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Excellent Tutorial for OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X

Posted by pudge on from the for-those-of-you-who-are-in-offices dept.

Blano writes "Marc Liyanage recently posted a great article on getting up and running and optimizing OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X. He includes some tweaks and helpful configuration tips." Another option is getting the software on CD.

19 of 51 comments (clear)

  1. Open Office is a joke on the Mac by Romeozulu · · Score: 3, Informative

    Open Office on the Mac is a joke. It runs under X and looks like crap. I used Open Office on Windows and loved it, but refuse to use it on the Mac.

    I hope they plan on coming out with a "native" version sometime soon. I own a Mac because I love the interface, it's very hard to take 12 steps back and use this.

    1. Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac by gl4ss · · Score: 5, Informative

      * Open Office on the Mac is a joke*

      much of the point of this article is to guide on how to make it less of a joke and more of an usable tool.

      --
      world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
    2. Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac by Taran · · Score: 5, Informative
      So why is it that OpenOffice for Aqua is so far off? Come on people- stop bitching, step up to the plate!

      The OpenOffice team is redoing their internal APIs for version 2.0 - the Mac porting team would be wasting their time porting a deprecated version. You can find more at the OOo Mac port site.

    3. Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac by grrrl · · Score: 4, Informative
      Word is the only MS app I'm hanging onto, and I have no use for Excel.
      being in a scientific field I find that Excel is worth the MS-infection on my machine. It really is a superior spreadsheet program (anyone ever tried appleworks? what a joke! its a wordprocessor with boxes). I use MS word occasionally for typing up letters (and opening email attachments!) but for reports I use latex (via TeXshop) so appleworks word probably would do for me if I only bought excel (but its cheaper to get the lot)

      as far as keynote goes, I think it was such a great improvement over powerpoint at the time, but the non-existent development since then is going to leave it way behind - I know a lot of people use it and love it, but if they dont fix the printing/pdf options and add some extra stuff it will die - powerpoint already has copied all the great stuff keynote offers (well, i assume it has, except maybe "cube" transistions) and noone who hasnt yet switched ever will. its sad. (i also love the drag and drop pdf capability but i think this is more an aqua thing than a keynote thing..?)

      open office has never appealed to me (i installed it once... ) because i already paid for the excel package. like i said, i hardly use word processing and I have keynote, open office seems too clunky for the effort

    4. Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac by neillewis · · Score: 4, Informative

      Yes, the article is worth it just for the download link for a patched libfreetype for OS X that does reasonable quality anti-aliasing. Love it!

  2. NeoOffice/J ~= OpenOffice.org for OSX by numbski · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php

    Take a look. It works beautifully here. Takes a little longer than MS Office to load, but once it's loaded, it's wonderful.

    --

    Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).

  3. NeoOffice/J development status by JavaRob · · Score: 2, Informative

    Do you think it's ready for non-technical users yet?

    I got scared off a bit by the website's warnings like "it's really only a prototype" and "As this is a development project, NeoOffice/J is intended for software engineers and is not yet complete enough for regular users." (emphasis theirs).

    Personally, I don't mind working around some bugs and crashes here and there in exchange for cool new features, but my wife doesn't work that way.

    1. Re:NeoOffice/J development status by numbski · · Score: 2, Informative

      I think so, given a couple of things:

      1. Said non-technical user understands how a windows/x-windows style UI operates. Despite being 'native', instead of the menu being overlayed in the menubar, each window has it's own menu.

      2. User isn't scared off by the said application loading a bit slowly.

      --

      Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).

  4. Other stuff by Marc Liyanage by jpkunst · · Score: 4, Informative

    Marc Liyanage is a great asset to the Mac OS X community. Check out some of the Mac OS X packages he provides for several important Unix applications. Though not linked to from that page yet, he also has a PHP 5.0.1 package ready for Mac OS X. (Caution: link points directly to the .dmg file).

    JP

  5. OOo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think the best implemntation of OOo for OS X at this thimr is NeoOffice/J

    It still does not really look like a mac app, but it does behave like one. In comparison to the X11 version it has:

    - quartz text rendering
    - native key commands (like cmd-s and so on)
    - one application package
    - double clicking files works normally
    - no seperate launchers
    - no extra software required
    - native printer and font support ...etc

    neooffice/j makes a lot of Marc's suggestions obsolete. The only drawback of /j is that you need a few hundred mhz tor run it.

