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OpenOffice.org Resource Kit
With a stable 1.0 release and spectacular cross-platform functionality, it's finally time to seriously consider putting this software to work in your company. Whether you are completely new to OpenOffice.org or just moving from its predecessor StarOffice, you'll want to take a look at OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit from Prentice Hall PTR.
The "kit" consists of a well written tutorial book and a companion CD-ROM. The book's authors (Solveig Haughland and Floyd Jones) are salty veterans in the technical training field, and it shows in the quality of the text. The CD contains the OpenOffice.org release itself, as one might expect. It provides builds for every supported platform, to include the Mac OS X developer alpha version. At the time this review was written, two minor upgrades have been made available since my book's CD-ROM was pressed. These are, naturally, available for free via the OpenOffice.org web-site. In addition to the releases, the CD includes templates, macros, and examples from the developer community. The authors provide additional templates and resources at http://www.getopenoffice.org
The first five chapters of the book are devoted to basic issues such as installation, migrating existing data, printer issues, and global setup tips. Special guidance is given to users switching over from StarOffice, or even that Redmond company's office suite. Speaking of that company, OpenOffice.org is superb at converting Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files into its own open formats. The book shows how to use the handy "AutoPilot", which can perform batch conversions of your existing data for use with OpenOffice.org's equivalent applications. Originals are kept safely intact-- AutoPilot produces converted copies. This could make a large office transition much easier, if not completely seamless.
The next six chapters cover the creation of written documents in fantastic detail. The organization of this section is quite intuitive; you'll easily learn how to create a simple letter. When you're ready to write your memoirs, you won't need to buy another book--it's all there: complex formatting options, page layout functionality, object manipulation, linking cross-references, and indexing. And don't forget office goodies like mail merges, label printing, and business cards.
Chapters 13-17 focus entirely on web-page development. Serious web designers may find this section bordering on useless, but the casual user will be able to create a home page without learning a single tag of HTML.
The next several chapters deal with Calc (a spreadsheet program), Impress (for creating presentations), and Draw ("the best drawing program you've never used," say the authors). The layout of each section follows the comprehensive example from the earlier chapters detailing OpenOffice.org's word processor, Writer. Basic topics are organized neatly along with the more advanced ones, and neither seem to get in the way of the other. Both the novice and the expert will find very little lacking from this material.
Organizations who deal frequently with databases will not be disappointed with OpenOffice.org, either. The final three chapters of the book explain how to incorporate data from any flavor database you're likely to be using in your network. Throw in an appendix on macros, and you've got one very complete tutorial masquerading as an all-in-one reference. I'm very picky when it comes to my geek shelf space, and this one gets high marks in all the important areas: comprehensive, well organized, and with a great signal-to-noise ratio.
We have learned that superior open source software alone isn't always enough to supplant the existing closed source way of doing things. However, "document it, and they will come!" The OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit will go a long way toward fulfilling that prophecy.
Reader Marcus Green sent in a review of this book as well. Here are some of his thoughts:
In addition to the document management features the book covers the more "Page Layout" style features of StarOffice such as the ability to manage columns and to place vertical text running up the page. These are features I was not even aware existed in StarOffice before I read this book.The StarOffice companion has over 1030 pages, but it is really bigger than it sounds because it is very dense. Although it has many screen shots, plenty of use is made of text based instructions. Instead of repeating instructions, the text will often point you to the page where a concept was first explained. This does break up the flow of instructions but it also means that the book contains more information than if they had repeated the text every time it was needed.
I found the section on the graphics module useful because I had not realised how StarOffice has some slightly non-standard ways of working with menus and selections. For example I spent quite a bit of time trying to get the 3d shapes menu to pop out and show all the possible shape options. It was only on a closer reading of the text of this book did I appreciate that you need to click and hold down the mouse for a few seconds before the menu pops out.
The tone of the book comes across as being created by people who like the program rather than a creation of a faceless corporation. Thus in the graphics section they have included the amusing Moose with moving fly graphic that is used for the logo of the JavaRanch website. Here is an example of the text style from the section on macros. "Macros can do things like open a file when you do a particular task, process data, or take your grandmothers' credit cards and buy $3000 worth of cat toys." It also features a section titled "Turning Off Annoying Features," which of course is about the autoformatting and word completion.
You can purchase the OpenOffice.org Resource Kit from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
For anyone who doesn't know how to use an Office Suite...
With release 1.1 on the way, wouldn't it make sense to wait until after that release to buy a book about it?
