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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. shame on me by mirko · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. For the past four years... by halivar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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!

  3. I dropped MS Word by angryflute · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  4. High hopes for the linguistic parts of OpenOffice by joeykiller · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  5. OO.o saved my client's behind by Rick+Genter · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?"

    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 .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.

    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 :-). It opened just fine. I saved it as an Excel 95 format document, then tried opening it from Excel. It opened just fine.

    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
  6. A Good Tool That Saves Me Money! by blueZhift · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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
  7. The code is completely innaccesible by Qwavel · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?