OpenOffice.org Team on OO.org (and Upcoming v2.0)

Aditya Nag writes "I recently got the chance to ask the OpenOffice.org team a few questions about OpenOffice.org in general, and their upcoming release. The questions were answered by Louis Suarez-Potts and Colm Smyth. Louis is OpenOffice.org's Community Manager, member and chair of the Community Council, and lead of many OpenOffice.org projects including the Native Language Confederation. Colm is a StarOffice Architect, and was responsible for defining the product concept for OpenOffice.org 3.0 (or StarOffice 9). The interview is fairly long and detailed, and there are a few interesting tid-bits, like Louis' assertion that there will come a day when there will be no proprietary file formats for Office Suites." This is the full interview from which excerpts were linked in the recent post about OO.o's beta candidate for 2.0.

Comments

Timothy

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the full interview from which excerpts were linked in the recent post about OO.o's beta candidate for 2.0.

You're a Slashdot regular Timothy, if you want to say your articl'es a dupe then don't beat about the bush just say "Yep, this is a dupe".

Re:new Sony Network Walkman

[HiMyNameIsSam]

Hello Mr. I have never heard of google, No clue, sorry.

Would Have Cared More Before...

[The Lost Supertone]

On OS X I would have really cared about OpenOffice being updated... that is until iWork came out... it's significantly faster than M$ Office on OS X I find, AND it's at a reasonable price... not to mention OOo's complete disregard of the Mac platform...

Re:Would Have Cared More Before...

[technomancerX]

Yup. I'll care when they do a Mac port.

Re:Would Have Cared More Before...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ill care when they do a DOS port and QNX; even AbiWord is on QNX.

Why dont they just wrap everything or code it on a runtime and just solve these "Application" porting issues once and for all, its more cost effective and logical.

Then again it has 15 years of code they are not going to throw away, they should have a team working from the bottom up trying to get as much platform generic as possible and minimise the platform specifics.

Re:Would Have Cared More Before...

[trash eighty]

yes pity if the only part of OO you ever use is the spreadsheet module though!

Re:Would Have Cared More Before...

[Anonymous Coward]

not to mention OOo's complete disregard of the Mac platform

Why? Works great on my Debian/PowerBook. ;)

Re:Would Have Cared More Before...

[DuBois]

Done: Neo Office/J

Re:Would Have Cared More Before...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.neooffice.org/

Re:Would Have Cared More Before...

[MadChicken]

NeoOffice is sweet. I'm hoping the OASIS format gets ported from the promised OOo 1.1.5. Then I'll feel more comfortable about switching on my Win boxen.

Re:Would Have Cared More Before...

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice.org gets zero support from Apple, and they are begging for people to develop on the Mac port.

I think you have the complete disregard comment backwards.

Anybody using it?

[lottameez]

Anybody actually using open office in a, er, office? How about some real experiences with it?

Re:Anybody using it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, people at my work place use Linux and often use OpenOffice to read and write office documents or view excel files. But it is a quite small company, less than 10 people work at there.

It really works great, but there are some small differences between what files look in Microsoft Office and what they look like in OpenOffice. But if you are only reading or creating files with basic formatting, it works perfectly.

Re:Anybody using it?

[ThisIsFred]

I've been using it for more than a year now at the office. There's still no way to read MS Access database files, which is a major drawback. Other than that, I prefer Calc over Excel because of features that make data import/export/retouching easier. I also get lots of use out of Draw, something which MSO really should consider. 'Write' gets the work done, but as of 1.1.3, it has problems exporting to Word 97/2000/XP format (their name, not mine), where it dumps something in the file that totally screws up the formatting when MSO tries to read it (all the special mark-up is lost and the file can't be converted to a real MSO format). Reading Word files works fine, but sometimes it does not pick the correct font size and margin sizes.

Thus far, Open Office hasn't crashed on me or mangled any data, unlike Office 95/97/2000. They fixed the annoying hi-lighting bugs from 1.1.0, but it still has an annoying tendency to open up random new, blank documents when you open a document and an OO window is already open.

