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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.

30 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. well... by dash2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    .... 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.

    1. Re:well... by dash2 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Er, I was complaining that openoffice was slow? I fulfil all the listed requirements by quite a long way - what's your point?

  3. It's better than TeX for WP, but... by melonman · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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
    1. Re:It's better than TeX for WP, but... by halivar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The PDF exporter prints the footers in the middle of pages. ...
      anyone who says it's a drop-in replacement for Word is not using many of the Word features.

      Apparently my eyes have glossed over the PDF export utility that comes with MS Word. Can you show where that is in the menu?

    2. Re:It's better than TeX for WP, but... by strictfoo · · Score: 5, Funny

      Wasn't it Linus who said that the open source model works better for OSs than for WPs?

      Yes, because, since Microsoft Office is a closed source project it is much more difficult to steal source code from it than from, say, SCO Unix.

      --
      I've just signed legislation that'll outlaw Russia forever. We'll begin bombing in five minutes.
    3. 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.

  4. Starting Page Number by jak163 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  5. 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!

    1. Re:For the past four years... by zelbinion · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  6. 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.

  7. Thoughts from an Excel user... by MrFenty · · Score: 5, Insightful
    I am currently pondering taking the MOUS Excel 2003 exam (to help pad out the CV), so I bought the MS Excel Step-by-Step book as a learning aid. One thing I quickly realised is how little Excel I actually know, and I thought I was pretty knowledgeable - I really do only know about 10% of what it can do, although I am a local expert in my office.

    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.

  8. 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
  9. Strip it down by zenmojodaddy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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...

    1. Re:Strip it down by pubjames · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Absolutely. Not only that, but I would love there to be extensions that can be installed as easily as the Firefox ones, and an extension manager that notifies you when there are new ones available.

      There is loads of room for innovations in the office suite area. I think that because everyone has become so used to MS Office, we've forgotten to question the design of office suites. Come on openOffice team, innovate! Or even better, make it so that openOffice is easily extensible so others can create innovative extensions!

  10. 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.

  11. 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

  12. 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
    1. 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.

  13. My experience by mks113 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  14. Who needs Word or Excel? by Tom · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  15. Re:My experience by LnxAddct · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

  16. 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
  17. 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

  18. 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?

    1. 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.

  19. 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...

  20. Re:My experience by thepoch · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  21. OO is like all free software by schmiddy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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).

    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 .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.

    Here's to another few years of the Linux desktop experience only getting better. Keep scratching those itches, developers.

    --
    http://cltracker.net -- powerful craigslist multi-city search
  22. Consolidation of Some Points and my $0.02 by Devi0s · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    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 .doc files. A simple PDF of their sxw document will do and it's a hell of a lot cheaper (free).

    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 .doc format.

    --
    - Have you ever noticed that the more you learn about technology, the more stupid you sound trying to explain it?