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"I have never seen open textbooks work in a subject area that requires frequent updates, such as fundamental computer concepts, or modern application software (office suites...)."

Hopefully this will change. I've contributed a lot of my learning materials for OpenOffice.org to the Documentation Project (documentation.openoffice.org/conceptualguide) under an open license, including an eBook version of my paperback title (ISBN 978-0-9778991-6-6), Moodle Course Package complete with quizzes, exams, test bank, exercises, etc. and supplementary materials. With the limited financial and human resources I have to work with, I would say that it has been successful in providing schools the materials they need to consider alternative, open source applications for instructional use.

Best regards,

Gabriel Gurley

Contributor, OpenOffice.org Documentation and Education Projects

XML Provides Standardization for International Functionality between individuals and (within) businesses, governments.... XML Customization by Businesses, Governments, Individuals... altering recognized and accepted international XML Standards seek to hawk proprietary products and hook data/content novices into a blind and costly ally.

W3C XML http://www.w3.org/XML/
ODF XML ISO/IEC 26300:2006 http://www.iso.org/
ODF XML OASIS http://www.oasis-open.org/
OpenOffice XML http://www.openoffice.org/

The XML OpenDocument Format (ODF) standard, used by OpenOffice and others, is an open XML-based document file format for office applications to be used for documents containing text, spreadsheets, charts, and graphical elements. The file format makes transformations to other formats simple by leveraging and reusing existing standards wherever possible. As an open standard under the stewardship of OASIS, OpenDocument also creates the possibility for new types of applications and solutions to be developed other than traditional office productivity applications.

IMO Summary: If you fear long-term data/content cost/legal..., then... from Microsoft Office... RUN AWAY! RUN AWAY FAST!

I'm not the GP poster, but I'd like to answer one of your questions.

seriously, what does OO.o open that MS Office doesn't anyhow?

PDF's (after install of an addon). I've found Open Office can import general de-linearized PDF's very well for editing (PDF files that are linearized can be delinearized with pdfedit). But keep this knowledge under your hat so that there's no need for anyone to create an even worse read-only document format ;)

The only thing that makes it at all tolerable is that my new screen is 900 pixels high instead of 768, so most of the space that the ribbon's burning up is new pixels

It's sad that silly decisions are limiting your new cool machine.

In the old days, they built giant programs to make processors feel slow (probably hasn't changed but processors have just gotten so darn fast, people don't have the same burning need to upgrade anymore). Now that we are getting good screen resolutions, they're figuring out how to keep our content limited to the same postage stamp sized area we've always hated.

I use openoffice all the time, and I'll be really bummed if I have to give up 100 vertical pixels just so I can have giant cut, copy, and paste buttons (check out the screenshot linked in TFA: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/w/images/thumb/f/f2/Prototype.jpg/778px-Prototype.jpg ). I'd much rather see as much of my document as possible than have pixels burned up for no good reason, particularly when ctrl-x, ctrl-c, and ctrl-v are so thoroughly ingrained I can't remember ever using a button or menu option to accomplish that task. I just don't get it -- waste is bad.

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3740

It looks like there are several bugs filed for this. They thought they had a working implementation for this for 3.1, but there were still issues.

This feature should working correctly in 3.2, which ship at the end of November. However, you can likely find development builds before then built from the 3.2 trunk.

If you're a Linux user, you should find 3.2 SVN builds here starting mid to late August after 3.1.1 ships.

http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/OpenOffice.org:/UNSTABLE/openSUSE_11.1/

In comparison, their traditional interface has more buttons taking up less screen real estate.

Let me be the first to assure that the interface is also out of place in Windows OS'es. I'm still at a loss to figure out exactly what functionality that new interface added to Office. It did require us to purchase all new manuals and devote a considerable amount of time to retraining our users. Perhaps that was the "goal"?

First of all, TFM is available for free here:
http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/

Seceond of all, for non-trained users, the Ribbon is easier to use. So long as the menu-driven interface is optional (whether is it the default or not) then power users can continue as they always have.

But Open Office wins on the format change topic, because upgrades are free. So you can always upgrade without much hassle if you get stuff in a new ODF version.

Open office 3: Requirements
Requires Windows 2000 or newer. Or OS X Tiger or newer. For users of Windows 98, or 10.3, or what have you, that are otherwise content with their "old" operating system, and previous version of application software, this isn't a "Free Upgrade" if they have to upgrade their operating system.
Open Office is also a pig on older systems.

