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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.
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...
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
Oh and how well does Microsoft render OASIS? Oh that's right... it doesn't. Try doing everything in OOo's *native* format and you'll see its real power. Sure it can handle most Word Documents, but it wasn't designed nor ever intended to be a drop in replacement for MS Office. When using MS Office do you save as a RTF? Nope, didn't think so. Why? because you'd be losing alot of potential features and capabilities. Sure MS Office can read and write to RTF, but it wasn't designed with that in as its main use. In that same light, sure OpenOffice can read and write MS Word documents, but it was *not* designed with that as its main use and as a result, some functionality may be lost when using those formats. There are many features in OOo that don't have an equivalent in MS Office, and vice versa, so you should really be using the format that was designed for the Word Processor you are using so you are using its maximum potential(no matter what word processor).Stop feeding into Microsoft, break free, and use the open format that its supposed to use.
Regards,
Steve
Let me get this straight, what you are saying is:
1. OpenOffice.org doesn't open Word documents very well.
2. If OOo does open these, it doesn't render well.
3. You can't use OOo for this *single* document that you edit on a regular basis.
and by this, you immediately conclude that it's not an Office 2003 replacement?
1. & 2. You can help by submitting to OOo's bug tracking system documents you've found to not render properly. This will help developers figure more things out about the document format.
3. If your most important document is this single Word document you talk about... to me it seems a little too much to have to buy Office XP Pro and Office 2003 Pro just to open this document. Couldn't Office XP Pro suffice? Is Office 2003 really a requirement for that one document? Did Clippy suddenly gain new features that helped to handle that document?
I'm sorry but these arguements don't sound "Insightful" to me. OOo isn't just a "usable free word processor" that isn't a "Office 2003 replacement". OOo is a full-featured office suite, that aims to replace nothing, but to only give you a broader choice.
To be honest, I've seen Office 2003, and it's no Office 2000 replacement. There doesn't seem to be any new features that warrant a "must buy". It renders Word documents well enough, but it doesn't seem to handle the OOo documents I throw at it that we regularly use in the office these days. Hey look I just saved the company 90,000 (my currency) from having to buy 6 copies of Office XP SBE.
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.