's chief development officer. "There's no fear of a corporation somehow overtaking the educational focus."

Well, I for one am HAPPY that Microsoft, through their completely benign efforts, will help push the technology direction of this school. Thank goodness, I say!

So, there will be no restrictions against running machines with other O/S's on them? No problems with students handing in presentations on say KPresenter or KWord, Open Office, or just plain HTML.

This is not even touching upon the complete lack of security around wireless protocols upon which confidential student information may be moving.

I certainly hope that MS's role remains consultative, and that they don't try and coerce or blackmail the school into the exclusive use of certain MS-centric solutions for the Student learning enviornments. If it were my kid, I would want them to learn about all kinds computers, not just the ones that run Windows.

Even if all of the computers were running Windows (possible), then the kids should still be exposed to non-MS products for using and programming computers. Give them the chance now to see that there are choices.

OpenOffice and StarOffice both have a BASIC interpreter with VBA functionality. I believe the name they have given it is "StarBASIC."

It's all documented rather well right here. If you ever find the occasion to upgrade, I wouldn't recommend staying with MS.

Another point is the actual reason to upgrade. I believe the only people that should upgrade, or need to, are the developers that are looking for a better API to work with. The whole .NET thing that MS is pushing has strange issues with every version of Office, except XP. I managed to get Office 2000 to work, finally, after a lot of work and experimentation. Word 2000 is really old, the syntax for automation is PASCAL, whereas the syntax for Excel is BASIC. Anyone who wants to write something easily would therefore "update" their version of Office.

The StarOffice/OpenOffice API, OTOH, will always be there to use. OpenOffice is free. There's not much more that I could ask for. :-)

The OpenOffice 1.1 PDF maker seems to be quite good from what I have seen of it. It doesn't yet convert hyperlinks and section headings as Acrobat does, but for printing it's almost perfect.

OpenOffice.org 1.1 has compatibility problems with its own format, too. See Bug 16128

Can't show you the code directly sorry, but if you download the SDK and look at TextDocuments.java this covers most of the bits (ie. inserting text, replacing bookmarks, filling tables and so on).

I can show you the saving to PDF bit though....

XStorable xStorable = (XStorable)UnoRuntime.queryInterface(XStorable.cla ss, xDoc);
PropertyValue[] storeProps = new PropertyValue[1];
storeProps[0] = new PropertyValue();
storeProps[0].Name = "FilterName";
storeProps[0].Value = "writer_pdf_Export";

xStorable.storeToURL(storeUrl, storeProps)

where xDoc is your xComponent (your document). It's all a little tricky, but once you've got your head around it it becomes a lot clearer.

the fact that no one ever reads them will make a good case for them being invalid - it shows that sticking a bunch of text between a user and using a product they just bought is not an effective means of establishing a binding, legal agreement.

Its not that people don't read it because people do. The terms are known to most if not by reading the license itself then by reading articles like this. People, myself included, just don't always agree with some of the absurd claims. The problem is there isn't much choice in alternatives so they use it anyway.

Just playing devils advocate here but by the same token, if M$ (or maybe even SCO) decided to hijack some GPL'ed code and claim the license invalid because they don't agree to it, there would be a major uproar in the OS community.

Hmmm... I don't agree to their terms so I'm going to use the software anyway just for spite! Maybe I'll let some of my intelectual property find its way into Linux and charge $ for it because I don't agree with the GPL.

Declaring it invalid because you don't agree but still want to use the software is not the answer. How about instead, finding an open alternative.

# Ms Office Standard (Win: 347 / Mac: 357)
# Photoshop (Win: 580 / Mac: 590)
# Illustrator (Win: 390 / Mac: 403)
# Premiere 6.5 (Win: 540 / Mac: 533)
OpenOffice.org
The Gimp
Dia
Cinelerra

Sum: $0

Moving to an Open Office environment, eh? I'd start here! http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-questions.html Ohhh, open office.... :P

In the beginning, UNIX was ahead. It had multiple processes, pipes, and signals. This looked like reasonable interprogram communication back in the late 1970s, but it's too low-level; trying to do anything that way is painful.

The problem is that what you want is a subroutine call, but what the OS usually gives you is an I/O operation. Some OSs do have good interprocess message passing as standard - QNX, Mach, L4/Hurd, and AmigaOS have it. The others need some kind of middleware to build message passing on top of I/O operations.

In the Microsoft world, that middleware is always there, and you can assume its presence. In the Unix/Linux world, you can't. That's why few open source programs are built that way.