I wouldn't want to miss out on all the yummy 1.1 goodies and it sounds like it will be a pretty significant change.
lysergically yours
I'd be happy with soem simple tips on scripting a setup so that "open file" points by default to a user's network drive and so that the display and toolbars are uniform within our firm. I do not relish setting up a dozen computers to make the settings match.
Basically, scripts or config tools would be cool.
is that it simply doesn't import MS Word documents properly. MS Word is the still the norm wether you like it or not.
Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.
Back in the days, the Amiga had AREXX & OS/2 had REXX. These were for scripting ANY compatable application.
Why don't we have these nowadays?!?!?!?
Then we wouldn't need entire books like this, and could get better functionality from all our programs...
Heres all the possible trolls, rolled up into one mod point.
1) OpenOffice is slow
2) No font config support
3) Ugly paper clip clone (the lightbulb)
4) Uses a non standard printer library
5) Won't work on my 386SX running Slackware 1.0
6) I don't wan't to start a holy war here, but my linux box is taking 20 minutes to.....
7) join the GNAA
8) Mirror
9) Openoffice has no footnote support
10) My Mom says linux dosen't have any decent solitare games
11) ???
12) -12, troll.
Are you kidding?
MS Word doesn't import MS Word documents properly...
While we're on the subject of StarOffice/OpenOffice, I'm going to post a question about it here because Slashdotters are more likely to be able to anwer than those kids over at the OO forums.
.gtkrc and .gtkrc-2.0 files and relateds are all configured correctly for my color preferences... but OO doesn't seem to see these either (I haven't checked to see if OO is a GTK app at all).
OpenOffice is able to inherit and use the toolkit/widget colors that I select in Linux/KDE. i.e. if my widgets are all brown in other apps, they are also brown in OpenOffice. However, when I am using WindowMaker or another simple managed environment rather than KDE, OpenOffice comes up in Windows NT gray and I can't seem to change that.
I've done an "xrdb -all -edit myrsrcs.txt" from within KDE to grab all the krdb stuff and then an "xrdb myrsrcs.txt" from within WindowMaker, but that didn't help. All of my GTK/GTK2 apps look the way I want them to at this point because my
I even tried "kfmclient file:/opt/OpenOffice.org/progrms/swriter" to see if I could get the KDE colors into OO that way without actually having to be logged in to KDE, but it didn't help.
Does anyone know how to change the widget colors in OpenOffice without having to simply log into KDE or GNOME?
P.S. final hint: using the Tools menu is not the right answer, it contains color options for a great many things, but the menu and toolbar widgets are not among them.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Do they mention a manner in which to upgrade an installation vs. re-install?
Ok, so it's a bit offtopic, but I think you're quote should be properly attributed to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, as he used it extensively in his character Sherlock Holmes.
Not that software development is any less a mystery to those outside of coding circles.
// you probably won't believe my review, so please
// read this guy's
#include otherreview.c
How can you forget that one? It is an alltime classic.
It needs some real work.
if(softwareBook.ageMonths > 6)
{
softwareBook.status = 'obsolete';
slashdotReview = NO;
}
<EOM>
You're full of shit.
{sarcasm mode on} But, of course, Office docs never corrupted -- they're self-repairing. {sarcasm mode off}
Never-ever-whatsoever post any bad comments about Apple or Macs on /., even on thread unrelated to Macs. Otherwise - be ready of being modded down. Mac zealots are everywhere. All they do on /. is posting bad comments about M$, collecting karma and using it to mod-down all anti-Apple comments.
Less is more !
Worst snack food ever.
but the fonts are sometime mess up
How do you mean? Like Times New Roman becomes Helvetica without you changing it, or the fonts just look bad?
Printing an imported MS Word document never looks the same way as printing an original MS Word document.
Are you printing using OO.o in windows? Printing in Linux is pretty crappy over all (IMHO), so it's probably unfair to compare printing in OO.o under Linux to printing under MS Word in Windows.
my pet machine
Don't judge OpenOffice besed on 1.0.
for our OpenOffice.org training classes and it is quite good. The customers/students have really given posotive feedback about it not only as a classroom textbook, but also as a reference for ongoing use. For what it's worth.
ER
Looks like I'll have to take the rest of the summer off if I really wanna learn how to use this. When's the OO for Dummies coming out?
Thank you. Couldn't have said it better myself.
Truth, not troll.
Informatus Technologicus
Dude, your a weak Jack Wagner
PHP is the solution of choice for relaying mysql errors to web users.
