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OpenOffice.org Is 4 Today
craigaa writes "OpenOffice.org turns four years old today.
A press release on the announce list giving an overview of the project has been issued with a link to the birthday page. What have your experiences been with OpenOffice.org over the past four years? Has the project and software met your expectations? What are you expecting in the years to come?"
An interview at NewsForge (also part of OSTG) poses the same kind of questions (and others) to Louis Suarez-Potts, the project's Community Manager. Suarez-Potts notes some specific ways to help the OO.org effort (especially if you are a Cocoa expert to help with the move to Aqua), and talks about the recent Sun-Microsoft agreement.
What have your experiences been with OpenOffice.org over the past four years?
I carefully considered its monolithism and decided to use lighter tools such as Abiword...
But I am glad that OOo exists because it's still a nice Free Trojan when it comes to infiltrating corporations with Free Software, so, Happy Birthday, OOo !!!
Trolling using another account since 2005.
And looking like a mature 40 year old.
Guess thats what comes of learning from 'others'!!!
Will OOo outlive M$O?
.... The spreadsheet native format takes an age to save. Writer is way too slow on my P266 laptop. Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre. Presenter is a pain. They've even managed to clone Clippy, with an annoying lightbulb thing that gives you pointless advice. (Oh, and the help system for that advice takes an age to load.)
BUT it allows me to use Linux on the desktop, and for that I am truly grateful.
My experience with it is that it segfaults opening the one Word document that I need to edit on a regular basis. Office XP Pro and Office 2003 Pro handle the document just fine though.
Oh, I guess you meant what positive comments do we have with this product... well, it sort of renders most Word documents half-way decently, although checkboxes and such look like crap compared to the real Word from Microsoft. Basically it's a usable free word processor, but it's definitely no Office 2003 replacement.
It really isn't Word. I use it in our cybercafe, and we have endless compatibility problems, plus the delightful feature whereby saving an OO document as a .doc and loading it straight back into OO often adds spurious bulletpoints everywhere. The PDF exporter prints the footers in the middle of pages... As a way of opening the occasional Word document or typing a letter, it's fine, but anyone who says it's a drop-in replacement for Word is not using many of the Word features.
Wasn't it Linus who said that the open source model works better for OSs than for WPs?
Virtually serving coffee
I created some a couple of years ago and they worked quite well in writer. Efforts to import those bindings in recent versions have failed.
How about some official support?
Big complaint, eh? Openoffice rocks.
It's great, except there's no good way to change the starting page number. Unless the starting page doesn't exceed the length of the document, you have to force a page to do it, so if you have any serious editing left to do, you have to edit it without the actual page numbers if the document is part of a larger project (e.g. a dissertation chapter). This is quite ridiculous and I just can't understand why it hasn't been done better.
I have gone without using Microsoft Office, and have not missed it one bit. OO.org is simply that good. I now prefer it to MS Office when I am forced to use it at work.
Thanks, OO.org!
It was about 3 years ago that I decided to totally drop Word and start using OO's Writer instead. And writing/editing is my profession. In all these years, I haven't had any client/editor tell me they had a problem loading my OO-produced documents, which I regularly export into various Word version formats.
What does this have to do with OOo ? Well, I like OOo, and use it on my Mandrake/KDE box at home. For future features/direction, I'd suggest that rather than adding in yet another additional funky feature that less than 1% of people will ever find/use, I'd ensure rock solid filters to import/export from MS Office. I still find OOo's ability to handle complex MS Word docs poor (tables, inline graphics, etc) and this is an issue preventing me completely moving across to Ooo. Some things are great - PDF creation, for example, is a killer feature for me. But rock solid MS Office import/export would be sooooo useful.
And yes, I do appreciate that it is difficult, given the lack of open specs from MS, and the fact that the format themselves is such a messy PITA.
Iain.
OOo is solid, and it's free. This is good. It's also a great big resource-hungry lump. This is not good. I'd love to see the applications separated, kinda like Firefox and Thunderbird, so there's no need to install the spreadsheet if all you want is the word processor.
That would be nice...
As a Linux user in a corporate world full of Windows site licenses, is it possible to make it easy for OO.o users to take advantage of the Windows fonts for which they already paid?
Not a 12 step program involving grungy details of xset fp , but something in the form of an easy script that looks around and automatically does the Right Thing.
Powerpoint presentations are decipherable under OO.o, but frequently look ugly, mostly from the font problem.
OO.o has gotten a lot better over the past few years; I'm looking forward to it improving even more.
[But I still think a cross-platform, SVG+MathML editor with TeX-like math rendering would be a nice way to publish both web and paper documents, much better than the WYSIWYG word processors most people abuse.]
"Provided by the management for your protection."
I would love to try this on mac. Will 2.0 work natively with on OS X with an aquified GUI?
The Open Office software is OK, but what I actually have high hopes for is the parts of Open Office that's not just code, i.e. stuff like thesauruses, dictionaries, determining prefixes and suffixes, and so on.
In short: I have hopes for this part of OpenOffice, since I can see that it can become incredibly useful for other kinds of applications, search applications especially.
Open Source search implementations are held back because they know little or nothing about grammar or common spelling errors, and until they do they will never get the same quality as Google or Fast's products.
And OpenOffice still as slow.
Go Abiword, Gnumeric!
One of the birthday gifts: The Defence Ministry of Singapore installs Open-Office in 5,000 new computers as an alternative to proprietary software
And if OpenOffice started getting reasonable Word and Excel filters, it might actually become useful.
Now now, very few four year olds can read. Wait until it's 7, then if it still can't read we can talk about remedial education.
--
What would it take?
Now I know of a birthday gift I got four years back and like a nice bottle of wine keeps getting better each year :)
I have a client who uses Excel extensively. They've built a spreadsheet that they've been steadily adding to over the past year. Yesterday, Excel just rolled over and died on them. This was a 6,000+ row spreadsheet with formulas, various flavors of highlighting, etc. that contained a year's worth of data. I don't know how they managed to save it, but if you tried to open it with Excel you'd get the friendly(?) "Microsoft Excel has encountered a problem - do you want to send a bug report to Microsoft?"
.csv then back again as a .xls would fix it, but this time I couldn't even open the file. I figured it was toast.
:-). It opened just fine. I saved it as an Excel 95 format document, then tried opening it from Excel. It opened just fine.
They were desparate: they (of course) had no backup except for the original source data, meaning it would take them days to re-assemble the spreadsheet. They asked me to "fix it." I had had problems like this in the past, and usually saving the file as a
Then I tried OO.o. I opened it with "Spreadsheet" (offtopic aside - part of me wishes the OO.o guys had more clever names for their components, and part of me is glad they don't waste their mental energy on such trivialities
I'll never get my client to move to OO.o (they are a 10+ year Excel user and are basically computer illiterate and petrified of ANY kind of change), but it's nice to have it as a tool that actually works for those times when Microsoft falls down on the job.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
OO.o works. I'm used to MSWord at work, and transitioning to OO writer is painful. It is about learning curve, not capabilities. I can do most things, but when I try some more complex things (e.g. sections) I cause myself pain.
