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OpenOffice.org Is 4 Today

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the older-than-my-niece dept.

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.

7 of 333 comments (clear)

  1. Re:OOo Four already! by AKAImBatman · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. Singapore Def. Ministry uses OpenOffice on 5k PCs by mandreiana · · Score: 5, Informative

    One of the birthday gifts: The Defence Ministry of Singapore installs Open-Office in 5,000 new computers as an alternative to proprietary software

  3. Re:It's better than TeX for WP, but. by LnxAddct · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

  4. Re:It's better than TeX for WP, but... by mdfst13 · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Ctrl+P Choose Acrobat PDFWriter as printer."

    That's not in MS Word... That's an add on.

  5. Re:OO.o saved my client's behind by micromoog · · Score: 4, Informative
    It's an Excel problem, exacerbated by bad user habits. Anyway, Excel couldn't fix the problem, and OOo could, which was the point of the anecdote.

    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.

  6. Re:My experience by 0123456 · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Most people create documents for others to view, and in today's corporate environment, that means .doc format."

    Maybe my employer is strange, but most documents I get to view in my corporate environment are .PDFs...

  7. Re:The code is completely innaccesible by uwog · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.