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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.
FWIW, StarOffice has been in development since 1986. That makes OpenOffice more like 18 years old. Only the name and the Open Source project "OpenOffice" have been around for four years.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
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."
One of the birthday gifts: The Defence Ministry of Singapore installs Open-Office in 5,000 new computers as an alternative to proprietary software
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.)
actually you can set the page offset.
R-Click - Fields (last context menu item) fill in the box for offset. (set as a negative number to start numbering on a page greater than one)
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
Writing Japanese sort of, kind of works. Opening documents written using kanji with furigana, however, craps out every single time. The kanji loses its baseline and the furigana is lost altogether. And even documents written with just straight kanji+hiragana will get the wrong margins, mysterious rendering errors and mixed-up fonts.
And here, that is "average, ordinary" documents. Abiword is actually better (though still not at all good) at opening such documents - it doesn't support writing it at all, though.
So yes, OOo is nice to have. Here it's not yet a viable solution, though.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
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
Well said. I too, use lighter tools like the koffice suite. But I have used Open Office in the past. And found it to be clunky, but useable. My kids use it on thier XP game machine for school work.
Agreed. I do a lot of writing (mostly articles) on my Macintosh, and I've found it more pleasant by far to use NeoOfficeJ instead of Microsoft Word v.X. Microsoft's software *looks* better on the outset, but NeoOfficeJ is actually more readable, faster responding, more usable, etc. The anti-aliased fonts are wonderful, and I've *never* had a NeoOfficeJ crash that caused me to lose work. (The Java layer they added to OOo traps the error and forces a save before close.)
:-)
The only compatibility problem I've ever had was with a mismatched font. Apparently I had accidentally used a Mac Font that my editor didn't have. It was no big deal for him to fix, and he only mentioned it in passing.
Even the OOo spreadsheet program is better. I recently did some rough calculations on the cost of doing a Moon Shot today and found NeoOfficeJ SpreadSheet to be WAY more usable than Microsoft's. I've got to hand it to the OOo & NeoOfficeJ guys. They're doing amazing work.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Dunno, some of us like the extra features that OOo brings. After struggling with Dia to make simple organisation charts, OO Draw is a dream (and much nicer than any of the MS office products for drawing unless you splurge for the newest office with Visio).
Just wish OO Draw could import Dia shapes.
"Ctrl+P Choose Acrobat PDFWriter as printer."
That's not in MS Word... That's an add on.
Part of "rock solid" import/export filters is supporting every funky feature. When importing an Excel document that uses some marginal feature, the filter must be able to handle it somehow. This is part of why creation of the filters is difficult; there's a shitload of weird features that must be handled somehow.
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 :-)
Actually, OO's spreadsheet component is called 'calc'.
And there's a new version to celebrate: http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.3/index.html/
My own contribution: the other day, one of our account managers desparately needed to send a PDF to a client ASAP. While they were pondering the quickest way to buy a copy of Acrobat, I fired up OOo and solved their problem completely in 5 minutes.
And you need the full version of Adobe Acrobat to get access to that add on. It's also not just for Word, it's acts as a print driver to the OS so is usable from any application that can print.
"Most people create documents for others to view, and in today's corporate environment, that means .doc format."
.PDFs...
Maybe my employer is strange, but most documents I get to view in my corporate environment are
And you need the full version of Adobe Acrobat to get access to that add on.
Or you could get a free version here.
But yes, PDF Export is not native to MS Office.
If you only need text processing, Notepad/Wordpad
... but the lack of a spell checker and only extremely simplistic paragraph formatting make it useless for anything more complex than a letter to a friend or a recipe.
... good, then don't use it. I *do* see a reason, and therefore I *do* use it.
... OOo does just as good of a job with most Word files as Office97 does. Sometimes O97 is better, sometimes OOo is better at preserving the original document ... it really depends on what version the original was authored in - but having Office itself is no guarantee of exact compatibility either.
... I don't do too much intensive spreadsheet work. For what I do, either Office97 or OOo will do.