I've never had a problem with basic spreadsheets. It does everything I need (which isn't much).
I use the presenter all the time. The only glitches have been in converting a ppt to it. For creation and display, it is great.
It isn't MS Office. Get over it. There is a learning curve to it, just like any other transition. It does what most people need. It does what *I* need.
If only they could get a database program with a decent front end. I ended up "finding" access because I couldn't get a free alternative for some fairly trivial stuff.
I simply love OpenOffice.org. It's probably one of the best things happening to the open source community in the last years.
;-D
And I'm always amazed at how good it actually is, it's more than enough for all I'm doing and I'm constantly discovering cool new things and the best thing, it keeps getting better and better. (I'm really looking forward to OOO-2.0)
Again, congratulations and if my post sounds like it was written by a fanboy, that's because it was written by a true fan.
Keep up the good work guys.
From the article:
Our Mac OS X build is fantastic, and I use it every day, for articles, presentations, spreadsheets. It never crashes, and it allows me to work with my Linux and Solaris colleagues while maintaining my Mac glow of happiness. It's entirely community built, the work of Ed Peterlin, Dan Williams, Kevin Hendricks, Eric Hoch, Terry Teague, Patrick Luby, and many others (all of whom have day jobs). It runs in X11, in a way that is very elegant and very pleasing to the eye. The job they have done is truly brilliant. The next step is to make the build run natively in Aqua. However, moving to the Aqua interface is an enormous undertaking.
It sure is. I want to take this opportunity to congratulate the openoffice.org team, but also to invite OS X developers (and users) to take a look at NeoOffice/J, an effort to port OO.o to OS X-- and make it look good, blue buttons and all.
The project basically has only three developers, but so far they have created an extremely stable office replacement that does NOT require X11. The latest addition-- Native menus.
Although the project is technically still in alpha mode, I know many people who use Neooffice/J for day-to-day use, including myself. (I'm probably not supposed to be saying that yet.. but it's true.) The project needs your support-- if you've got the skills and the resources, please come and help.
(For anyone who has used the OS X version of OO.o, Neooffice/J does not require X11 to be running.)
On the plus side, OpenOffice has gotten *much* faster since 1.0, and compatibility is remarkably good. I let my dad try OpenOffice about a month ago and he loved it and switched to it for all his office work.
However, on Linux, OpenOffice looks like *crap*. The interface doesn't match any other apps on my system. GTK apps look tight and clean, QT apps too. But OpenOffice doesn't even look "native" like it does on Windows. It has a look all its own, which is ugly, the widgets are not as responsive as GTK widgets, and it's quirky--especially with respect to input methods, such as Japanese. If they simply used a toolkit such as GTK, they would have *proper* Japanese input, a consistent, clean, customizable interface, and access to any future GTK features.
Dr Superlove 300ml. I use my powers for awesome
I can't see a reason to use OOo except when you feel the need to have a million "collaboration"/"compatibility" features (in which case your time is better spent on the guaranteed compatibility of Word proper with erm.. Word files) and when you have some dislike of Microsoft - strong enough that you refuse to spend the initial outlay on the Word license to make up for the number of problems you'll have in using feature-filled Word files.
Fill in similar for other componenets.
OpenOffice is what I use whenever other people pick up word, excel or the other ms crap.
Funny thing is, at first the MS junkies tried to put me down (even OO does have it's problems, you know). After a while, though, they started coming over, especially after using it for a while.
I don't use word often, except when forced to at work. Every time I cringe about one of its billion bugs or quirks, I find that OO did the same thing properly, and I rejoice.
OO isn't without problems, but it's worth a try and so far none of the people I convince to try have gone back to the MS crap.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I rely heavily on MS Office for my day job - but I run OOo almost exclusively for personal stuff. I love being able to edit docs on the nearest unix/windows box without worrying which platform I am dealing with.
....
Before reading the following you must understand that I have 17 years experience working with C on UNIX variants. Please do not underestimate my intelligence due to
The biggest feature I would like to see would be tools more similar to Excel VBA. It would be nice to move macros and non-trivial VBA code, not to mention leverage existing skills in VBA.
KK4SFV
I've always used StarOffice/OO.o
I love it. Everytime I have to use M$O in school, I cry for my OO.o
I'm going to go create my own technology news site, with blackjack and hookers. You know what? Forget the news site.
While current Mac/OSX support is decent (you have to use it under X11, but there's easy to use startup scripts for that), I'd love to see a true Mac version. I've been using OOO on my Ubuntu box for a while and found no problems with it for general WP and spreadsheet usage, and I use it on my Mac regularly (mostly with MS Word docs from the office). I enjoy it and think that for a four-year-old product it's a shining example of OpenSource.
I converted all computers in my house to *BSD several years ago. My wife and I, as well as our two kids use it. It meets my needs fairly well [no microsoft products, ability to do simple word processing].
For my wife's thesis, however, I prefer LyX. It takes a little getting used to, but the results are great.
Bottom line: it's not as bad as AbiWord, yet [and I really hate to say this] it's not yet as functional as Word.
*However*, WordPerfect 12 is out, and who knows, maybe there will be a new Linux version of that some day. . .
The last time I used OO.org, I lost hours of work from a crash. I found it horribly slow on a 1.4ghz system with half a gig of ram. And as mentioned in the first post, "Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre."
I would not recommend OO over Microsoft Word, and that's a bummer because I hate still having to rely on Windows just for word processing (fortunately, however, I don't do a lot of word processing.)
I realize it's free software, and being what it is, they've certainly come a long way. However, I often see comments along the line of people suggesting average users should/could start replacing Windows with Linux and OO.org.
AFAIC, it's a great project, but it's just not ready for prime time yet.
-kidlinux.
that's what Miguel de Icaza said about OO...
now I think open sourced operating systems, desktops, email clients and browsers are far more important than office suites.
we may discuss if OO is the most important open sourced office suite, but hey... that's it.
Overall, I like the concept of OO.o. We need an alternative to Office, and I think it shows real promise.
/net) switch, then, after doing the main installation, run the install for every user? I've been waiting for this to be fixed, but it never has. I work on computers every single day, and this really discourages me from using OpenOffice. I can easily see this frustrating a casual user to no end. Why the hell can't the installer deal with this on its own? And God forbid that this should be documented on an install screen. I tried to write up a simple installation instruction sheet for people at work, but I finally gave up after realizing that passing out the program in this form would just create more problems and support issues for me. Come on guys, if you want to develop a program that normal, everyday users will adopt, then you have to make it easy for normal, everyday users to install.
Having said that, however, there are some things that really bug me about the suite. First, and this is a big one, installing it in multi-user mode on a Windows 2000 or XP machine is way too cumbersome. Why the hell do I have to use a command line with that -net (or is it
Other than that, I like the program. It feels a little sluggish, but I'm hoping this will improve in 2.0.