That link you posted isn't to the free openoffice.org, it appears to be some scam site trying to get people to pay to download openoffice.org

Yes, Wikipedia is not like projects such as OpenOffice.org, Mono, Evolution and Red hat Directory Server who do require you to relinquish copyright before your submission is accepted.

Cloud computing is a bad idea.

Isn't that kind of a sweeping statement? Might it not be a good idea for some people?

It gives software companies an unprecedented level of control over our data.

It rather depends what you put on there and what kind of business you are, doesn't it? It also depends on your backup strategy. If they up the price of their service, you can migrate away. If they shut it off completely with no warning... well, you were keeping backups, right?

I would not endow them with this level of trust

Who's talking about trust? You use their service and you keep backups. You don't "trust" anyone.

If you are looking for an alternative, might I suggest http://www.openoffice.org/ [openoffice.org]

Please tell me that your whole post wasn't just a plug for a free office suite that everyone on Slashdot is already aware of?

Anyway, other than saving a few hundred bucks per seat, OpenOffice isn't a "solution". It still requires more support compared to letting Google/MS be your IT department.

Cloud computing is a bad idea. It gives software companies an unprecedented level of control over our data. If they decided to up the price of their service, or withdraw it entirely, there is little we can do. Microsoft is famous for manipulative behavior. I would not endow them with this level of trust; nor would any other sane person. If you are looking for an alternative, might I suggest http://www.openoffice.org/ (many people I know also use it for its superior equation editor, in addition to the fact that it is free and open source).

I suspect kmail/kontakt does autosave periodically, but apparently it's broken in some way: http://lists.kde.org/?l=kde-bugs-dist&m=122605713921371&w=2

Anyway the last I used it, when I try to save an email draft while working on it, it closes the draft. The KDE people seem to think that just because I want to save my work it means that I want to close it too.

Then there's Openoffice:

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=10604&hilit=autosave

It should probably be fixed by now, but what it shows to me is how seriously they value their users work - not seriously enough.

As it is, I'm going to have to assume that most apps are NOT written sensibly.

FWIW, so far my windows, Linux and *BSD machines have not crashed on me for months :). But back when I was using Opensuse 10.x, it did lock up on me a few times, maybe it was an interaction with vmware GSX (which I was running on it).

the best course ? find something that interests you, maybe something that you use every day - and find something you don't like about the product, or maybe think of how it could be improved.
it's famously called scratching your own itch.
why is that an effective way ? because you are interested, of course ! you see the results of your work, you use them.

what project to choose ? it's completely up to you. pick one, look at what they have on their web, wiki, join their irc channel, talk with people. see whether you like them - because that is important.

you could look at major projects who have specific sections to help new contributors like http://contributing.openoffice.org/ or http://techbase.kde.org/Contribute, or take a look at the many smaller projects in various categories like personal or system management software, games or... anything.

but really, basic requirements :
1. you are interested;
2. you can work with the people on the project.

everything else will come itself.
also, you are in no way limited to a single project - actually, it is beneficial to participate in multiple projects because you'll get familiar with various organisational, code versioning, documentation and communication practices. contributing a few fixes here and there can be very eye-opening on how these things come together.

good luck :)

With an extension, Open Office can even export PDF files with the source ODF embedded:
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

PDF readers see it as a legal PDF file to display, Open Office sees it as a legal ODF file to edit. Truly the best of both worlds.

Another option is the Open Office PDF-export extension. It lets you export a PDF file with the original ODF file embedded. PDF viewers read it like a PDF, the user can edit it like an ODF. One file.
http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/pdfimport

Well, you can use Access against a PostgreSQL database. Other than that, there is Rekall as an option. OpenOffice.org's Base is available as well.

That's true for OpenOffice. However NeoOffice uses Java in order to present an Aqua interface.

If the sluggish nature of NeoOffice really is too much, maybe consider OpenOffice.org Aqua instead.

[snip] some sort of addon/extension system [snip]

You mean like this?

But the new Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) will be the first that will not run on PowerPC Macs.

I'm in the same boat, although my Mac was nearly a gift so I don't have the same sunk investment as you. Having said that, the biggest feature of Snow Leopard is that it's optimized for 64-bit, and your Mac and mine are both 32-bit. I doubt that a 32-bit build (even if it were logistically feasible) would run well on our machines. While I wish I could play with Snow Leopard, 10.5 isn't going to stop running on release day. You've already gotten more than 3 years of use from your laptop with no signs of stopping. That's nothing to sneeze at!