I have not tested the Word export problem on 1.1.4, so I don't know if it is fixed or not.

Re:Anybody using it?

[mehaiku]

Yes, I am. We have many office docs stored on the network - word docs, spreadsheets, etc. I knew from day one I would use OpenOffice. (This is in an environment of sales people. We are all self-employed and bring our own machines.) One of my co-workers had Word but not MS Office, so she couldn't read the spreadsheets on the network. I showed her how to install OpenOffice. Now she reads the spreadsheets.

I told the head honcho who wasn't pleased about this. He said the office may end up going all Microsoft and I was just spreading my "agenda." A few weeks later I over heard another sales guy, who had just purchased a new computer, asking the head honcho if he had a company copy of MS Office he could install on his machine. I never heard the answer. A few days later that same sales guy approaches me saying the head honcho said I knew of some office software he could put on his machine to read the docs and spreadsheets on the network. So that's three machines in an office of about 40 people that now have OpenOffice on it, with one by special request of the head honcho. I also use OpenOffie to create sales material. Funny how when people have to actually pay to use MS Office, the alternatives become awfully attractive awfully quickly.

Re:Anybody using it?

[Anonymous Coward]

We've got OO deployed across 15 machines, PC's and Macs (using X11). No complaints other than lack of Access file portability. The suite should add MySQL wrapped in a nice UI.

In general we've spent the past two years moving away from MSFT and into OO and generic hardware. We're getting IT spending down to a point where I'm not hearing complaints from mangagement any longer. We're even considering installing MacMini's as the new default hardware.

Re:Anybody using it?

[__aamcgs2220]

I'll give you three guesses which owner of SuSE is converting their entire company to OOo and getting rid of MSO... Ask your friendly neighborhood Novell employee what s/he thinks. I've heard good things from them, but the guy I know says he really doesn't use any office products that much.

Re:Anybody using it?

[zecg]

I am using it exclusively for a few years now; it and Firefox have also eased my migration to Linux a few months back quite nicely. There are options missing (like separate Word Count in Writer 1.1.3), but you can download them as scripts. It does all I need to do and opens all my .doc, .rtf and .xls files adequately.

It's a shame, though, how you still cannot use OO formats exclusively, since compatibility with the fascist world of MS Office is pretty much why you use any Office suite to begin with.

Re:Anybody using it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here in a rural county, we are using OpenOffice.org quite a bit. The local ag extension office has moved to Linux boxen and OpenOffice.org for all of their personnel (the extension service, like a lot of state government agencies, are having to serve more people with less money these days). I work at an agency where I counsel entrepreneurs and small business owners. I have been distributing OpenOffice.org to my clients, and many of them have been using the software to create business plans and other business documents with excellent results. I have NeoOffice/J on my Mac, and I now use it as my standard office suite.

So yeah, in this low-populated, rural area OpenOffice.org is being used quite a bit without a lot of publicity or fanfare. Which makes me wonder sometimes: If my small, rural community is utilizing OpenOffice.org to this extent, are the estimates regarding OpenOffice.org use nationally or internationally grossly underestimated.

Re:Anybody using it?

[hermeshome.se]

Yes. Our company (7000+ employees) has migrated from MS Office to Open Office. Unfortunatly most comments in the beginning was negative. I do suspect that it was due to the transaction to a "new" program(s) and interface. People are used to use MS Office and with little to none real computer experience, it is scarry to try out "new stuff". Thus, everything new is dagerous and should be regarded as evil.
Now, two years later, nobody reflects over the fact that we uses another office suite. The only problem that we have are some conversion from Excel to OO Calc.

To sum it up. If you got a user base with good common computer skills there should be no problems. Just remind them to keep an open mind. If you then can point out that by changing office suite to a free alternative, your company saves money and maybe your job are a bit safer, you should be homefree.
Do not, however, engage in ideological arguements. That will only confuse, and poeple in general think any mid to big sized company are made of money...

Re:Anybody using it?

[johannesg]

We tried it. It failed to read our existing Word files correctly (standard company document features coming out wrong, that sort of thing), so we decided against using it for now.