... I'm not a big PPT fan. Impress doesn't handle all PPT files correctly ... usually it messes up things like wacky transitions and animation effects (which I wouldn't use anyway) so it doesn't affect me, but I could see where someone who is into that kind of stuff would be set back.
... 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.
... most people use the basics - just enough to make Wordpad incapable of doing the job (which is by design, I'm sure). OOo does a great job for me so I see no need to spend hundreds of dollars to upgrade MS Office. I'd rather use that money to upgrade something more useful to what I do.
Wordpad isn't bad
cheaper/leaner MS Works
MS Works actually ships with the full version of Word.
Abiword
I've downloaded Abiword, and I like that there's another alternative, but in fonts don't show as nicely (odd letter spacing) and I've had troubles with placed graphics that I just don't have in OOo.
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)
You don't see a reason
I own a copy of Office 97. While it works, it is getting dated. I don't really want to spend the money to update to a newer version of Office because I only need to occasionally use files that I get from other people (my main business is in design).
Writer
I own Acrobat, but I appreciate the built in PDF capabilities of OOo. In fact, I once needed to create a PDF of a Word doc for work. I opened in Office 97 and created the PDF through Acrobat. I also opened in OOo and did a direct PDF create. The resulting PDF was actually smaller from OOo with no loss of quality in the PDF (I'm guessing that Word was embedding metadata or some other filler which made their document larger)
Calc
Impress
I own and use Illustrator for most graphic work, but I actually like using OOo Draw for flow diagrams and such because the drawing tools are geared toward that kind of thing. (I wouldn't use it over Illustrator for illustration, though)
--
I don't see too many 'feature-filled Word files'
If it doesn't work for you, fine. But it works for me and I'm sure quite a few others, so I use it.
AbiWord on *nix uses Gtk2, wv, libpng, libxml2, zlib, fribidi popt, and libiconv. All of which are available in all new distro's, except maybe for wv. If you use the GNOME version, it uses several GNOME libraries as well, such as libgnomeprint.
The Windows version uses the same libraries, except for of course the Gtk2/GNOME libraries, since we use the Windows native widgets and print systems on every platform. Same holds for the native MacOSX version.
Ditto on that. Equation editing and graphics handling (as well as master document arrangement for largis things like theses) are the big seller for me. My supervisors both use MS Word and I must say that I have not problems exchanging docs with them... as long as I remember that I cannot use the builting "Caption" feature for images. This little problem I work around by using an auto text which inserts a "Figure " followed by a counter for the figures in a paragraph style called FigureCaption that is preceded by a paragraph of style Figure... this "Figure" paragraph style is set so that it will not be separated from the next paragraph... so the caption will always follow the figure. It is best then to anchor the image as character. This is not a limitaion, however, since I have noticed that MS Word can only add Image counters and captions for images that are inserted inline with text anyways. My only grip is that the counter does not seem to be saved nor retrieved from .doc format files which are necessary to exchange files with my supervisors.
Also, I love the context menu in OO.o. You can do so much so easily from them. Particularly form image anchoring, etc. It's just a breeze, and way better than the clumsy image dialogue-based only interface in MS Word. As a rule I prefer the way things are done in OO.o.
I also love the fact that you can include dimensions in the drawing format of OO.o, and that you can set the physical scale of the drawing, and change the units displayed by dimensions in a given style. That is sooo cool. The only suggestion I would have with respect to dimensions is the addition of angular dimension, and leader type dimensions for circles, where they would not be defined by 2 points but by pointing to a circle. More sophisticated object snaps to endpoints, intersections and center of objects would also bring it very close to an actual 2D CAD drawing package. I've been using it for just that, and if I ever find some time to write a macro to this effect I will. With some time.
My main grudge is that it is not as simple to switch themes as let's say Mozilla. Using KDE, Gnome, and Mozilla, I have come to realize how important the seemingly trivial ability to change and create themes can be for the vitality of a program.
I like my dinosaurs feathery, and my pterosaurs hairy (or is it pycnofibery?)