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Happy 3rd Birthday To OpenOffice.org
Milo Fungus writes "OpenOffice.org is three years old today. The birthday page links to interviews and information about OpenOffice.org's push to schools, which is led by Ian Lynch of the Marketing Project. As a happy and satisfied user, I say 'Happy Birthday' with vigor and gusto." Gift idea: give a copy of OpenOffice.org to your boss tomorrow.
No... The Mac OS X Porting group specifically said that the only reason they haven't been able to port to Cocoa is that they need to change several of the Graphics APIs owned by different parts of the project.
Since some of these APIs are being revamped anyway(for all platforms), they feel it best to wait until they are finalized, or at least fleshed out enough to allow porting work to begin. This has the two fold advantage of:
A: They will have some say in the new APIs so MacOSX Concerns can be taken into account
and
B: They wont have to waste tons of time porting over obsolete code that will have to be changed anyway.
On a bigger note, they have made a lot of improvements in the past 3 years from Star Office to 1.1 today. Its well on its way and usable, but still there are some things that can be worked on, like getting it to load faster.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Since students and academic folk are poor anyway, and nobody wants to steal from Microsoft, tell others at your school or university about OpenOffice.org.
I've convinced a couple professors to link to the projects from their web page. Hell, I learned about OpenOffice from school myself. It's a great place to spread awareness of this Office alternative.
OO.o loads in 4 seconds on my Athlon 1400 on Slackware 9. If you haven't tried version OpenOffice.org 1.l yet, it's highly suggested. There are so many improvements to it, it's hard to believe it's the same program. Not only is it *much* faster, but there are lots of enhancements to features and such. I love the new "Export to PDF" feature (no worries about someone viewing a file intact). The UI is faster. Everything has improved greatly.
If OO.o keeps on getting this much better with each release, it's soon going to become that greatest Office program around (sadly, it's still lacking database software, unless you count StarOffice's ADABAS package). I've already shown a few people the greatness of OO.o. Many people that I know have switched to OO.o from expensive commercial products.
Bullshit - straight from Abiword - it is not yet ready for the real world of everyday business users.
/ Fa qMicrosoftWordDocuments
.rtf with a .doc extension to exploit a mis-feature of MS-Word. Yes, this is cheating, but it is better than nothing and almost nobody will notice.
http://www.abisource.com/twiki/bin/view/Abiword
Presently, AbiWord can open basic Microsoft Word documents well.
However, if the document has complicated tables, embedded spreadsheets, and so forth, then it might not work as expected. Developing good MS Word filters is a very difficult process, so please bear with us as we work on getting Word documents to open correctly. If you have a Word document which fails to load, please open a Bug and include the document so we can improve the importer.
AbiWord can currently save in the MS Word ".doc" format, but by doing this you only save in
Adabas is just a database backend and not very important, though I admit it would be nice to bundle one of the existing open source backends just to remove the need to fetch and install one.
Backends that are currently supported by both StarOffice and OpenOffice include MySQL, Postgress, and any data source exposed by ODBC 3.0, JDBC, ADO, dBase, or if you want to go low tech flat CSV files.
When most people say they want an Access-like tool, they mean a frontend, something that OpenOffice and StarOffice already have.
To help you out, the main database section of OpenOffice.org has atips and tricks section.
Then, there are the forums that have some very interesting threads on the subject...
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
As recently as last weekend, I emerged abiword 2.0 (on my gentoo desktop), and tried to open my resume (in .doc format) that I've constantly been updating over the years.
Go to open it.. crash.
In addition, I was getting strange refresh issues with Abiword (had to scroll up and down the page to get it to properly display edited text - ie, deleted words werent getting deleted from the screen).
Yes Abiword is attractive-looking (way less visual clutter than alternative office suites), but because of the issues I described above, I won't be using it anytime soon.
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...