Worse, the message-passing middleware for Unix and Linux carries excess baggage. CORBA for Linux is big, heavy, and available from at least five different sources in incompatible forms. The GNOME people finally had to implement their own CORBA, but it's still at the beta level. GNOME wants it mostly as an internal interface for GNOME components, so they're not too concerned with external compatibility.

OpenOffice uses an incompatible system called UNO. There's an effort to build a CORBA-UNO translating gateway, but the systems have conceptual differences and don't play well together. And, of course, all this translation drives overhead up.

Related to this problem is inadequate language support for inter-object communication. Newer languages like Java and C# have some built-in support for serialization, marshalling, and introspection, but C and C++ do not. So the operation that really has to be efficient - turning a local object into a string of bytes - tends to be slow.

Because this is more of a standards problem than a technology problem, it's tough to fix in the open source environment.

. . . in the dorm rooms? Although I've got XP Home on my laptop, I am proudly taking along a copy of OpenOffice to college, thanks to the numerous positive reports from people who had used both Word and OpenOffice. I don't have any plans to replace other MS programs with alternatives, but if something comes up and it looks good and runs well, I'll use it. (You can't beat free, which is usually the case for most MS replacement programs).

Honestly, I would think that colleges would be one of the last organized locations of Linux and the like. After that, you get a job and maybe run into a few of the company's admins who are Linux fanatics, but otherwise there's no organization.

The libraries may be gone, but until the dorm rooms are conquered, there's nothing to fear. How many of you regularly use your home computer over library for research, anyway?

/didn't read the article

(to start out with, the development of the next-generation graphics/userinterface/toolkit stuff doesn't go on in the normal OpenOffice mailing lists, but rather at http://gsl.openoffice.org/)

Currently, OpenOffice's interface is based on two different subsystems: UNO and VCL. UNO (Universal Network Object) is the component model that OpenOffice uses. It is roughly comparable to Microsoft's COM. Unlike popular thinking, UNO is NOT COBRA-based, although it does use a COBRA-like IDL. VCL (Visual Class Library), is how OpenOffice draws it's interface. VCL is cross platform, and is designed to maintain a common look and feel in all the platforms that OOo runs on (mainly, Windows, OSX-X11, and non-OSX-X11..)

Now, the problem is that VCL doesn't interface with native widgets that well. There are some crude hacks to try to integrate OOo slightly better, such as Ximian's OOo, but they arent' as effective as using native widgets. It'll take quite a lot of work to make VCL do this, and won't happen before OOo 2.0. The current plan is to reimplement VCL to make it a very abstract library that eventually calls native functions.

Now, there are several ways that this can be done, and it hasn't been decided by OOo developers which course to take. First, there can be a mapping of controls themselves to native controls. For example, OOo could tell Cocoa/Carbon to "draw a button at 300,100", etc.. Another approach is to map windows and dialogs as a whole with native windows and dialogs. This would be akin to OOo asking an Aqua frontend to "display a print dialog". The final approach is to make VCL a simple UNO interface and make each OOo frontend "do their own thing". This is how existing applications like Abiword. Thus, each OOo frontend could look completely different.

There are several OOo frontends that are planned for OOo 2.0. A Win32 frontend, being the most important platform that OOo runs on, is a foregone conclusion. Also planned for certain is a Java-interface for platforms that don't have a native frontend yet. A native OSX (using Cocoa or Carbon) frontend is also likely to happen. On X11, there has been a strong commitment as of late from OOo developers not to focus on one toolkit, but to support several. A gtk+ frontend is a very certain frontend. It looks like there might be a Qt frontend too. Less likely is a wxWindows frontend.

Now, there have been many people who question why OOo just doesn't use a multi-platform toolkit like wxWindows, gtk, or Qt. The answer is that the OOo developers don't want to focus on any single one. Additionally, there are problems with certain toolkits, such as wxWindows, which lacks a significant amount of accessiblity support.

You can ALWAYS use a faster CPU if you're compiling big stuff like OpenOffice or Mozilla from source...

It is not WordPerfect. From this document on OO's homepage (search for wps), StarOffice and OpenOffice is considering this for new features.

It has to be red hat-- unless Suse all the sudden decides to support gnome more vigorously
This seems to be a requirement for them, considering the direction they are taking with StarOffice/OpenOffice for example:
"Q" concept ... check 3.1.5

I assume when you say you used OOo for 18 months that you were using 1.0...

Try out OpenOffice.org 1.1
I hated 1.0 and was sad to see so much effort going into such a bad office suite.. but 1.1 is an amazing difference. Now I don't have any reservations recommending it to family/friends who ask me if I can "get them MS Office" (expecting a free--pirated copy).

And my girlfriend actually uses OOo1.1 more often than MS Office.