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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.
.... 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
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...
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 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.
I'm not an OO.o user, incidentally.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
I still use OO at home though.
When you get to hell -- tell 'em Itchy sent ya!
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.
At least spreadsheet is quite descriptive. I wish they had used "Word Processor" instead of "Text document"
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?
Well I have a P4 3.06 Ghz with 1 GB of ram and a Geforce4 video card and I still say OpenOffice is sluggish.
Even running MS Office on CrossOver office was less sluggish than the natively linux coded OpenOffice
I recall using MS Office (Word, Excel, et al.) on Windows boxes in the late 90s. There were no speed issues at all - it was easy to get my work done. Chip speeds and memories were slower than what I have now.
I can't blame the openoffice developers for not focusing on the low end when "most people" have much faster machines. But I can accept that MS Office got it right a lot earlier.
Compatablity with Word is the difference (IMHO) between a corporate WP, and a personal WP. Where I work, even if I generate the document myself, it usually needs to be based on a template generated by someone else, and nearly always, someone else will need to edit the documents I create, and they will expect all of the formatting imposed by the template to work properly. This makes using OO.o unusable at the office.
At home, pretty much the only thing I need is a word processor. I don't generally give presentations to my house mates, so OO.o works fine. At work, however, I can't get around the two most irritating things (IMHO) about open office:
1. There is too much white space between the last letter you typed and the cursor.
2. With most fonts, there is too much white space between each letter, and not enough white space inserted with a space character.
With the first problem, I am CONSTANTLY deleting characters because it looks like there is a space where there is no space. In every other application where I edit text (Word, notepad, web forms, kopete, konsole, xterms, etc. etc.) the cursor is rendered directly behind the letter so that you are never fooled into thinking there is a space between the cursor and the character immediately preceding the cursor.
With the second problem, I often can't tell the difference between there being one space between two characters and no space between two characters, or the difference between two spaces and one space.
I realize switching to "online layout" mostly fixes this problem, but "online layout" mode (in my experience) really screws up the formatting of a lot of the Word documents I need to work on (the text flows across the full page width [right past the margins] and this hammers much of the formating). So, I have to choose between screwed up formatting, or screwed up kerning. Neither is acceptable for day-to-day use, so I'm stuck on Word... Also, where is the option to FORCE "online layout" mode for every document? (I'm speaking of OO.o 1.1.0 on linux here, so maybe the newer versions fix this, but anyway...) The company I work for will not likely switch to OO.o anytime soon. So until OO.o can deal with some of the more complex formatting in Word while at the same time getting the text rendering right, it will continue to be a non-viable option.
Just yesterday, my wife was trying to edit a Word document in OOo, and it crashed consistently every time she clicked on certain portions of the document. So she copied+pasted the whole document into Microsoft Works (the only other "word processor" installed on our PC) to finish editing it.
Microsoft Works could solve a problem that OOo couldn't. So what does my anecdote prove?
(That was rhetorical; none of these anecdotes prove anything.)