Linux Office Suites

Cowculator writes: "Sun Microsystems will release the beta version of StarOffice 6.0 in October, with the development version already available. This ZDNet article has some more details, including a link to the development version..." Other submitters sent in notes about Gobe Productive and Hancom Office 2.0, not to mention KOffice and the Gnome office applications. As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

Comments

Just as important

[alanjstr]

Just as important, the lack of EXPORT filters! If you're going to send a document to other people, they need to read it too.

Re:Just as important

[PhotoGuy]

I think it's important to state that both important *and* exporting are as important as each other. Being able to send word-compable documents to business colleagues is every bit as important as viewing incoming ones properly.

As far as MS changing the formats to force incompatability goes (which they will undoubtedly continue to do, as per normal course of business), the one thing the industry has working in their advantage, is that they end up creating incompatability for their earlier products, as well. That's why we see as "Save-as Word95/97" option in Office. They create their own incompatabilities in the process. That works to the advantage of the industry, against this monopolistic behaviour.

Anytime someone saves something in the latest office format, they break Word 95, 97, as much as they'd break StarOffice. And StarOffice has historically tracked the import formats closely enough (at least for Word) to keep up with the previous gen of office products. If they fall behind a couple of revs, the race will be over.

-me-

How about intermediate formats?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

It's obviously pretty essential for users to be able to transfer between the office suites in question and MS Office, if the others are to gain any kind of mainstream acceptance. However, most MS Office users don't actually use something like 90% of the functionality. It's the other 10% that's important.

Further, the only really important Microsoft Office applications are Word, Excel and Access. There isn't the same volume of existing data that must be readily accessible for the other applications.

Now, suppose you could get a solid intermediate format covering those basics (something XML-based, perhaps) adopted as some sort of standard by the free software/open source guys, and have all these office suites using it. It then just needs someone to write a single filter for, say, MS Word docs, to convert to and from the intermediate format, and then all the other Office suites can do it.

I can't believe no-one's thought of or attempted this before, but I don't know of any actual examples. Does anyone else? It must be technically possible; at least, if it's not, you haven't got a hope of converting to the format used by any individual free/open source office suite either.

Re:How about intermediate formats?

[Error27]

>>Do you wonder why people don't leave outlook after numerous virus attacks? It's that useful, that's why.

I think you give people too much credit. They use it because it's the default.

Most people don't even change their home page so how are they going to figure out what other email programs are out there, download/buy it, install it and configure it to download mail from their isp?

And in a business then it's even harder because someone has to go around to each computer and install a new email program and set it up. Then he/she has to teach users how it works. And there are _always_ problems with new software so that is more work...

If Eudora was the default instead of Outlook it would be just as popular.

Re; Why OpenOffice?

[Bodero]

Personnaly I don't like to see every two days in my mailbox those "where is the Desktop?", "it was better before!", "Companies need professional Scheduling management tools!" postings.

My biggest concern (having implemented Star Schedule server for 30 people so far in a 50-employee company) is that no regard at all has been given to the groupware functionality in OpenOffice. I have very few gripes with Star Schedule, but will need to explain why the newest verions of Star Office cannot be used with the Schedule Server.

If someone were to start a project to make a newer better groupware tool for open office (or some other open-source cross-platform tool), I would find a way to contribute (as I think quite a few others would).

Unfortunately it seems as if ogsproject has died.

Maybe if someone took action and said "All groupware discussions will take place on groupware@openoffice.org" or similar, then at least it wouldn't appear on discuss.

Does Sun not care that there are customers of their software who will be left stranded with data in an obsolete server and egg on their face. I hope not.

Don't try to do too much, though!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Tip to the folks working on it: cool object oriented design is neat, but it's usability, stability, and compatability that will make StarOffice a success. Don't try to do things beyond MS Office, just match it on all fronts! Anything else is an esoteric waste of time.

Don't even try to match it on all fronts, IMHO. As much as MS would have it otherwise, most Office users are only using a very small subset of the functionality available.

If you can support bulletproof import/export of simple Word documents, with basic things like the formatting, cross-references, tables and so on working reliably, you've got 99% of the portability problems solved. The big issue is the number of documents that already exist in Word format, which people will continue to need to read/edit in whatever new format they're stored. Most of those documents don't use super-advanced VBA scripts, half a million text boxes and WordArt.

Now, if you can go one better, and fix the terminally annoying bugs in Word -- cross-references not updating properly and woefully broken bullets and numbering spring to mind -- then you've also got a technically superior product that solves real problems that MS Word doesn't. Add in the silly omissions -- genuine three-part headers and footers, as used by many, many business documents, for example -- and you're clearly winning.

Of course, similar arguments apply to other Office applications, particularly Excel and Access. I'm simply highlighting Word because the issues are likely to be more widely understood.

Gobe has great filters

[loosifer]

Gobe actually has great import/export filters, but they're even better: They actually developed an API that anyone can write to, so if they port the API and the filters over to linux (which they are apparently doing), then any application can choose to just write to that API and will immediately be able to save or write in any of the M$ formats that Gobe supports.

BTW, this functionality is based on how BeOS does translation for other formats, too, mainly graphics. Linux could really use to take a lesson from this, because it was one of the coolest and best functionalities of BeOS. Hopefully Gobe will port the full API over, not just the filters themselves.

Chicken In the Egg

[Lethyos]

As far as I know all of these are lacking the single most important thing, a robust and complete set of import filters for Word, Wordperfect, Excel, Powerpoint, etc.

There's a real good reason we haven't seen this yet. It's the chicken in the egg problem. Before you can have fully capable import filters, you must first impliment the feature set of the app you're inputing from. For example, Microsoft Word has a bunch of features that do not yet appear in most other "word processors". If your word processor doesn't impliment these features, a filter that does is quite useless for your application (except in regards of ignoring things your application doesn't understand).

Unfortunately, before those features are implimented in your own application, you're going to need some more acceptance (to bring more developers on the project). Unless you can say you do what the mainstream needs/wants, you're still an obscur project. *sigh*

Off this topic, one other thing that kind of bothers me is the massive ammount of reinventing the wheel. Now while having many options is good, there are just far too many open source projects that are each trying to create their own robust, fully-featured office suite. Why is the community wasting so much time?

Some of these really should merge and share code more. Or at least, there should be one organization that is dedicated to creating a unified set of the features found in all open source office suite projects. That way, they could create a big set of libraries that do these things... so when the next guy has this reckless desire to make his own office suite... well, you get the idea.