Happy Birthday! I would sing the song, but... you guessed it http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2003/7/5/112441/6280
I wrote a novel in OO.org. Very pleasant experience. I use it all the time in the office and at home.
I would love to be able to plug in an xml validator. I'd pay for that. It makes me wish my programming skills were good enough to help out!
You know what I miss? Leeches.
I love openOffice.org, but...
I wish they would stop just copying Microsoft Office. There is lots of innovation still to be done in the office suite and openOffice is where it should be happening. I don't want more features, I want well designed user interfaces. They should take a leaf out of the Firefox team's book.
When OOo first came out, I was working for a certain competitor to MS's office suite. As soon as the program managers found out about it, they were in a tizzy. "How will we sell our product if they're just giving their's away for free?"
:-)
I calmly invited them to my office and showed them OOo (which they hadn't bothered to look at before). They said, "Man, that sucks. Phew, I guess we don't have to worry".
To which I replied, "We don't have to worry right now, but give it 4 or 5 years and we will probably have a lot of problems". They didn't believe me (in the proprietary world, when software sucks it stays sucky because fixing sucky software is considered unprofitable).
It's now 4 years later and I no longer work for that company. I will enjoy seeing how OOo competes with them
A few years ago I was rebuilding my (Windows) PC and was particularly annoyed at Microsoft for one reason or another so I installed StarOffice instead of MS Office.
It was pretty functional, ended up using it exclusively for a few months. The mail client sucked and I was ending up using Outlook Express (which also sucks) for E-Mail. The Mail client was dropped when StarOffice more or less became OpenOffice.
I ended up installing Outlook for E-Mail and not long after ran into some problem (which admittedly I can't remember now) that forced me to install MS Office 2000 and I never switched back.
I still use a few spreadsheets that I created in StarOffice, they work fine in MS Office.
IMO OpenOffice is probably fine for most people , it's existance is most definitely a good thing.
I enjoy using Openoffice, but the spellchecker frustrates me to know end.
Maybe by the time it turns 10, has finished grade 4/5, it will know better spelling and grammar.
OO is not Word, but if my daughter needs something to write school reports on that doesn't cost me more money, it fits the bill perfectly. Plus it does a decent job of making PDFs to boot, which again means I save money! I use Word for work, but where there's no need for Word specifically OO is a very good value. Not only that, OO has pushed down the price of Word, which means I save money at work too! And beyond money, I can load it or reload it on as many machines as I need to. OO has come a long way since the StarOffice days! Happy Birthday OO!
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Thanks to OpenOffice.org, The Mozilla Foundation, and Gaim, the only Microsoft software running on many of the computers I've built for family and friends has been the OS, and maybe the odd game or two.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Excellent point, you should get modded up. I use the PDF export functionality nearly everyday. I love it and the problems that the gradnparent mentions I've never seen. Maye he's using an old version, or maybe there is something different if you don't use native formats. All I know is that I stick with the OASIS format for all my document writing and editing. Thats what OOo was designed for and thats what I'll use it for. Because of that (using OOo with the format it was *intended* to use) I never experience any of the problems other people complain about and it lets me use and save some of OOo's more advanced features that MS Word doesn't have. People need to start using OOo the way it was meant to be used. The MS Word import features was not designed to be an "end all be all" kind of thing, but rather a stepping stone in your transition to an open format.
Regards,
Steve
Writer: Excellent set of features, more than I would ever need to compile a report. However, the spellcheker (yeah my spelling sux) could use some speed. Whenever I right click on an underlined (misspelled) word, Writer kinda gets sluggish and hangs for a while. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?
Calc: The same as Writer, tons of features, excellent set of tools. This is my new Excel.
Impress: I never used Power Point. I never had to prepare presentations for that matter. But this day, I am creating one small presentation and I find it as user friendly as a presentation software could get.
In case anyone is wondering, Open Office has everything you would need in an office suite. If Microsoft Office is stopping you from switching to Linux, then take a look again!
This is my sig. There are thousands more, but this one is mine.
I does excactrly what I was hoping it would do for me: Print out the lab reports that are only available for downlaod from the college's (a CUNY school)chemistry department website. They are only available in .doc format, and Abiword would choke on even the simplest lab tables. OpenOffice handles the tables, charts and equations fine.
.doc was properly documented as some sort of standard. Here's wishing that .swx becomes ISO!
Thank You OO, you saved me numerous trips to the overcrowded computer lab!
P.S. I'm sure Abiword would have worked if the
Is anybody actually working on the grammar checker component? My understanding was that it was an area nobody had decided they were willing to put the time in to complete.
I just love that double entendre
Now do I get to hit the server 4 times?
I own Microsoft Office for both Mac OS X and Windows, but I prefer the relative simplicity and "not in your face" style of OOo. The OOo technical drawing program is also very nice to use.
I especially like how simple it is to parse OOo document files (just open a gzip input stream, run through a SAX parser, and grab what you need).
For Mac OS X, I also like the NeoOfficeJ package: OOo that uses Java to provide a native OOo application on OS X - really cool.
And there's a new version to celebrate: http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.3/index.html/
I was a starving graduate student (literally, my idiot advisor dropped my funding), and I couldn't afford a new word processor. This was terrible, as I had a lot of graphics in my dissertation that MS Word 97 COULD NOT HANDLE. OpenOffice to the rescue! I ended up writing my dissertation in OpenOffice, and my dissertation committee was none the wiser.
P.S. An undergraduate had introduced me to Slashdot at the same time, and that was basically my social life
The Death Penalty: Killing people to show others that killing people is wrong.
Why not return it to the client in OOo format complete with an install disk for OOo, and say "I recovered it into a more stable format - OpenOffice" ;-)
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
I find these WYSIWYG text editors a pain.. I certainly stay away from MS Office, because I don't want my data locked in, but OOo is not as user friendly as I would like it..
1) I want to put a page index in document.. Took me forever to figure it out. It's not explained in the Help text or details are sketchy. So I figure out it's locked to a text style. I'd rather insert a token or something that means 'This is the next chapter'. Oh well..
2) So I insert the automatic index creating token thingy.. I want it to start at the top of the page, but there's an empty line in front of it.. I cannot remove it with backspace or delete.. I have to go to the previous page and push delete there.. Ye gods!
3) So I see there's a style that draws a box around text. Neat! So I do that, but the box is stretched to the right end of the page, not at the end of the actual text.. I haven't figured out how to do this yet.
4) So I see you can insert clickable URLs in the text.. nice.. So I do that, start type right after that.. Euhm.. I'm adding text to the URL. No! I want to write normal text now! Only work around I found was to cursor ahead, insert extra spaces and then backspace until I hit the end of the link, cursor right one, and start typing normal text again.. EASE OF USE! Argh!