BTW, iLife '06 is the last version to fully support our Macs. iLife '08 requires a G5 or newer for iMovie. Also, OpenOffice.org 3.1 is only available for Intel. It's not just Apple that's deprecating PowerPC builds.

Don't bother saying anything about KOffice or any other Office product becoming popular until it can be installed on Windows with a setup.exe or an MSI.

- First as you said yourself in your follow-up : KOffice is part of the KDE software that can be installed on Windows with their package manager.

- OpenOffice.org
Installs on Windows with a very standard installer.
The only minor problem in my opinion is getting the plugins. It uses the kind of plugin manager as the older versions of FireFox (you can't directly search and browse the installable plugins from there, you have to go to a website first). Also the plugin manager doesn't help you to restart the "quicklaunch" if a restart is needed.
It cool be great if I could install LanguageTool with a simple click from within the manager, the same way as AdBlock+ in recent versions of Firefox. But I'm nit-picking. Back to the subject.

- Gnome Office :
It's not an actual suite, its a lose collection of separate software that cover the needs of an Office suit. All use the same library underneath (GTK+) which has been ported to windows since ages (back at the begining of the GIMP on Windows port). As such you can find installers for :
- AbiWord (word processing)
- Gnumeric (spreadsheet whose accurate statistic formula are done in collaboration with R projet)
(and probably other GTK stuff if you need them).
In fact, as they are small separate software with a very small footprint (compared to behemoths like OO.o), they are quite popular and often recommended for people wanting to build for free small lightweight Windows installation on underpowered hardware.

- For the VI vs. Emacs flamewar combatant out there (the kind who'll immediately scream that they don't need an actual office suite as every needed function and even more is available in some Emacs mode/Vim plugin), both softwares are also available for Windows, if that's your kick. (And yes, I'm not sarcastic. I'm definitely sure that here on /. you'll find at least a dozen of people who can be more productive with a complex emacs-based stack).

So as we can see, the three major players of Linux/BSD's office suites (and the two editors behind most holy wars) are installable on Windows (and on Mac OS X for that matters too).
Yes they are indeed cross-platform.

KOffice was more of a problem until recently the whole KDE switched to Qt4 during is 4.x branch and took opportunity of the major overhaul to be rebuilt with cross-platfrom portability in mind.

Don't bother saying anything about KOffice or any other Office product becoming popular until it can be installed on Windows with a setup.exe or an MSI.

- First as you said yourself in your follow-up : KOffice is part of the KDE software that can be installed on Windows with their package manager.

- OpenOffice.org
Installs on Windows with a very standard installer.
The only minor problem in my opinion is getting the plugins. It uses the kind of plugin manager as the older versions of FireFox (you can't directly search and browse the installable plugins from there, you have to go to a website first). Also the plugin manager doesn't help you to restart the "quicklaunch" if a restart is needed.
It cool be great if I could install LanguageTool with a simple click from within the manager, the same way as AdBlock+ in recent versions of Firefox. But I'm nit-picking. Back to the subject.

- Gnome Office :
It's not an actual suite, its a lose collection of separate software that cover the needs of an Office suit. All use the same library underneath (GTK+) which has been ported to windows since ages (back at the begining of the GIMP on Windows port). As such you can find installers for :
- AbiWord (word processing)
- Gnumeric (spreadsheet whose accurate statistic formula are done in collaboration with R projet)
(and probably other GTK stuff if you need them).
In fact, as they are small separate software with a very small footprint (compared to behemoths like OO.o), they are quite popular and often recommended for people wanting to build for free small lightweight Windows installation on underpowered hardware.

- For the VI vs. Emacs flamewar combatant out there (the kind who'll immediately scream that they don't need an actual office suite as every needed function and even more is available in some Emacs mode/Vim plugin), both softwares are also available for Windows, if that's your kick. (And yes, I'm not sarcastic. I'm definitely sure that here on /. you'll find at least a dozen of people who can be more productive with a complex emacs-based stack).

So as we can see, the three major players of Linux/BSD's office suites (and the two editors behind most holy wars) are installable on Windows (and on Mac OS X for that matters too).
Yes they are indeed cross-platform.

KOffice was more of a problem until recently the whole KDE switched to Qt4 during is 4.x branch and took opportunity of the major overhaul to be rebuilt with cross-platfrom portability in mind.

An online repository of extensions, templates, and content for KOffice? I like the sound of that."

OMG!!! An online repository of extensions?!?!?! It's not like OpenOffice.org hasn't had that for ages. Oh wait...