I'm game... post a link to the source?
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
http://avi.alkalay.net/software/msfonts/
for a solution. Hint, just get Microsoft fontpack.
One more thing, Microsoft supplies free viewers for Word, Excel and Powerpoint. They even run inside Wine. Google for them. I run OO with Windows 2000 and have these viewers installed, plus the fonts. What can i say? It works.
If you're looking to get OpenOffice.org for the Mac, you should get the GM from the official download site and not use what's on the CD with this book. As the "GM" implies, there were lots of bugs fixed between the "Final Beta" and "GM", and definitely lots of serious issues were fixed since the alpha.
If you're on another platform, you should probably check the version on the CD as well. Even though it's now being called a "legacy build", the latest stable version is 1.0.3.1 which fixes nasty printing errors in 1.0.3 on other platforms (didn't happen on the Mac! woo hoo!). The "RC" in 1.1 RC stands for "Release Candidate", so if you're thinking of going the whole way to 1.1 you may want to wait until the RC is dropped from the name.
I guess, in short, don't buy this book just to get OpenOffice.org on a CD since you'll probably have to download a newer version anyway.
I would use Open Office but it can't support reading and writing MS Word documents. Until it does that, I will remain an avid Microsoft user and supporter.
It actually DOES do that. Not quite sure why you don't think it does. Perhaps you require some obscure function or something that they don't have perfected yet? But in general, I've had spectacular success importing and exporting with MS Word format in Open Office.
no thanks
In the table of contents, there is a bit of space between the section number and title in MSO, but OO concatenates the number and title, which also looks ugly.
We also spotted an empty chapter 1 before the actual text started, which was not present in the MSO interpretation of the document. This also means all the chapter numbers changed, which we really don't like.
Finally, in the header the document title suddenly popped up twice whereas MSO just displays it once. There could be a hidden field there that gets displayed anyway by OO, I haven't checked yet.
Before you ask, I haven't reported any of these problems yet. Don't shoot, they were only discovered yesterday...
And don't take all this as whining: I am very pleased by the way OO is progressing, and I want to help making it a little better by reporting these errors.
...we use OpenOffice to repair hopelessly munged-up Microsoft Word documents - which happens more often than anybody is willing to admit. I used to fix all the formatting fubars with WordPerfect but the two products have diverged so much in the last two years that we've discontinued using WordPerfect for anything. Anyway, everytime I get a user who asks me why she can't get her headers and columns to do such-and-such I snarf a copy off his/her server, import it into OO, undo the hideousness (sp?) and export it back out. And it generally stays fixed, even after subsequent exposures to MS Word, plus it's a lot smaller.
Thanks to Microsoft, OpenOffice looks pretty damned good.
I would echo this endorsement. The 1.1RC release is significantly more polished. Font handling seems to be much cleaner, and the package is much faster overall.
Woot! Troll moderation!
Well, if it's any consolation, I'm pissed that it's gonna look like that, too. If you're gonna use XML, make it human-readable. That's the point.
Mikey-San
Karma: +Eleventy billion (mostly affected by watching Celebrity Jeopardy)
I'm using OpenOffice 1.1 on an optimized gentoo linux installation running on an Athlon XP 1900+ 256MB and 80GB Western Digital special edition harddrive and it still takes about 50 seconds to load for the first time if no quickstarting is used.Even after loading it still feels like a java app with slight delays in menu appearance, although I'm sure whatever parts of OO are written in java have been compiled to native code.In short, performance is STILL a major issue not to mention the UI could use some tweaking ex: icons are flat and not easy to distinguish at a glance, menu items placed in strange places. I have a professor who exports lecture notes to WordXP from Openoffice and images are always placed in the wrong location in his document, sometimes on the wrong page, although he is probably not using 1.1. Don't kid yourself, OO needs some serious work. Hopefully the developers will work to improve on the existing features before adding anything new in the next release.
Yeah, 'cause Microsoft sure as hell can't!
What - you must be joking??? You can even configure OOo to read/write in MS Office formats By Default. This is ideal in a situation where the MS Word users outnumber the OOo users.
Oh well, what the hell...
This review, in particular, almost seems like it was copied straight off of Amazon or something. Some of the quotes seem to come from a marketing firm rather than an independent critic:
Whether you are completely new to OpenOffice.org or just moving from its predecessor StarOffice, you'll want to take a look at OpenOffice.org 1.0 Resource Kit from Prentice Hall PTR.