5) So I want to print an envelope.. the envelope goes in the printer 90 degrees turned. HOWEVER, I want to type my stuff normally. There is NO option to rotate when you want to print. MS Office HAS this option.
When I want to do something I run into these little gripes again and again.. It's crappy! This is why I still type my stuff in ASCII! How about adding a 'suggestion' button to every control, like the early beta's of Windows XP, so I can communicate all of these little gripes to the OOo developers so that the product gets fixed?
Ooo developers, contact me if you want your product beta-tested! I see tons of things that can be improved!
Last year I had a hard drive crash shortly after heading up to school for the year. I had to start over with a completely new system, reinstalling everything... and discovered that I had left my Office CDs at home, with a paper due the next week. So I installed OpenOffice as a stopgap measure, figuring that I'd write this paper with it and then retrieve my Office CDs when I went home for Thanksgiving.
It's been more than a year now, and still I've had no need to reinstall MS Office. OpenOffice does everything I need it to.
"Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself." -Richard Feynman
Partner/Invest/whatever to get OO.o running native with Aqua under Apple OS X.
Why?
Because this is a user group that:
(1) has a proven track record of going against the trend
(2) has gotten a great deal of attention in the same 4 years for their movements towards opensource development & compatibility
(3) would be a customerbase with proven record of paying a prmium for good products
(4) is outspoken and
(5) is known for setting trends inthe industry
With these benefits, OO.o would generate both revenue and critical market mass to gain momentum in the land of Linux and pentially even move in on Microsoft's Windows.
Without making a strong showing in the Apple OS X landscape, it is my opnion that OO.o will continue to make marginal strides (yes, I give them a "good" rating on a scale of "failing", "marginal", "good", "very good", "excellent", and "market leading") and will eventually make a couple or three desprate calls for donations before being bought and turned into a marginal product or dispanding as anything other than a weekend hacker effort.
I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
It does. Runs Great.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
A bit slow at startup, but fast enough then. Can't remember last time it failed to open a MSOffice file, something I do regulary. More than enough features for me. I wish it could import WordPerfect files, Abiword can. Thank you Sun for making it OpenSource, thank you OOo team for improving it to the current level.
I think you are a karma whoring, astro turfing liar. There is no way that you had a perfect experience 3 years ago, or even now. OO has serious problems with Word interoperability and anybody who has actually tried it would know that. But hey, you know how to appeal to slashdots soft underbelly so bully for you.
I had three requirements for a word-processor last year: the ability to easily add complex formulae, the ability to save or export to a near-universal file format, and a price tag of 0. Open Office matched all three.
Why is anything anything?
Is the grey shading around bullets. It looks so horrible it's embarassing. I use it almost exclusively for desktop use, and I have used the API quite extensively (which is really nice).
Still, I cannot believe that the bulleting has that god awful shading. It's absolutely horrible and a disgrace.
The Mac support for OOo1.1.2 is great although it requires X11 to be running. Not that big a deal, since it's on the Panther XCode install CDs. And if you don't want that running, NeoOffice/J allows you to run OpenOffice.org1.1.2 without X11: http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php/
I also love the Forrest support:
http://forrest.apache.org/docs/oowriter.html/
(but beware that if you delete a style from the sample OOoWriter file, you can't get it back...)
As a C++ developer I have found OOo to be pretty useless as an open-source project.
It uses all its own frameworks and conventions, so it is innaccesible.
If it used the STL, Qt, GTKmm, wxWindows, then I would know where to start with the code.
It would be really great if one of the cross-platform frameworks (GTKmm, wxWindows, FOX, the Mozilla runtime) could get the extra boost of having OOo run on it. That might consolidate effort around one of them. And it would be nice to be able to write an application (eg. an xml editor) on the same 'platform' as OOo.
How about AbiWord? What libraries does it use?
My experience with OpenOffice is almost all on Windows. Occasionally some interface item will bug me, but I can accept that I'm just used to doing it the MS Office way. What is most disappointing is the speed.
Speed to start, open a file, save a file, and perform certain operations is painfully slow compared to Office. I've played with the 1.9.51 branch a bit, and it doesn't seem 2.0 is going to be enough of an improvement to compete with Microsoft on the speed front.
I used to think that Moore's law will take over, but I'm now using a brand new P2.8 with 1 Gig of RAM at work, and after editing a presentation file with some large images I couldn't edit a slide with only text (don't ask me what OpenOffice was doing in the background with those pictures - it couldn't be autosave, since the problem was constant). I also used to think that OpenOffice should keep adding new features (e.g., macro recorder, which is in 1.9.51), but now I wish they would just optimize the hell out of it and add no new features for a while.
Perhaps it doesn't feel as slow on Solaris or Linux, but I doubt it - my Linux machine is pretty anemic, but it used to run Office reasonably when it had Windows on it. Now I don't even try to use OpenOffice on it as it is unbearable. When Koffice becomes file compatible, I may try to use that program on this machine.
The two free cross-platform software projects I use most are OpenOffice and Mozilla (Seamonkey or Firefox). Of course Mozilla's task is completely different, but it works reasonably fast compared to Internet Explorer (faster with some tasks, slower with others). I look forward to the day I can say the same thing about OpenOffice.
Dara
...and still no native MacOS X version
I wonder how many MacOS X apps were written in the time it's taken Sun to get even this far?
I indeed wrote such as Abiword (with a link which should have been toward this site).
I used Abiword under both BeOS and OSX where these fit nicely.
Anyway I do not use it intensively as I now work using the Latex port for OSX link, link and link...
Trolling using another account since 2005.
My experience has been great. Maybe it will open soon and I can do a more complete review!!!
Knightfall
The spreadsheet native format takes an age to save. Writer is way too slow on my P266 laptop. Menus are unintuitive, user interface design is lacklustre. Presenter is a pain. They've even managed to clone Clippy, with an annoying lightbulb thing that gives you pointless advice. (Oh, and the help system for that advice takes an age to load.) (Emphasis mine.)
So... You have an old and MHz-challeneged laptop, most likely with an aged 4500RPM ATA-33 or -66 hard drive - and you are grumbling about speed? Hmmm.
Before anyone starts thinking "troll" or "flamebait", I have (and still do) run Linux on an old PII-266 ThinkPad 600 with 288MB RAM. Yes, it's slow - but with specs like that one must expect a graphical office suite to be slow. It seems a bit inappropriate to blame the slugishness solely on the suite.
I want to drag this out as long as possible. Bring me my protractor.
OpenOffice is great, I use it all the time for my reports or whatever, but it REALLY does need to go more modular. Compilation takes about 16 hours on my laptop, and requires a very old version of gcc. (even the ximianized version)
:-)
I am a gentoo ppc user though (no binary packages for me) so it might just all be my fault
ive spent all afternoon so far (its 4:20pm here - uk) emergeing open office, does this mean theyre goin to release a new bloody version?
