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New York Times Plugs OpenOffice Suite
MrNovember writes "The New York Times (registration blah blah) describes a new choice for office suites. The writer seems a bit slanted toward OpenOffice but it's a fair discussion of its pros and cons. The article has identified some interesting compatibility issues to those who aren't using OpenOffice but might. Again we see major media discussing open source as an actual alternative to a longstanding standard. The article concludes amusingly with 'Every now and then, you get what you don't pay for;' just tack on 'Open Source' to the beginning for the perfect sig." We've gotten numerous submissions recently from people whose [company/school/whatever] is switching to OpenOffice.
I find the compatibility to be great with the exception of bullets. A bulleted list in OpenOffice.org will not appear like one opened in Word. However, a bulleted list in Word will appear as a bulleted list in OpenOffice.org. Aside from bullets, OpenOffice.org performs great with tables, spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. I have not tested any documents that contain macros or advanced formulas, since I rarely use those features. OpenOffice.org is great for users with basic needs.
Since my resume contains bullets, I have not been able to uninstall Word. OpenOffice.org is my default application for all Office filetypes.
Regards,
javajeff
So far it starts up quicker than staroffice and there is no so desktop which is nice. It failed to recognize my jvm during the install, but I'm not that bothered by that just yet. I am using it on Linux and installed it as root, and ran into a problem with permissions it seems. I had to change ownership to (chown -R : ) to then run it as myself. It would start up and then crash right away until I did this. Or I could run it as root. Not sure why though, and now I dont care as it works. It does use lots of disk space but then so does MS office and SO 5.x. So far I am pleased with it, as it gives me yet another option to deaeling with MS docs and excel spread sheets... I give it a thumbs up ;-)
Only 'flamers' flame!
I don't know about VBA from Office, but OpenOffice has an Autopilot that does mass conversions. Run OO's word processor, go to File, Autopilot, Document Converter. Seems to work pretty well for me. It also imports templates and such and automagically guesses where you're keeping most of your Word files.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
here is a page I made showing how Windows/MSOffice, Windows/OO, Linux/OO, and Mac/MSOffice handle the same document--a document, as it happens, that comes straight from Microsoft.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
It's OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice, OpenOffice is trademarked.
From the faq: 8. Why should we say "OpenOffice.org" instead of simply "OpenOffice"?
One great trick I found for converting excel files to HTML files. Excel does an awful job, writing an html page 10 times the size it needs to be, and the code is IE-centric. However, openoffice can open .xls files, and then save as html, and it outputs nicely formatted, standard HTML at very respectable sizes.
Travis
To my fellow OOo users running under GNOME, you may have encountered a problem where the program will often fail to start properly. This is not a crash. OOo is simply being purged by the GNOME session manager due to its relatively long startup time. I was a bit surprised to encounter this problem in 1.0, having thought it an OO bug. However, this article led me to search Issuezilla for a solution, which thankfully was determined.
There are a couple ways around the purge. The easiest one is to add "unset SESSION_MANAGER" to the soffice startup script. One file, all GNOME users happy. A somewhat more intrusive and wide-ranging solution is to add "exec $PATH_TO_GNOME-SESSION/gnome-session --purge-delay=0" to ~/.gnomerc. Supposedly, this will solve a similar problem with Opera, according to the bug comments.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
I wind up doing a lot of work with some larger spreadsheets (storage system implementation documentation), as well as some fairly massive CSV imports from perl scripts. I haven't needed to do a lot of formulas/macros in the spreadsheet (since most of my spreadsheets are a result of perl scripts, I just make the script do it!), however, I've found that OOo has wound up working much much better than Excel for me. It's faster, it has better importing, great interoperability with my cow'orkers using Office, and the file sizes are smaller. Plus, I can install a copy on my laptop, both work desktops, and my three PCs at home (running Win2k, WinXp, and Linux across the 6 boxes that I use) without any fear of Microsoft Visual Gestappo Suite XP coming down on me, or my employer. I've been playing around with StarOffice for the last few versions and found it a bit cumbersome and broken (imports not working right, limited versions of Office formats to export to, really slow on my dual P2-233 linux box). OpenOffice, however, has completely impressed me.
Finding God in a Dog
Sun has Enterprise licenses that drops the per-user cost the more licenses you buy. They have various levels from $50/user for 150 users to $25/user for 10,000 users. At 1,000 users, a company would pay $40,000 ($40 per user). (SOURCE: http://www.sun.com/service/support/sw_only/star_pr ogovw.html click on "StarOffice 6.0 Licenses")
I couldn't find MS's volume licensing, but even if they gave a huge discount from retail (say 75%off the retail price of $450 for Office XP Standard), the 1,000 user company would still wind up paying $112,500.
In other words, Star Office would save the 1,000 user company $72,500. (Companies might shy away from the free Open Office because there's no official support channels whereas you can call up Sun with tech support inquiries.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
I'm on Debian Woody, and I've been fiddling with both KDE 2.2.2 and 3. Configuring the HP OfficeJet T65 is a major pain. I have an ad hoc-solution now that works OK on PS files. But those PS files created by KWord look nothing like they did on screen, and often, some of the words are lost at the end of lines.
I haven't got OpenOffice to import anything but it's native format. Is there some kind of subprocess that is supposed to do the filtering, that just dies? It's a hell to debug this stuff.
The really bad thing is though that this box is not on the net right now, so it is too hard to get to the docs and to the updates. Last night, I burnt OO debs on a CD, and when I got home, it turned out that the CD was corrupted.... Arrrrgh!
Well, I'm going to quite a lot of pain, some of it is definately not Linux' fault, but I think that if I hadn't been into it for freedom, I wouldn't have bothered.
Freedom is still Linux major selling point.
Employee of Inrupt, Project Release Manager and Community Manager for Solid
I seem to remember that TrueType was an Apple product with MS collaboration.
...)
Whatever, the basic idea is so good that its worth is obvious. And I beleive that progress is underway. Don't both KDE3 and Gnome2 support "anti-aliased" fonts? That's a partial answer. Now what is needed are some decent tools for building those fonts. If I recall correctly, the idea of a font is a collection of objects that know how to draw themselves are various sizes and resolutions and which can be mapped to a keyboard. One way to specify this is with Bezier curves (+ hinting), but I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be possible to specify programs that would do the same thing:
draw(char#, rect=(top, left, height, width), weight, color=false, solid=true, underline=false,
FontMaker used to show one a rectangle and allow one to specify which dots were black for which letter (rather like an icon designer). Fontographer, it's sequel, changed this to specifying the same thing in terms of what appeared to be Bezier curves, with hints for things like how lines ended, how you specified holes inside of letters, etc. These programs allowed the Mac to have MANY custom fonts that did just what was needed. The pixelated fonts looked ugly at every size but the design size, and appropriate reductions, but the bezier fonts looked good at many sizes. (There were scaling problems with things like serifs, size of dots, etc. which created esthetic problems if you deviated too far from the design sizes, so even scalable fonts look better at appropriate sizes.)
I haven't gone searching for projects like these, but they would certainly be a "good thing(tm)".
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
I downloaded and installed OOo right after it was released. I generally like the software. However, there is one show stopper issue that keeps me from migrating completely. It is currently not possible to make crossreferences to paragraph numbers. If for instance you have a document with a numbered list of references at the end, it is not possible to insert a cross-reference in the text to one of these numbers. The same applies to tables, figures, sections, formulas and headings.
Since I write scientific articles and need to be able to do all of the above, I can't use OOo (I use framemaker right now). I checked with issuezilla and this is something they are aware of, even though there doesn't seem to be much activity on the issue. I really hope they fix this soon.
Jilles