However, we also reported every problem we could find and the good news is that quite a few seem to be fixed now. Once 2.0 gets released we'll reevaluate it for use in the office.

OOo Writer has at least one killer feature: PDF export, which is something we need badly and which is a pain with Word.

And unlike Word, OOo Writer hasn't yet gone and destroyed any of my documents. Word tends to do that, and I believe it is using its Intellisense to sniff out approaching deadlines so it can concentrate its evil powers where it can do the most harm. Example: last week we lost a day's worth of work on a document when it was inexplicably eaten by Word at the end of the working day. Yes, we keep backups. No, they don't run halfway through the day. And then the next day it happened again with the same document, repeating the same changes as the day before. Buh...

Re:Anybody using it?

[Mac Mini Enthusiast]

My brother works for a financial firm in Wall Street, and uses Excel all the time. So hes a "power user" w/ Excel, and often makes complicated spreadsheets.

While we were at my other brother's house, he wanted to create a mortgage spreadsheet to show my father various options to buy a house. The computer there only had Linux and Open Office, but my brother was able to whip up the spreadsheet in no time on his first try using OpenOffice. He only ran into a few small bumps where certain items were located in different menues, etc.

So this was a real kind of spreadsheet application that he'd use at his work all the time, and he was able to integrate into OpenOffice just fine within a few minutes. He was amazed at how smoothly it was, and even more amazed that it was available for free (as in beer, not speech).

On top of that, he occasionally sends me various complicated spreadsheets that he's made up for personal finance things on Excel, and all of them have opened just fine in OpenOffice. In fact, they work better there than in Apple's Appleworks!

Re:Anybody using it?

[lgarner]

Yes, personally. I've experimented with OO since it was StarOffice 5, and used it exclusively on my laptop since 1.1.0 or so. My only real gripe is load time. It's better on Windows, only due to the quickstarter. On Linux you can go grab a cup of coffee while it's loading the document that you clicked. Once it's loaded, it works just fine. I'm currently playing with 2.0 beta, especially Base. It looks like a good start, but crashes regularly.

Re:Anybody using it?

[Glowing Fish]

At Free Geek , we use nothing else. Of course, since we are a Linux only shop, our other choice is...Abiword.
It works very well for all our in house needs, which are mostly spreadsheets and word processing.

Re:Anybody using it?

[vandan]

Yep.

I've got about half our office on it. We moved to StarOffice 5.2 after the BSA sent us letters demanding that we explain our software licensing before someone comes and inspects things for themselves. The other half of the office are using some pretty complicated spreadsheets with stacks of VB code, and it's just not feasible to port it to OOo ( even though it would be technically possible ) at the moment.

At the moment I've got all the OOo people on the 2.0 beta. It's working very nicely. The compatibility with Office is much better. Documents that used to have severe formatting issues now work either flawlessly, or damned close.

I've done some simple dialogs in OOo for our sales department. They enter a prospect's code and get a combo box showing all the locations and contacts for that company. They select from combo boxes and hit a button to copy all the info into a word processing document. Simple but effective. The scripting language isn't as easy to use as VB, but it's not too bad, and the macro recorder makes things easier.

I've also done a Perl-Gtk2 database front-end for them which is working remarkably better than MS Access. I've written a little Perl module, at http://entropy.homelinux.org/Gtk2-Ex-DBI/ ( screenshot available at that link ) that makes Gtk2-Perl apps designed with the Glade GUI builder data-aware. It handles all database querying, via DBI, 'paints' records onto your Glade-generated form, detects user-changes, updates the database, etc.

I've just started on a Perl-based report writer that outputs to PDF via PDF::API2. Obviously this is to replace Access reports. It's coming along very nicely.

OOo 2 has a database engine and front-end, but honestly I find that ( at least currently ), Access is far more powerful, easy to use, and stable. Of course the OOo 2 one is young and improving, but I think that no matter how good it gets, the Perl-Gtk2 way is always going to be much better ( and more fun ). Perl really is a nice language to be programming in, and Perl-Gtk2 is just so simple and logical, and yet powerful and fast that it really is a compelling option.