At least some hackers! Two years ago I recommended that a cash-strapped startup use OO on low-end Window machines they had leased since they did not want to buy MS Office. After two weeks of giving it a sincere try (these were biochemists, nanotechs, and such) they decided they could afford MS Office, after all! Complaints were: too slow, not compatible enough, raised the level of profanity in the office, and caused them to stomp up and down and smash treasured possessions. OO has improved a lot. It is faster now. It is more compatible now. But I think MS still regards it as more of a sales tool on Windows than competition! On Linux and FreeBSD it is a very different story. OO is definitely in the running there for ubiquity, distro-upgrade support, completeness of features, and ease of use.
Happy birthday Open Virus.
And thanks again for corrupting my word docs and spreadsheets!
FUCK YOU SLASHDOT
Well, I've been using OO for a long, long time. Actually, since before it was OpenOffice, back in the StarOffice 5 days. It used to be almost entirely unusable. Now it's good enough to limp on. It keeps getting better...
I completely defenestrated over 2 years ago at both home and work, and this is one of the pillars holding that up. I use it almost every day; mostly on documents I created, but also a good chunk of time on .doc and .xls files. I have occasional problems...either someone's .doc file gets misformatted (or, very rarely, won't open) or I hear that a document I sent doesn't look right. It doesn't happen often, and when it does I typically just save to .rtf or something to get around it. I also send out all contracts and things that the recipient won't need to edit (and shouldn't!) in .pdf instead. That solves a lot of the display issues. Only maybe once or twice in the last year have I been forced to get a document over to one of my co-workers Windows machines...highly embarrassing, that. But then, I've been asked to untar something more often than that ;-)
But compatibility isn't my main OpenOffice gripe. Editing is a pain in the ass. Autocomplete will fight you to the death, the onscrean display of text frequently just goes "all weird" so my cursor is away from where the text is appearing and there are blank spots and lines sometimes get crunched together (but these problems don't appear in the printed document). And what's with the text just randomly changing font size while I'm not looking? I can usually force it back to what I want...but man, what a pain in the ass.
So, in summation, I hate OpenOffice. But I absolutely can't live without it. Which makes it pretty much exactly like every single other Office suite I've ever had to use regularly. Somebody mentioned at some point that a piece of software doesn't need to be the best thing out there to be successful...just good enough and cheap. Well, OpenOffice fits the bill for me.
Given a choice between free speech and free beer, most people will take the beer.
I use OO because, frankly, I'm too cheap/poor to buy MS Office. But OO works fine for me. Sure, import/export can be a bit dicey at times. Sure it's a little quirky. But it gets the job done. I do have a list of things that should be changed. But number 1change , top 'o the list, why the heck does it do that, is deleting stuff in calc. What's up with the dialog box? Just clear the contents! Makes me think of buying Excel every time (which could be many times per hour). Oh, and drag and drop. Oh, and .....
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I'm a Technical Writer (well, in theory; about 60% of the time I'm a web developer) and I love OpenOffice.org.
It simply does everything that I need it to do. It does it well. Compared to Word, it has rock-solid stability (I know, some standard ...). It has some very useful and obvious features built in, like direct export to PDF (and for presentations, direct export to Flash).
The compatibility issue is largely a red herring. First, a Word file is basically a memory dump of Word. It's amazing that anything can read it or convert it at all. If an organization chooses to use OpenOffice, then obviously passing files around internally presents no compatibility problem. I suspect that very few organizations really need to pass around source files to and from the outside, and those that do could keep a copy of Word on hand for just those occasions.
Having said that, reading my own text I see that I exaggerated the compatibility issue. For most documents there simply isn't one.
I'm not blind to the fact that some places have huge heaps of custom VBA code. Heck, I have some pretty fancy macros myself. But in X-thousand seat organizations, how many really use those apps? And if the number is high, wouldn't a web app make more sense? The decision is individual, but I have a feeling that it's not often made rationally.
I've been using OpenOffice ever since I've moved exclusively to Linux on the desktop. For me at least, Linux is "good enough" already so that its benefits (flexibility, easy software installations/updates, security) outweigh the few downsides (less polished, not being able to run Windows programs).
.doc files online of handouts instead of something a little more universal like PDF's/RTF's, but I'm managing fine as it is. In a few areas, such as being able to export to PDF, OO even outshines its rival.
But one thing that's always struck me about both OO and the Linux operating system is that it's always getting better. Right now I'm using Debian, and with its excellent package management it's quite easy to always have fairly current (or trade whiz-bang for stability if that's your thing) software packages. Every time I move up an incremental upgrade of OO, i notice a few improvements here and there. Same with all the shiny GUI tools, KDE gets better every time I upgrade.
I've used nothing but OO for all the lab reports and essays I've had to make over the past year and a half, and frankly I don't miss Word at all. It's annoying as hell when professors just post
Here's to another few years of the Linux desktop experience only getting better. Keep scratching those itches, developers.
http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
Instead of moldering on my hd, I put it up on my server here.
I was thinking of just uploading the sxw file but didn't want people new to OOo to wonder if it could carry a word-like macro virus (which I believe it cannot of course). The headings are:
INTRODUCTION
X INTERACTION / WINDOWING / FILE MANAGEMENT / DISPLAY / BASICS
TEXT BOXES
MENUS
HELP SYSTEM
OUTLINING
TABLES
Autocompletion / Autocorrection
FONT MENUS
FIND/REPLACE
STYLES
FEATURE REQUESTS
For what it's worth, lately I have been using OOo mainly in WindowMaker on RH9, on my Dell Inspiron 7.5K laptop in Japanese locale. Mostly recently for translating things from Japanese to English. I keep open 3 kterm shells, one to view a saved job request (converted with nkf -le to view in euc with more), one to run xjdic_sa which is a great dictionary, and one to save words I look up in a studylist in vi (though I am usually an XEmacs person). Sometimes also firefox, maybe jwpce under wine. Have to say copy/paste between apps sux, could use that applet from kde. Well that's about it for now. Can't tell you about printing since I don't have my brother MFC-410CN printer working yet under linux.
Hope this helps!
If OOo had perfect im/export for Word 2000 format, then at least anyone using real Word could read your documents with minimal hassle. It's an old format, MS can't change it - and they need to support reading it for a good few years yet. Many corporations are still using win2k, and office2k, so this would be a big help. And since OOo was founded in 2000, you'd think this would have been the format to aim for!
it sounds like a lot of the complaints here have to do with folks trying to go from Word to OO. i regularly write large complex technical documents with Sun's StarOffice and it works flawlessly. it may not have all of the bells and whistles of Word but who cares? i don't use all that crud anyway.
note that i have mostly used StarOffice on Solaris, but it seems unlikely tha the Solaris binaries are more stable than linux.
I've been using Open Office for a couple months now. I use it primarily to write papers for school, with the odd presentation every once in a while. It works ten times better than expected for a completely free suite meant to replace a $200 one. More worried than I am of it not performing I am of it being sold for a price. It's almost too good to be free.