I am absolutely astonished by the convoluted reasoning being used by astroturfers here to excuse this completely evil and devious scheme by Microsoft. You guys should be crowing to the skies about OpenOffice having a bug.

I never said I was happy with the OOo behaviour.

Here if the PROPER solution:

1. OpenOffice copies whatever the fuck Excel does with strings. Either the string is marked with the locale that it was loaded from, or the current locale is used,

That would require some kind of standard list of locale names, which does not exist. I already suggested that in the bug report.

They can thank Microsoft for their diligent bug search that located this bug, Microsoft must have put big bucks into this team that found as many bugs as they could.

This issue has been open and hot for 7 years.

3. When the programs handle formulas differently, you find out what the majority does, and you change the minority to match (unless the majority does something so stupid that you can convince the majority to change). This is how standards evolve.

I mostly agree, but OOo seems to be entirely entrenched in the no-string-conversion camp.

but we are very interested in not getting stuck in vendor lock-in or abandonment.

Thus you must look at the vendor that purchases and their specific history with open source projects and decide what to do.

Historically, when a proprietary vendor takes an open source project in house, especially when said open source project competes (or appears to compete) with their proprietary product, eventually they do something (or nothing, as in letting it stagnate) that results in what-use-to-be-called open source being abandoned.

If Microsoft adopts, historically they only support long enough to replace with a proprietary product and then kill it off. History is littered with examples.

If a company that has a strong relationship with Microsoft adopts, eventually the relationship results in the company either killing or abandoning the project. History gives us ample examples of this scenario as well.

The only example that I am currently aware of, and there are people who would NOT agree with me here, of an open source project going in house and continue to being supported is OpenOffice.Org (OOo) which was acquired by Sun.

Of course whenever the majority of developers jump ship after an event like this, that is usually a good tale-tale sign of the acquiring companies intentions with the open source project.

A good solid fork by the founder starts to sound safer than the official fork at that point.

I will probably continue to use the official fork for a few more months to one year to give Sun a chance to show their true intentions. As soon as something is implemented that can NOT be forked, as in they alter the license for that feature, I will move to the fork.

Equally bad, will be if the company does not dedicate enough resources to keep the official fork current, which is what I suspect is more likely given the defection of many core MySQL devs, than I will move to the fork.

Obviously I will be installing a forked version of MySQL to make sure that I can test in both the forked and official version. If for any reason the official version starts to require Java, or some other proprietary product in order to install it and/or use it, that too is a death knell for the official version.

Java can be an option, but should NEVER be required. Just my two cents.

Sun seems to love requiring Java in their apps

If you mean the string/numeric thing, I started out arguing that this is a bug, but now I'm not so sure. Like one of the devs says in that issue, "we handle the differnet data types stricter than excel does. This is a kind of philosophical question and we're the guys that represent the other position."

You are missing one ENORMOUS detail: the formulas ARE defined, they are defined by Open Office and every other ODF user as "do what Excel does".

Oh no they aren't. (skip to the end to see my suggestion on how OOo should handle Excel interop)

Where as, all they had to do is look at a *document* that OO created and mimic it.

Why didn't OOo just look at what Excel did and mimic that?

Interoperability where different implementations evaluate formulae differently is impossible. Given that there is no standard that specifies how a formula is to be evaluated, formulae are meaningless according to the standard. So they put them in a different namespace, as they are essentially written in a different language. Excel formulae, OOo formulae, Gnumeric formulae, Lotus formulae, these are all very different formula languages with different rules. It's like expecting Perl to evaluate a Python formula, just because both can read CSV files. OOo chose to disallow automatic string conversion in their formula language, Excel does allow automatic string conversion, so Microsoft decided to put their formulae into a different namespace to avoid silent change of behaviour when switching between applications. See Bug 5658, that I have been very active on.

I'm not sure about ligatures, but it has a great equation editor: http://www.openoffice.org/product/math.html

Here is the auto-save feature request:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=102041

http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/

I use OpenOffice Draw as an alternative to Visio. I'm able to make good looking flowcharts and network diagrams and save them to PDF. Works great for what I need it for. Colleagues have never had a negative comment regarding the diagrams etc.

It's odd how little need I have for spreadsheet software. I don't know where I'm going wrong that I don't get to use one more often :) As a network engineer and administrator, I still find the only value for me in a spreadsheet is doing my monthly finances (very simple) at home. Once in a while I'll use Calc to format some cvs file before importing to a database. I guess I've also built up some service quotes in a spreadsheet, but Calc was good enough for that as well, and the resulting PDF looked great, rather professional even.