Re:Anybody using it?

[Lehk228]

I have been thinking of writing an email tool which would automagically catch and OOo documents which did not have *.nc.* in the filename and convert them to the corresponding MSO file to make internal use of OOo easier.

Re:Anybody using it?

[xtraub]

Sure. The main reasons ? - It is so much easier and faster to download a file and install it than getting a purchase order requisition form, than a purchase order,and eventually, the product. - One cannot import DXF graphics into Powerpoint - The import and export filters to MS software works very well (Powerpoint and MS Word) - I run OOo at home on a Linux box

Re:Anybody using it?

[rowanxmas]

Maybe you can help me then.
All I really want to do is have text files (like any text file, regardless of extension, since I always use my own random extensions ) to open up in Calc, not Writer, without having to first select "txt/csv" from the drop down menu.

Why doesn't it realize that I want to open something as a spreadsheet from the speadsheet program!

Re:Anybody using it?

[eugene ts wong]

hentzenwerke.com

This entire publishing company uses Linux and OpenOffice.org. I seem to recall that their books are prepared using the office suite. Their experiences and documented at their web site.

Re:Anybody using it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did you notice that OO 2 underlines the word Microsoft in red? :-)

Re:Anybody using it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Several departments at Ford are using it daily. We have a url for reporting any incompatible files, which are becoming rarer. There are teams working on porting company standard macros, etc. Recent hires claim GM and DaimlerChrysler have similar in progress.

Re:Anybody using it?

[MadChicken]

Actually, you *can* read Access files, it's just really confusing... First launch one of the other apps, then press F4 to bring up the data sources navigator (I think that's the name) Right-click on the left part and click "Administrate data sources"...

Choose ADO as the database type, and enter something like this (all on one line):

Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;
Data Source=c:\somepath\myDb.mdb;
User Id=admin;Password=

Click on the "Tables" tab and you should know right away if it worked.

That's as good as it gets in the 1.1 tree. 2.0 beta has a bunch of really nice improvements over that, including the [Windows] systemwide data source configuration. I'm still confused about how (or if) the engine detects Access memo fields though...

Re:Anybody using it?

[merger]

Well, until you are able to make the jump to OOo, another open source program may be able to help with the PDF creation. PDF Creator installs itself as a print driver and makes life pretty nice (unless you need links embedded within word to transfer to PDF) and can be found on Source Forge. Maybe someday Word will decide to stop eating documents, but that's probably wishful thinking.

Re:Anybody using it?

[dbIII]

Anybody actually using open office in a, er, office?

Powerpoint files were a pain until a release a few months back and loading a few more fonts - since then about a dozen people running it have found no problems with powerpoint files. Two users have MS Powerpoint, and they can read the OpenOffice generated stuff OK, while others can view theirs. Win4Lin used to be used exclusively to run MS Powerpoint, but now no-one is bothering to do that, they all just run OpenOffice.

Printing setup wasn't put in an easy to spot place, so if you don't use US Letter paper you need to watch out for that.

As for Write - it's a word processor and has a similar GUI to word from 1.0, wordperfect and dozens of others - most people can use it in seconds. The handling of images embedded in documents appears to be a lot better behaved than versions of word I've used - ie. they don't move about unless you tell them to.

As for the other bits, people are only using calc here to do simple spreadsheet stuff which it's been doing well for many years since the start of StarOffice - I don't know how well it handles graphs and scripting. There haven't been any problems with files being worked on at different times by people with OpenOffice or MS Excel - but it's just simple spreadsheets.

All that said, the place is full of geophysicists who are used to working on three different operating systems and secretarial staff as familiar with Wordperfect for DOS and Lotus123 as with Office2k. I don't know how a recent high school graduate trained in the current version of MS Office would see it.

Re:Anybody using it?

[alexandreracine]

Yes we are. I forced everybody in my team (infrastructure) to use it we I began to create all new documents in OO :) And now, everybody that needs to read our files have to install it. They simply have no choice :)

We dont have some major documents, just simple documents, so it is perfect for us. I did ran into some little trouble with a presentation once. When I was adding page 4 and saved, it just currupt. So I had to add page 4, save in power point, reopen it in openoffice, add more pages and resave it in presentation. But that's all.

Re:Anybody using it?

[XSforMe]

My experience with Openoffice has been very similar to yours. We produce very large reports with custom made headers and footers. Lots of embedded pictures, and quite a few tables along the way. OO can open them, but the tables are misaligned and the headers/footers are screwy. I am really looking forward to OO 2.

... OOo Writer hasn't yet gone and destroyed any of my documents. Word tends to do that...
One of the things OO outshines MSO is... opening its own corrupt documents! Yes, most of MSO SNAFU's are recoverable by OO (at least the content). Give it a try, you'll be amazed and your users will worship you.

OO is the real underdog of Open Source. I see lots of people bringing Linux and Mozilla when they discuss open source, but in my opinion the real fight against propietary software will be carried in the office arena.

Re:Anybody using it?

[crisco]

I recieved a new computer a couple of years ago right in the middle of a project. Rather than migrate everything over to the new one I bought a KVM and used new and old side by side for a while. OOo was the only office suite installed on the new computer. I'd estimate only 5% of the time I'd have to switch to the old computer and use MS Office to open or print something.

Acid test was when one of the owners came in and wanted to edit a spreadsheet for his other business. He sat down, opened his email, loaded up the .xls file and started editting. I hovered for a bit, expecting to explain the difference and help him out but he never seemed to notice.

Re:Anybody using it?

[Master Bait]

I've been using it for years, starting with the old pre-Sun StarOffice. But I've also done without RPM for many years and I'm not sure I want to build RPM just to install OpenOffice 2.0. Koffice has gotten very nice.

Re: Anybody using it?

[gidds]

Well, AppleWorks is effectively dead now -- hasn't had any proper updates for several years now. And it was showing its age even then...

A fairer comparison might be to Pages or Keynote, though of course they haven't released a spreadsheet yet. (I'd be prepared to put down good money that they're working on one, though!)

Re:Anybody using it?

[hey!]

I've been using OO for over a year now.

The only thing that I really miss is MS Office's outline views. I'm an outlining freak, to be perfectly honest. So I do most of my thinking in JOE (Java Outline Editor) or FreeMind, but none of them is as good as MS Office I'm afraid.

Re:Anybody using it?

[unoengborg]

We use it, and have been doing so since version
1.0.

It's a good replacement for MS-Office as long as you don't need Outlook or MS-Access. We use the Mozilla suit and Postgresql so that is not a problem to us.

In fact not having an Access replacement have been a good thing as putting databases in one central place simplifies backups and you dont end up with different versions of the same database.
Hope people will avoid Base in 2.0, even thought it probably will work very well for people who like these kind of things.

Even the 1.0 version opens MS-Office documents sent to us resonably well. Sometimes we have actually managed to use it to recover data from broken MS-Word documents that wouldn't open in the Microsoft suit.

All in all OpenOffice a very nice Office suit. It really doesn't make sense paying for MS-Office when you can get OOo for free.

Re:Anybody using it?

[ThisIsFred]

This is sort of cheating. It's not reading Access format files, it's using Microsoft drivers to query the database. I don't have this option on Linux. There are tools that read OLE streams on Linux, but they often choke on Access files or don't read the contents of tables.

Re:Anybody using it?

[towndowner]

reason number one: because the operating system doesn't have lots of supercool metadata built into the operating system like the BeOS did. reason number two: patient: "Doc, it hurts when I do this." doctor: "Don't do that." stop using your own random extensions, silly. question: why aren't desktop systems using "magic number" file typing, or whatever the hell that's called? or are they? i dunno - not my problem.

Re:Anybody using it?

[fireduck]

OO 1.97 routinely mangles formulas entered in Writer. I'm trying to type up notes for my students. Maybe 7-10 page documents with a few formulas per page. Guaranteed when I reload the complete document at a later point, equations will have been modified beyond recognition. Half the time its copied earlier formulas in place of later formulas. Other half, it's odd bits of half formulas. Usually they involve really odd size changes as well (original formula's frame size with new formula either stretched of crammed in). That's the only frustrating aspect I've come across.