I'm fine with the product itself. It has glitches and a gotchas but they will be ironed out and I can live with them.
What I really feel OO.o is missing is an abundance of quality templates, clipart, macros and sample documents.
This is what Microsoft is so good at. Every MS Office application has plenty of templates, examples etc. and tons more can be found at the MS Office website. And Im not talking about mediocre to fair user-submitted stuff, but templates from Microsoft.
This means that every MS OFfice application can be learned more quickly and professional results achieved sooner. Case in point: Start up MS Access, and it offers to create a household inventory database.
By comparison, Open Office offers nothing to talk about when you select File / New from template in any OO.o application.
A barebone "Recommendation of a strategy" and "Introducing a new strategy" is all you get.
ClipArt? Forget it.
What about downloading stuff from the OO.o site? Nope, a meagre selection of mediocre stuff.
What about other sites? There are a few, but nothing like Microsoft's Office galleery site. Most of it is mediocre, and you have to spend a lot of time surfing if you want to build a collection.
Now people, remember that Microsoft has a long-standing tradition of using documents and documentformats to build and sustain their monopoly. Well, *this* is how we counter that. Build quality templates and template-wizards using macros. New users evaluating OO.o should immediately find that they can easily produce the documents they need. Resumes, business letters, newsletters, spreadsheets, presentations.
We need to have clipart libraries as well. Font packages.
With all that, and the recent possibilities that OO.o document formats may become official standards and even used within the EU, we could really take some marketshare from Microsoft!
So I propose this:
Lets build a new OO.o resources portal, and make OO.o integrate and use it so users wont even have to download stuff - OO.o would do it for them.
Once such a site is up, start asking design professionals contribute with professional templates, samples etc.
How about a community pool of donated money specifically budgeted for synchronizing with MS Outlook? PalmOne has licensed the protocol, and they compete directly with MS PocketPC OS/SW. Any Microsoft denial of a license at that benchmarked price is obvious abuse of Microsoft's office SW/OS monopoly. And OO.o connection to that server can not only compete with MS Office, but offer leverage for other competition with Exchange, like Open-Xchange/SLOX/OpenGroupWare. Go get 'em, Junior!
--
make install -not war
It's a pretty faithful imitation of MS Office, both the good parts and the bad parts. Most of its limitations seem to be the result of trying to be compatible with MS Office. And, like Microsoft Office, it's a huge, C++ application suite, with all the problems that that entails.
Overall, between the two, I like OpenOffice slightly better than MS Office at this point: the UI makes more sense to me and was easier to learn, the file formats are actually usable and accessible with standard XML tools, and it has some functionality that I like that either doesn't exist in MS Office at all or requires an MS Office guru to find. I think people who claim that Microsoft's UI is better just happen to be more familiar with it.
Until some alternative approach to building office apps catches on, OpenOffice seems like it is a worthy competitor and will probably keep eating away at MS Office's marketshare. And whether OpenOffice is objectively slightly better or worse than MS Office, it is good enough for just about any application, and that is good enough--after all, Microsoft itself has demonstrated throughout its history that it isn't quality and features that count, it is being more widely available and cheaper than the other guys. And with OpenOffice 2.0, OpenOffice may actually so clearly beat MS Office both on features and usability that there won't even be a contest anymore on features and quality.
Well, I just finished writing a paper that's due today, so I'll have to say "thanks".
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
One reason only: EndNote, and its cite-as-you-write functionality. Indispensible for academic work for me at this point.
The MS Office suite always has and will continue to kick OOo's ass in terms of interface, features, usability, etc.
I have plenty of complaints about OpenOffice.org. But I'd still rather use it than MS Office.
still using WordPerfect 8? I still use WordPerfect 8 that I received with my box set of Red Hat 7.X. I might even still have a copy that came with Corel Linux way back when. No one ever mentions that Corel had produced a linux native version of WordPerfect that stood a very good chance of offering a viable alternative to MS Word. OOo is very good but I still think WordPerfect is far superior to OOo and MS Word.
funny that you mentioned that.
i wrote a draft of a paper recently and my supervisor demanded me to switch it over to MS Word so she could edit it. this is an electrical engineering paper. anyway, so i had to run the latex2rtf conversion. The conversion went well except whenever there were equations. Neither abiword nor openoffice writer were able to display all the equations. One software displayed some, some displayed the other.
and MS Word? it displayed NONE.
[tangent]She claims that it's more efficient to get work done with that format, which I think is complete bullshit. Wasting all the time doing text formatting and making sure it opens properly in other word software is more efficient? It's not like this is the first paper she'll be publishing anyway. What a bunch of bull. In latex, all you need to do is include the IEEE template and everything's done for you automagically.[/tangent]
my blog
Try this:
w _v1.0.doc/
http://www.osvdb.org/reference/SlippingInTheWindo
Load the above into OpenOffice.
Now save as a HTML Document.
Note how the backgrounds on some of the tables doesn't line up with the foretext.
It doesn't matter what browser you use to view it.
After 4 years, my shared libraries have all been linked to...! Finally I can start using it!
Just Kidding...!
I actually love Open Office though. I prefer the Calc spreadsheet to Excel!
hey, I was wondering if anybody else had this issue, too. Sometimes OOo for me just doesn't load all the way. I'll see the title screen, but it will just never get past that. I'll look in the task manager and see soffice.exe in all of its 42 MB of glory, but it's idling. Finally, like an hour or four later, it will load up all the way.
:-/.
I've seen this behavior on 2 PCs- a P3 1.1 GHz and a P-M 1.3 GHz, both with 512 MB RAM and Windows XP, and I was just wondering if I was the only one
Insightful: 76, Off-Topic: 379, Flamebait: 24, Funny: 152, Interesting: 201, Underrated: 55, Troll: 9, Total: 896
openoffice lets me use a Linux desktop. I started using Applixware, then switched about 2 yrs ago for the better conversion filters.
I'm no power user, but I write reasonable documentation for clients and customers using openoffice 1.0.1, print to postscript and convert to pdf with ps2pdf. Works like a charm, although I really ought to upgrade to get native pdf generation.
It's been easier and more predictable for me to position graphics in oo documents than in Word documents.
I don't like the fonts/display situation, but I haven't upgraded anything in about a year and a half.
As for loading/saving time, well, not great, but my 600MHz PIII with 256M is tolerable with it, so any modern desktop should be fine.
A side note... way back 5 yrs ago, I started my thesis outline in html for the web, then brought the text into Word to do the document, thinking that I'd just edit out the HTML tags. Word "recognized" it as an HTML document, and caused me no end of grief. Word damaged my ability to have a life several months after getting out of school by causing me to fight with inane formatting problems just to get a "final copy" out.
If you haven't used openoffice, you should give it a try.
I'm probably not the only other user who nearly peed his pants upon mistakenly reading that OpenOffice version 4 was released today.
Phew. Glad that's over, and has been straightened out.
OOo is incredible, considering how young the project is. Currently, I consider it to be about as good as MS Office 97.
Stop whining about the UI and MS compatibility; they will both improve.
My main concern is BLOAT. OOo is a memory hog, and its integrated PDF export is *extremely* inefficient. Don't get me wrong, PDF export is a killer feature, but I usually use CUPS-PDF on Linux or PDFCreator on Windows. Both produce more compact files.
Good work OOo team! You're well on your way to producing a VERY strong product!
OpenOffice's storage format is not .doc. Just like MS Word saves documents by defualt in it's (proprietary, closed-source) native format, .doc, to leverage all of Word's features (instead of .rtf or .xml or .sxw), OpenOffice needs to store documents in it's native (non-proprietary, open-source) format, .sxw, to leverage all of it's features.
.doc files. A simple PDF of their sxw document will do and it's a hell of a lot cheaper (free).
.doc format.
You should not expect OpenOffice to perfectly store or perfectly open complicated Word Documents. However, it does a good enough job to allow someone to work with an MS user. It also allows you to PDF your documents to share.
By the way, use Word and don't want to install OpenOffice to make PDF's for free? Check out the free, open-source PDFCreator software at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/.
OpenOffice has been a wonderful solution to my need for an office suite while in college. I've never had anyone complain about my documents, and there was not a Word document from a classmate or teacher that I could not open.
Someone pointed out that it would be great if they would take the Firefox-like approach and package the different components as non-monolithic standalone applications. I thought that was a great idea.
OpenOffice is a great tool to give to developers, IT staff, and anyone else that does not have to collaborate with clients/executives/managers by passing around Word
Have you ever noticed that Excel is limited to 65,535 rows? Ever notice that OpenOffice is not?
OpenOffice is a viable and more than capable replacement for an expensive office suite. It is not a viable replacement for someone who collaborates by passing around files in Word's
- Have you ever noticed that the more you learn about technology, the more stupid you sound trying to explain it?
Is it just me, or the development pace in this project feels slow. They should be more open and let others know what they are doing with the next release etc. Personally A good example is how the Mono guys keep everyone aware of their development with their blogs etc. Another good point is how KDE developers give their roadmap for each release and tell whats completed, and whats not, etc. Hopefully this will bring more developers in and help them increase the development speed. Problem is we need to be at OpenOffice 3.0 by now to compete with MS Office...
Just my 2 cents...
I've used both MS Office and Open Office, and while it's OO is reasonably capable to being a word substitute, it just kinda of feels clunky or slow. Opening a file is slow, saving is slow and typing just feels unresponsive.
Now I run an Athlon 1Ghz with a 1GB of RAM with a 7200rpm 8MB cache ATA100 HDD so I don't see why that should be the case.
The rendering is also a little weird at times when opening Word files, but that's to be expected between platforms.
I had to negotiate dealing with MS Word tracked changes and inline comments created by my thesis advisor while wanting to keep my Mac as a Microsoft-free zone. Ended up trying AppleWorks [not quite an office package as an OfficeSpace package... why hasn't this dog died yet?], TextEdit, TeX (no patience for that critter), AbiWord, ThinkFree Office (slower than your average Republican president) until I learned there was an X11 port of OpenOffice for Mac OS X.
Have to say that it tackled the job superbly for what was about as complicated as a document gets--a book-length work. Tracked changes worked almost seamlessly, even when these changes were made in MS Word versions of the docs. Export and import to/from MS word caused no noticeable difficulties, not even when dealing with paragraph formats, TOCs, styles, graphics, tables, charts and the like.
In all, I was very impressed with its robustness and more than pleased by the price.
My only beefs:
- one somewhat minor problem dealing with section formatting and heading numbering when you use a master document with subsection documents--well known apparently in the OO.o discussion forums
- no native support in EndNote for the OO.o format--made dealing with citations and bibliography a bit tricky (had to save from that format to RTF to run through doc scan to export as RTF and then re-format citations in OO.o document to make us of Bibliography). Then again, that's an issue not with OO.o per-se but with the folks who make EndNote having their heads up their Microsofted tuchases.
- occasional crashiness/quirkiness when dealing with tracked changes--sometimes the UI would jump forward many pages and bail out when trying to return. I found that there were mouse and keyboard sequences I should just avoid when navigating that UI.
All around though, the final product turned out very well from a pure text formatting perspective. Contentwise? you be the judge.
***Foucault is watching you..***
Your next caning for spitting on the sidewalk will result in open sores.
I've been using OOo for a year, and quite often the formatted text is there, but not displayed properly. An example, when I bold text, it never displays on the screen as bold, but saves to .pdf and/or prints just fine.
Other than these flaws, which can be overlooked, I've had a good experience with OpenOffice.
what on earth is it going on startup???
I can almost go to the bathroom and take a piss waiting for it!
Happy birthday OOo!
I haven't used it much, but that isn't what matters... it's there when I need it for loading MS files. It's been a big help in making Linux usable for every-day use, particularly interaction with the real world.
It's definitely one of the big-hitters in the Linux world.
It's interesting that you bring up the idea of less-integrated applications, since that's what openoffice originally did to the star office suite (as per Stardivision) in the first place. I remember using StarOffice back in the days before openoffice existed. Back then, I doubt many others had heard of the suite, but I needed a cross-platform office suite, and that wasn't available from anyone else. All of the office programs were one gigantic application that spanned the entire desktop and had even had its own start menu at the bottom of the screen. There were some cool benefits to this, but mostly the suite just lended itself to redundancy -- redoing what the desktop management system and OS already did. When Star Office was bought by Sun and subsiquently opensourced, OpenOffice.org and Sun's most important contributions in the first OOo version was, i feel, separating the applications out and re-inventing the office file format with XML. I agree that applications could be further separated (and looking at the 1.9m54 build, I would guess the dev team would like to move in that direction, too), and an simpler means of implementing "addons" or "plugins" would be great as well.
[ you and I are ugly ]
You can your scroll wheel to send page up/ page down keystrokes at each notch in the System Preferences.
That should do it.
I don't use OO as my primary desktop office suite, but I'm begining to reconsider. For some projects at work I receive data from all over the world in with foreign language encoders. Using MS apps its been a real pain to get some foreign language text to show up nicely. I installed OO at work and now everytime those foreign langauge character files come our way we crack 'em open in OO, save them as *.DOC, *XLS etc. In this respect it works as you would expect an office suite to work.
At home, I use Open Office on all the PCs for me, my wife and both kids.
It does the job and is compatible with MS Office stuff so far. It does not have the security holes that MS Office suffers from, and it is free. They are a mix of Mandrake/KDE and Windows 2000 at present. I would have had to pay a lot for 4 seats of MS Office otherwise.
My only gripe is the bloat. I have to close most other apps in order for it to work well on my P2-300 laptop.
All in all, a good app though.
