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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.
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.
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.
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.
Would the latest MS Office run on a p266 laptop?
GETPKG - Package Management for Slackware
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
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 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.
If the main feature you use from MS Word is reading MS .DOC, oowriter might have problems replacing it (many fewer on 1.1.x than on 1.0).
.DOCs just fine. .PDF or .PS, easily produced by any version of MSWord.
I, on the other hand, use it as a word processor, and I am very happy with it.
The only problem I have is that its GUI is too much of a copy of MSOffice's. In the points it differs, for example the math editor, 10x the writing speed I good with MSWord's, it's far superior. Happy me I just need a word processor, and that I can read everybodys
If I couldn't, of course, I would just need a
In the small niche of cross-editing MSWord documents, between different people, maybe you need MSWord, but it only lets you work with people who have the same version, on the same platform. That's not doable in a bussiness where the main activity is not editing MSWord documents.
It would be a much sensibler choice, in compatibility, productivity and cost, to use openoffice everywhere, using a standard, documented format, for important documents, instead of a format that is too closed for real world needs.
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
This sounds great but unfortunately, rarely works in the real world. Most people create documents for others to view, and in today's corporate environment, that means .doc format. As simple as that.
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
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
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.
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.
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
OO's built-in PDF exporter needs work--but if you get the enhanced PDF exporter, you get a product just about as good as Word + Acrobat. Maybe better.
>This sounds great but unfortunately, rarely works in the real world. Most people create documents for others to view, and in today's corporate environment, that means .doc format. As simple as that.
And, if your whole company is using OpenOffice... what then? Scrap Microsoft Office? Sounds great!
I run a company and apart from having to install Word/Excel/Powerpoint viewer (free) to deal with other companies files, I've never actually had any reason to buy Microsoft Office. At over $1,000 a seat, I think I'll stick with OpenOffice and spend an hour or two a month dealing with editing the occasional foreign file that doesn't import all that well. If it ever came to the point where I really had to deal with MS files all the time from other companies, I'd probably buy one or two seats of MS licenses (not one for each computer) so that people can use it to massage the document back to reality (RTF) when its needed. Besides, there's always wv when you're stuck, which is far more versatile than MS Office.
All in all, it just works out cheaper. Especially for small businesses.
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC
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.
With Sox404 and other corporate compliance issues, i think we'll see the rise of .PDFs in a big way. Yes you can protect Word documents, but .PDFs are considered a much more immutable form. The volume of .pdfs has increased 10x in the past 18 months as we've relied more and more on outsourcing... the best way of confirming exactly what you sent and external unit.
John Maynard Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?"
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.
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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?
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..***