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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.
.... 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
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.
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.
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
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...
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.
One of the birthday gifts: The Defence Ministry of Singapore installs Open-Office in 5,000 new computers as an alternative to proprietary software
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
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
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
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?
"Most people create documents for others to view, and in today's corporate environment, that means .doc format."
.PDFs...
Maybe my employer is strange, but most documents I get to view in my corporate environment are