    1. Re:OOo by liyanage · · Score: 3, Informative

      NeoOffice/J is indeed *really* nice, I write that at the beginning of my article.

      However, the point is that it is based on an obsolete version of OpenOffice that will not run the ExtendedPDF macro. If you don't need that, then I would indeed suggest to use NeoOffice instead of X11-OpenOffice.

      Once, NeoOffice/J comes out based on the current OpenOffice, I will immediately switch to that myself...

  6. It works, but.. by T.Hobbes · · Score: 2, Informative
    I managed to install it and get it working, but the install is a little wierd: everything - libraries, executables, etc - is installed in the application's folder (i.e./Applications/OpenOffice/). Which is OK, but it kinda sucks in that none of the applications are (easilly) accessible from the command line. Also, when I started it from within gnome, it complained that
    Could not get value of CFPref AppleLanguages! Please reset your locale in the International control panel..

    Does anyone here know if there are other relases that work on OSX (perhaps a *BSD/PPC release?).

  7. Easy.. unless you're not using Panther... by uncleFester · · Score: 3, Informative

    If you're 10.2(.x) or earlier, you run into a bit of a roadblock at the X11 stage: Apple's X11 only works w/Panther. Anything earlier and you want to look for Fink and/or XDarwin. And have some alcohol handy.. it took me a little while to get X in place before the oO install.

    caveat - i'm playing with an iBook as a possible work-PC replacement, so though unix is my day job darwin/osX is new to me.. damn if it isn't cool as shizznitz though.

    -'fester

    --
    -'fester
    1. Re:Easy.. unless you're not using Panther... by grrrl · · Score: 3, Informative
      Apple's X11 only works w/Panther.

      unless they have broken it recently, I had apple's X11 working fine under jaguar, and it was a very simple install

      most of the issues with fink were pre-"apple X11" where you had a few choices for X, but I assume most people now just use the apple x11 as it is the easiest to install and deal wtih

    2. Re:Easy.. unless you're not using Panther... by peretzpup · · Score: 3, Informative

      Apple has stopped distributing the X11 beta that runs on Jaguar and forbids others from distributing it. See their X11 faq.

  8. Nice Article, but... by Harold+of+the+Rocks · · Score: 2, Informative

    "My reason for looking into this was that I need to produce long technical documents as PDF files."

    Why not just use LaTeX? Since PDF is native to Mac, PDFLaTeX seems (to me) to be the best solution. I've been using TeXShop for a few years now and have really enjoyed it. Sure, you don't get the GUI of an Office "suite", but I think the results speak for themselves.

    --
    bueller...bueller...bueller
    1. Re:Nice Article, but... by liyanage · · Score: 3, Informative

      "Why not just use LaTeX?"

      I didn't want to. I wanted a GUI environment with WYSYWIG rendering. I really want to see what I'm working on, that's a matter of personal preference. I don't want to look at my document in markup source code, I want to work on it the way it looks on paper.

      And some of the users who will use the inhouse templates I've created will not want or be able to learn LaTeX.

      As for the results speaking for themselves, that's exactly why I created this setup. The results are astonishing and they closely adhere to our corporate design guidelines.

  9. It needs to be OSX native... by analog_line · · Score: 2, Informative

    ...before my customers will even consider throwing Office away, and trust me, they REALLY want to, with the raft of problems that it creates daily for just about all of them.

    However, those problems pale in comparison to the issues that these decidedly non-technical people will have in trying to use the horrendously awful X-based interface. I'm having enough trouble getting them able to operate OSX without having a fit of panic every 10 minutes because it doesn't work like OS9. I don't need them getting even more confused with all the X requirements of Open Office.

    Yeah, Open Office is great. I use it on my Windows and Linux installs, and recommend it to my Windows-using customers. However until they get it native, unless someone makes a special request I'm not going to bother further confusing my Mac customers with it.

    1. Re:It needs to be OSX native... by norkakn · · Score: 2, Informative

      the native version should be out in 2005. Yeah, its a while, but it's free (-: