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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.

21 of 269 comments (clear)

  1. Birthday Wish by trippinonbsd · · Score: 3, Funny

    They should wish to lose some weight this year...

    1. Re:Birthday Wish by Doomrat · · Score: 4, Funny

      They should wish to lose some weight this year...

      Happy Girthday.

    2. Re:Birthday Wish by ducomputergeek · · Score: 2, Informative
      For once I wish people would keep things efficent. Just because we can make things bloated with everything under the sun doesn't mean we should.

      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.
    3. Re:Birthday Wish by 13Echo · · Score: 2, Informative

      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.

    4. Re:Birthday Wish by Spoing · · Score: 2, Informative
      ...sadly, it's still lacking database software, unless you count StarOffice's ADABAS package.

      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...

      ...such as this handy little link

      --
      A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
    5. Re:Birthday Wish by Bishop923 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Hey, a Jetta costs $15,000 vs the $80,000 of a Porsche 911, yet they can perform roughly the same function...

  2. A great service to OSS by SargeZT · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's nice to have a realistic alternative to MS Office. I've tried many OSS Office Alternatives, and this is by far the best of them all. Happy Birthday!

    --
    And why did you staple the trout to the RAM?
    1. Re:A great service to OSS by Trolling4Dollars · · Score: 2, Insightful
      I use Wordpad. Fast, stable, and has every fucking feature 99% of the population needs.

      I love pointing this out... the troll has a point. Most people don't need anything beyond simple text entry, spell checking, bold, italic and underline. When you write a paper for school or work, it's not supposed to be interesting looking, it's supposed to have CONTENT. That's what a lot of people seem to NOT understand these days. With all the options for fonts, graphics and color text, the message is getting lost in the medium.

  3. Re:And still no native OS X offering... by sould · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Still no native Aqua offering


    Time for you to start coding dude!


    Happy Birthday OO! You rock!

  4. Re:And still no native OS X offering... by Bishop923 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  5. Spread the word at your school or university by bigberk · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  6. Three cheers for by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Three cheers to SUN for being one of the few companies to "get" Free Software licensing. I think it was the then CEO, at a gnome confernce:
    "I have three letters to describe our licensing scheme: G - P - L!" [to much applause]

    Here's the original announcment.

    Ciaran O'Riordan

  7. Gift idea? by PissingInTheWind · · Score: 2, Funny

    Gift idea: give a copy of OpenOffice.org to your boss tomorrow.

    Yeah, I'll just burn the web site on a cdrom.

    --

    A message from the system administrator: 'I've upped my priority. Now up yours.'
  8. Re:It's been three years... by t_allardyce · · Score: 2, Interesting

    True but the latest release loads allot quicker, still makes me want to hit something though :( Apart from that its excellent, I dont even bother using pirate MS Office anymore!

    --
    This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
  9. Last night my Supervisor... by skank · · Score: 2, Funny

    was asking for a crack for MS Office, because his trial version was about to run out (I didn't even know MS Office had trial versions), so I sent him a link to OpenOffice.org. Today he came in and was extremely happy. He said it installed with no problems, let him open all of his existing .doc files, and the look and feel was easy to get used to. I work for a Cable ISP, and my Supervisor is one of those guys who gets nervous when you say IP address, so he's not very technically inclined... He was very impressed with thee software, and could not believe he got a free program to run on windows that did not turn his computer into a adware box. He said that if there were any complaints, it was that it would take a bit to learn the features provided by openoffice that are missing from that other office suite. All in all, he is a very happy man, and I'm happy, because it always helps to make your boss happy for a while. Thanks OpenOffice!

  10. Abiword experiences from last weekend. by harikiri · · Score: 2, Informative

    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...
  11. Great compliment by Microsoft by bogie · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,4149,1331169,00.as p

    "Addressing several thousand attendees at the Worldwide Partner Conference, he took a swipe at Linux, open source and StarOffice, saying, "they simply accept the view that what they have is good enough. That view does not foster innovation. Being where we were with Office 1997 is not good enough for us," he said."

    Microsoft admitting that OO is already equal to something they spent millions and millions on and also happens to be much more widely used than Office XP is the best thing they could have said.

    I mean that. Office 97 is still very popular. One of the biggest challenges MS has is moving people off that since many businesses find that Office 97 is all they need. The fact they think OO has met the quality level that most of world thinks is "good enough" is excellent news.

    Congrats to the OpenOffice.org team and thanks to Microsoft for the marketing material.

    --
    If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
  12. I am downloading it now. by alfredo · · Score: 3, Funny

    You know I love them, I'm on a dial up connection.

    --
    photosMy Photostream
  13. Re:It's been three years... by Nephroth · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Simple, while open source code, garners stability from being examined and evolved by many programmers. GNU code has a nasty habit of picking up large numbers of undocumented and otherwise unecessary "features" that are conducive to its relative slowness. Also GNU is a broken Unix standard, things designed to the GNU specification are not necessarily compliant in Unix (which Linux does seek to replicate) Take a look at popular GNU applications such as EMacs, EMacs is quite possibly the largest simple text editor ever concieved, it is practically its own operating system and that's hardly necessary. EMacs is like using an atomic bomb to get rid of a tree stump. Like it or not, though Linux has a good deal of stability, it's quite sluggish in many aspects and will continue to be until some standardized Linux is created (IE Linus stepping forward and saying "this is Linux, all Linux has these" and sets forth a set of applications and features, the option to add more in various distros would still be there, but they would all be based off the standard)

    --
    Our greatest enemy is neither a single man, nor is it a nation, it is, as it has always been, our own greed.
  14. Re:People like it! by Daengbo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yeah, we just started distributing Windows versions of two Thai OO.o derivatives and Mozilla Firebird on the CD we give out free for our Gimp classes. The response was pretty good.

  15. Spreadsheet:s by Knights+who+say+'INT · · Score: 2

    As an academic economist that uses MS Excel and Maple on a regular basis for number crunching and data presentation, I'd say that Excel might be the only reason why I haven't either switched to [Free/Net/Open]BSD or to a Mac yet. Excel is an amazingly powerful tool for both business automation and statistical/econometric work. Have any among you switched from heavy Excel use to heavy OpenOffice work? How good is its set of readymade tools for statistic work (specifically, crunching up histograms from lists of data), numeric solving and graphs? Can it come up with candlestick charts, smoothened XY plotted charts, nonlinear regression on the charting GUI? Does it even have a correlation function? Excel goes as far as having a Beta function. I know most of those things can be easily written in a spreadsheet. Uh, I know some of these things can prolly be read on the documentation or just tried out, but I'm sure there are a lot of features I'm forgetting about. Unlike word processing (and I've given wysiwyg editors for LaTeX altogether), this is the kind of software where creeping feature-itis actually increases use value more than computer bloat. So, um, essentially, how have your switching experiences been with Excel and OO?