I use OpenOffice Draw as an alternative to Visio. I'm able to make good looking flowcharts and network diagrams and save them to PDF. Works great for what I need it for. Colleagues have never had a negative comment regarding the diagrams etc.

It's odd how little need I have for spreadsheet software. I don't know where I'm going wrong that I don't get to use one more often :) As a network engineer and administrator, I still find the only value for me in a spreadsheet is doing my monthly finances (very simple) at home. Once in a while I'll use Calc to format some cvs file before importing to a database. I guess I've also built up some service quotes in a spreadsheet, but Calc was good enough for that as well, and the resulting PDF looked great, rather professional even.

And you get what you pay for. Like bugs guaranteed to put you at risk for losing saved data, discovered in beta, but released anyway without being fixed. The mother fuckers responsible should have lost their job... oh wait, it's open source. Who cares. If you value your time and work you're probably better off buying Sun's Star Office. For typing notes to grandma, OO is great.

Well, it's a good thing you can distinguish between good and bad software. Maybe you can even employ that skill when choosing which to use. And if you choose Free, Commercial software, you can't lose, right?

But seriously, if you don't have to pay any money for the privilege of installing and running some piece of software, that's one less thing you'll loose if it turns out to be a bad choice. I don't care how much bad software is out there (of any license or cost). I only care about the good stuff. If you avoid all gratis or libre software because a large percentage of those categories is of poor quality, you might as well avoid the web because such a high percentage of websites suck.

Except that Oracle hasn't yet finalized the purchase of Sun and Oracle doesn't host the site. Finally, even disregarding all that, it still isn't irony.

But the site runs that bloody Oracle InnoDB thing! That has long been an Oracle product, right?

Agree that it's a lame joke though.

Openoffice has, and has had for quite a while, a fairly extensive scripting capability. I haven't used it extensively, but from what I know, it isn't significantly less powerful than VBA.

Of course, that doesn't really help those who have already developed a signficant amount of code for VBA, and don't want to have to rewrite it.

You can download OpenOffice.org Aqua for Intel and PowerPC with the bonus of native OSX widgets (no X11). They currently only have 3.0.1 and tend to lag behind the main releases.

You can use the AltSearch extension to get that functionality.

What great timing. I just dumped Open Office 3.0 and bought Office Home and Student 2007, which incidentally is on sale for $99.99. Why? Because last night it destroyed 2 hours worth of homework. You see, there was this tiny little bug in OO that causes the Auto-Recovery option to replace the backup file with the original after a crash. The best part? Open Office closed itself after an internal error without even displaying an error message. The fucking window just disappeared. When I reopened the program it recovered my document to the last state it was manually saved in. The auto-save option? Worthless.

Try and wrap your FOSS loving, ass-licking brain around that for just a moment. A free Office Program.... that MIGHT contain bugs serious enough to cause the program to crash and lose data. But wait!..... There is a recovery feature that will salvage your precious work. Except, it's broken. The one feature that shouldn't break, was, and remained that way for a long time. "OH, FOSS is so wonderful, bugs get fixed in only a few days, while commercial software takes years?" GO FUCK YOURSELF.

I don't give a god fucking damn what software it is. You Get What You Pay For. If you use Open Office for anything serious, you are an idiot.

Let me just say "thank you" to Steve Zaske, a Microsoft employee who helped the OpenOffice.org team make an order-of-magnitude performance improvement. What Excel and Calc can now do in less than two seconds takes over a minute with Numbers 2.0.1 on my 2.33 GHz iMac.

I was able to get it on bittorrent. Link here.

auto-updating word count

OpenOffice.org supports plug-ins. Get Writers Tools Writers Tools.

Too bad they don't use antialiasing or any type of filtering for the thumbnails...

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.1/images/image11-big.png
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.1/images/image12-big.png

Too bad they don't use antialiasing or any type of filtering for the thumbnails...

http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.1/images/image11-big.png
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.1/images/image12-big.png

Create all you current documents in OO and send them to people with this link or else send as a PDF. The biggest bone-of-contention for people is receiving documents that don't display correctly on different computers with different printers and different msOffice versions.

http://tools.services.openoffice.org/odfvalidator/ Still can't verify that the ODF you saved properly represents what you see on screen.

http://tools.services.openoffice.org/odfvalidator/

Does OO support track changes?

Yes it does.
Reference between Word and OO Writer (it's the 10th option down or so in the table):
http://documentation.openoffice.org/HOW_TO/word_processing/Word-to-OOo.html