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
The irony here is that (12-year-old?) M$ Office is full of more crap than 4-year-old OpenOffice!
It's always felt fast enough, and never felt bogged down even with fairly large documents. And haven't people compared OO to Office 97 features instead of OfficeXP/03
I used Star Office, then was OO and I use that now. I have had FAR LESS hassle with these than any version of MS Office (O 95, O 97, O 2000, O XP, I have used them all). Until my last reformat/reinstall of my OS's, I have had both MS Office, and Open Office ( or Star Office depending on when) installed. This last time (about 11 months ago) I saw no reason to bloat my harddrive with MS Office, so didn't bother installing it. I have had zero problems or regrets over these 11 months, and STILL see no reason to install MS Office. Those 4 install discs of MS Office don't even make good coasters so all they do is collect dust. I love having a CHOICE about application software! Does it sve me $? No, not yet because I was foolish enough to be scared of compatibility, so Ive bought the PAST versions of MS Office. But the NEXT "flavor de jour" that MS comes out with won't get my hard earned $.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
That's why I can't convert my 4k users to OO. The spreadsheet doesn't support the standard @functions that Lotus 123 has. Come-on, Lotus had them 20 years ago! You can't do something simple like @sum(a1:a10).
The other problem is that it doesn't take the standard ".." as a range. That's the standard VisiCalc method of denoting a range. In other words, you can't do "a1..a10". You have to use the Excel-style "a1:a10". Why?
They're so focused on beating Microsoft that they've intentionally ignored the rest of the world. Well, not everyone is switching from Microsoft Office to OO.
Isn't anyone concerned about if MS is aligning itself with Sun? They have worked it out where Sun users will not be sued for using StarOffice but nobody is protected under OpenOffice. Hopefull they see SCO getting smeared. But they are setting up the dominos, people. http://www.microsoft-watch.com/article2/0,1995,164 6481,00.asp http://news.zdnet.com/2100-3513_22-5375070.html
The name "openoffice.org" is a ridiculously clumsy name, unlike the actual software which is very good although it takes far to long to crank up. Even the abbreviation "OO" is just as useless, having a completely different popular usage. 4 or 400 years old - that name is an albatross around it's neck.
No wonder so many small businesses don't take O/O seriously. I know we couldn't use it the way it is.
What is really pretty funny is that the functionality of powerpoint, of all the useless software on the planet, was implemented ASAP. Shoot, fire, aim. Sheesh.
I mean, for business: Word processing? Absolutely. Spreadsheet? Can't live without it. Project management? Great idea. Database? Absolutely essential. Powerpoint? POWERPOINT????
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
hi,
I was always very skeptical of ooo.
I still am a bit worried about what Sun might do to it, and certainly they are not very open about letting extra contributors in - this is the impression I get from michael meeks blog.
But I am quite amazed in how good the word processor is. I have been using it on a daily basis for about 18 month and it is absolutely brilliant. It is about 99% right for what I need.
I use it for essays and letters, but also for desktop publishing newsletters. It gets the job done. It is slow on my P450/328meg ram, but I survive.
Thank you ooo.
Although I will always use gnumeric as my spreadsheet. Gnumeric is pure brilliance. And I would happily switch to Abiword if it can ever catch up to ooo.
Just yesterday and today, I programmed a simple
patient managing program for Acupuncture clinic
that my friend just got started, using OpenOffice
Calc and OpenOffice Basic(staroffice basic?).
Patient managing program in just 2 days with no
cost... ah.. what a happy day is today.
On my 700MHz laptop, OOo is zippy, and that's an underpowered laptop by today's standards. I have had no problems with loading/saving stuff. Menus are no more unintuitive than in MS Office, but finding something buried three levels deep is hard in any program.
After having used both MS Office and OOo for about the same amount of time overall, I prefer OOo--it has many flaws, but so does MS Office. I suspect dyed-in-the-wool MS Office users just like to complain about OOo because they are reduced to being newbies on OOo.
I use it in our cybercafe, and we have endless compatibility problems, plus the delightful feature whereby saving an OO document as a .doc and loading it straight back into OO often adds spurious bulletpoints everywhere.
Yes, you are right: Microsoft Office's compatibility with the rest of the world sucks. That is a serious bug with Microsoft Office; Microsoft should fix their default save format and document it better.
OpenOffice, on the other hand, has a well-documented XML-based format that not only works well, but also is easy to process with other tools. Microsoft should become compatible with OOo, not the other way around.
As a way of opening the occasional Word document or typing a letter, it's fine, but anyone who says it's a drop-in replacement for Word is not using many of the Word features.
OpenOffice has the features people need for day-to-day office work, and a lot more.
It's better than TeX for WP, but...
It's neither better nor worse than TeX, it's a different program for different purposes. If you try to use OOo or Word, for that matter, for the kind of publishing people do with TeX, you really don't know what you are doing.
I fully agree: as far as I'm concerned, I don't miss MS Office at all. And OOo keeps getting better; have a look at the roadmap for OOo 2.0. The people working on it are fully aware of what users need and want most.
Read the roadmap; usability and import/export are at the top of the list.
Let's hope that Microsoft's move to XML formats is going to happen for real; that should greatly simplify the creation of import/export filters for OOo and other applications.
One of the big attractions of OOo is that it works predictably the same under Windows. It couldn't do that if it were Gtk+ based (Windows support not quite ready yet) and Qt (license issues on Windows). Using STL would probably complicate it unnessarily and lead to other problems. Basing it on the Mozilla runtime or wxWindows might work, but it would be a major effort, and you'd end up with something that wasn't a lot more mainstream or a lot more extensible.
I think you wouldn't get enough return on your investment porting the OOo code to a different C++ toolkit. For the same amount of work, you could probably convert the code to managed C++ running on Mono, and an XUL-like GUI system. That would then really make it much simpler for third party contributors to create additional functionality.
that my boss switched the entire company away from MS Word. We used it.. well we tried to use it.
We waited a while. Even contributed code to make it work better. We extended it however we could. It still sucked.
It was 2.5 years ago that 4 of my coworkers and myself chipped in to get volume pricing on Word and Visio.
Life is good now.
Hey you crazy fucktard.
You think you're fucking smart?
Posting crappy articles on shellscripts being viruses. And what kinda shitty resume is it anyway? Notepad? Submitting sites to search engines?
Gee, get a fucking life. And stop posting on Slashdot. Morons like you have collectively brought the intelligence of this place down to that of a fucking snail.
Fuck off you crazy bum. Go saw wood or work in the field you redneck.
Hehehe.
I wanted to post something nasty to you, but looks like someone's done it before me.
What kinda crappy submission was that Mac Virus thing anyway?
In case no one's told you yet, you're a freaking moron btw.
I pity that kid of yours, probably gonna grow up to be a retard like you.
Ha ha ha ha. You put Notepad on your resume. You fucking dick. All of Slashdot is laughing at you right now.