If only there were some sort of meta-moderation for book reviews...
OpenOffice.org Resource Kit Review (Score: -1, Uninformative)
50 seconds to load on an Athlon 1900+? Well, there's your problem. I'm using an Athlon 2000+ and it takes me about 4 seconds, again without quickstart. I think you need a faster processor.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
Ditto of your ditto. This version starts in under two seconds on my Linux box. I no longer hesitate and ponder whether it's worth the start-up time before starting OOo.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
It also takes me about 6-8 seconds to load, but this is only after it has been placed in Linux's memory cache by the first load. It takes forever and a day to load off disk.
YHBT.
YHL.
HAND.
I have a similar (but lower in hardware) setup:
Athlon 1400
512MB RAM
10GB Quantum Fireball IDE HD
Gentoo Linux "-march=athlon-tbird -O3 -pipe"
OOo takes about 5 or 6 seconds to load for me. It's a bit laggy if I leave it for a while, but it picks up to speed as I use it. I think that something is wrong with your configuration/setup since mine _should_ be about 20-30% SLOWER than yours and it's 900% faster.
BTW, my memory usage is about 75MB with OOo loaded, not including cache or buffers.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
Remember who the real enemy is.
Wow, either you have a shitty gentoo setup or Windows 2000 SP4 totally rocks.
I have an Athlon T-bird 1.33GHz, 512MB, and a plain old 60GB ATA100 5400RPM hard drive. It doesn't take longer than 5 seconds to start *any* of the OOo programs (OOo 1.1rc1).
I agree that OOo could use some more work.. but wow! 50 seconds? That's funny.
OO Draw is a steaming pile of shit.
I got it slow too on my Pentium 4, 2.53 Gig. So I uninstall it (after reading this thread), and install it again. It shows up in couple of seconds. Try that see if you get it.
Microsoft is hiring.
Openoffice is not written in Java, and does not require Java to run. Thank you.
I am still waiting for the OO Outlook killer. Outlook is IMHO the best piece of software M$ has ever produced. I know of a few other stand-alone projects that hope to be the next Outlook replacement but I'm wondering why none of them arn't part of OO?
-Someone who thinks trying to come up with a username that hasn't already been taken is a massive pain in the ass.
Superb? Uh...no. I recently built a new computer and rather than pay for (or try to bootleg) a copy of Office, I downloaded and installed OO 1.0.3.
I've since tried to open several different Word 2000 documents in OO and not one has converted properly. The worst one was a brochure I did for my wife's jewelry business--a standard two-page three-column brochure with some imbedded pictures, nothing too out of the ordinary. When I imported it, the contents of the entire second page of the document were gone. The page was there, the framing for the pictures were there, but the text and pictures themselves weren't. I ended up having to retype it.
I think OO itself isn't a bad application, it's slower than Office but just as useful. And I've got one less piece of Microsoftware on my box. But, jeez, "superb" at converting documents isn't anywhere near the truth unless they drastically improved the import/export filters in 1.1.
"Settle down, Beavis. We've got an experiment to do."
I find the OO draw program nigh unto useless. This doesn't mean that I know of a good replacement, just that it's so bad it's unuseable.
I feel guilty about panning this module so strongly when I'm not offering to help fix it. But my attention is elsewhere. I have, however, bought a separate machine and Deneba Canvas, so I don't have a real need for the OOo drawing module. But if I had to use this, I'd be quite desperate indeed.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Are you certain that DMA mode is enabled on your disk (assuming you're using IDE, which most people are)? Running a system from a hard disk in PIO mode can be agonizing in comparison.
(fdisk is the tool, in case you weren't sure).
Also, make sure there are not any old, slow devices on the same IDE channel, as it will be forced to cater to the worst thing attached.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
Amazon has it 30% cheaper than bn!!!!
Can somebody post a MS-word doc that OOo cannot open please....I have not come accross one!
And even if you don't...does anybody EVER read documentation on something as boring as an office suite? If it isn't intuitive, it should be fixed to begin with.
I agree to a point-- that the *basic* functionality of the office suite should be intuitive (font selection, etc). But you have to realize that many businesses rely on the advanced features of office suites. These features need to be focused around productivity (think vim, emacs) rather than intuitiveness.
Also, look at http://www.microsoft.com/mspress for information about office and you will see that there is quite a market for this sort of documentation.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
true, true. Also, it's probably faster to read the code than it is to just wait until the thing loads and then try to do something with it.
Perhaps you mean hdparm? Fdisk doesn't seem to do DMA/PIO settings.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
If you wish to wow your LUG new-to-linux users, I recommend an OO presentation. We had several new faces there to learn about the MS Office replacement. They went away interested / happy.
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." - Chief Brody
Regina is a Rexx implementation for a variety of platforms, Linux included. It is very good: faithful to Cowlishaw's language definition yet supporting of all the major extensions, ARexx included. Alas, *nix systems lack the AmigaOS hooks for universal scripting, but Regina does a nice job and can be used in place of all those ugly shell scripts :-)
Well I'm not sure but should this article really give Sun the credit for StarOffice? IIRC OpenOffice forked when Sun bought StarOffice from I believe a German company, but what the hell, Microsloth gets credit for all of the software written by the companies they bought!!
Their is a VB like macro language and uno(unified network object )set of api's for use in OO's VB, C++, and Java. Uno is talked about most. Also com/ole is supported on the windows version and the online version of the book at openoffice.org has great detail into it.
Sun plans to kill everything but java in future releases so who knows. But go to for the free online docs if you want to create macro's with it or get a free peak.
http://saveie6.com/
Can you please spare us "reviews" that are just a list of chapter summaries? Yes, we need to know what the book covers, but a very short list of topics is actually more informative. A technical book review should cover not just what the book explains, but how it explains, and why the reviewer thinks this is good or bad.
I'd like to see OpenOffice succeed, I really would. It's got so much about it that's cool. I'm particularly anxious to try the DocBook support in the latest version. But can we call an end to tilting at this interoperability windmill? It just wastes a lot of effort on complicated filters and macro languages that are never as compatible as they claim. So lots of developers pour their valuable time into something that can't be done, and OpenOffice develops a reputation for BS. Not good!
Really? I was thinking of upgrading my K6/500, which loads it in about 25 seconds, but maybe those new-fangled CPU's aren't really faster after all.
I'm sure there are others that could have made the list:
13) OpenOffice will never take off in the mainstream14) [Choose a non-Microsoft operating system] will never take off in the mainstream without a decent office suite
15) Something about stolen intellectual property
16) "I don't want to sound like a troll, but..."
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
My smallest computer is 233 MHz pent with 96 megs of ram and it runs Open Office not fast but it runs. My 650 MHz athlon run it well with 256 megs of ram. Both run in win 98/win 95/linux. So I dont see where the half a gig comes from but it is my size ram I like but with MS Word 97 I like having the same so it is no a diff.
Yeah, wipe is the tool you want--wipe the bad DMA settings to make way for the good DMA settings.
/dev/hda
# wipe -f
(as root)
then,
# man hdparm
(from Knoppix CD)
Update: I too reinstalled OO RC and the speed issues went away. I was running openoffice-bin 1.1 beta2 and it like the other ebuilds of OO was painfully slow. After getting the official build it is orders of magnitude faster, thank god. No, I was not using PIO mode as suggested by someone above, hdparm reveals that I'm getting 45MB/s off disk.
I've just emerge the latest Abiword 1.99.1, and I am going to switch completely from OO to Abiword. It is lightening fast (takes well under 1 second to open, often is instantaneous), handles Word fine. OO is too slow and too sensitive to changes in JVM every time I upgrade. procman tells me Abiword is taking 13.7MB with empty document, and 20.4MB with a 2.5 page CV open. Perfect for my lightweight WP needs.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
Yes, hdparm, not fdisk. Gah. Working from 7:30 - 4pm is very bad for a nightowl.
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
This is Openoffice 1.1 rc1 (I tried beta also), right?
For what it's worth: Athlon XP 2000, 512 MB RAM... 5 seconds from a fresh start (not loaded previously). 2 seconds if it's been loaded before. And this is with 10 galeon browser tabs with slashdot stories loaded, and evolution.
1.0 used to take ages... 1.1 is as fast as I'll ever need. If your machine is an even vaguely similar spec to mine and it's taking "forever and a day", there's something wrong.
Goddamn right! Like we in the Marine Corps use to say: don't ask, don't tell but if you do we'll ass-rape you in the latrine with a broom-stick.
> If you're gonna use XML, make it human-readable. That's the point.
IIRC OOo 1.1 offers save-as-formated-XML as a new option.
Regards, Simon
This behavior was only implimented after focus testing revealed that common users did not understand why they did not 'get a free coffee break' because 'the program decided to leave'.
Many Thanks,
Luke