Re:Anybody using it?

[fireduck]

The flipside of this, when you create table in Writer and as the first character in one of the cells, you enter "=" it will immediately assume you're entering a formula and causes all sorts of headaches. The only way I've found to get around this is to actually paste an equal sign in.

Re:Anybody using it?

[m0rningstar]

I do; I have the awesome Codeweaver's Crossover Office installed on my laptop so I /can/ use MS apps if and when I have to, but I try and do most of my word processing and spreadsheet functionality in OO. This is mainly since I've become increasingly irritated with the Office suite, not just for bloat but for the automated sidebars and whatever the HELL they did to styles in XP and 2K3. Mind you -- final versions of almost everything are in MS Office format so my cow-orkers can deal with them.

I've found that Writer is, in general, solider that Word for large documents; it's style support is definitely superior and the outline numbering for headers and integration into ToC's is better. It took adjustment, but I'm happier producing documentation and deliverables with it than I ever was in word.

Math seems a little quirkier to me; I use it less and tend to fall back to Excel more. However, for the basic accounting, budgeting and proposal type spreadsheets that are all I need in my job role, I find I can do 90% of my work in it.

Impress? Sorry. Still got to be Powerpoint for those pre-sales presos and post-sales trainings. Again, that could be a familiarity issue on my part, but the difficulties I've found in handling dedicated title slides and section breaks plus the lack of some of the auto-scaling geatures made me unhappy. (I'd love someone to tell me I'm being dumb, since I'd rather use it over PPT...)

Re:Anybody using it?

[kaiwai]

Sounds like your organisation had some difficulties; personally, in that position, when unemployment is as high as it is, I would put out an ultimatium - accept the new software, learn how to use it or find a job elseware.

Sorry to sound like a dictator, but employees need to learn who works for who, who provides the pay check, and who provides the work equipment. If they don't like the environment, then they're the ones who should changes jobs, not the orgnisation to change simply to meet their "unique" needs.

Sure, I can't stand Microsoft Office, but I sure has heck aren't going to whine to management, demanding that the *WHOLE* organisation much change to something I like.

Its about employees knowing their "place" and realising that they're not the ones in charge - no matter how much they would like to convince themselves and their friends (who they boast to about doing 1/2 the work of the management - when in reality, all they do is type letters).

Re:Anybody using it?

[galdur]

You also want to make sure the users get some training to get them off to a good start and ease the transition pain. If you don't prepare the users adequately, there's a good likelihood that an negative attitude may work against the change.

Re:Anybody using it?

[Kjella]

One user is a whiner. Lots of users are a problem, even in a tight labor market. If you create a ship where everyone would like to hop off at the first possible opportunity, they will as soon as there is an upturn. At that point, it doesn't matter who is "right" - unless you plan to have them settled in "well that wasn't so bad" *Before* the upswing.

Kjella

Re:Anybody using it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep - we are a consulting firm - dumped MS Office about 2 years ago and started using Open Office. Aside from the pain of converting tempaltes & some spreadsheets, it has been a wonderful experience and has saved us a lot in lic fees as well as giving some peace of mind. Though 99.99% of our customers use MS Office, we have no problem with document interchange. No problem here.

Re:Anybody using it?

[runningduck]

Have you checked out the Navigator in OO.o?

If you structure your document with heading styles (all documents should be built with styles), the Navigator provides an outline view. You can re-arrange items in the Navigator, promote or demote heading and all the contect moves with the headings.

I actually find it more functional than MS's outline view.

Re:Anybody using it?

[witort]

Unfortunatly most comments in the beginning was negative.

Maybe it has something to do with poor spell and grammar checking..?

Re:Anybody using it?

[david einstein]

Yeah I use it. Not in an office setting like you have asked, but I use it for presentations. In Thailand, the cost of a bootleg copy of ms office is the same as openoffice, a cd will cost about 150 Baht. oo doesn't have the same number of cheesy slide effects as powerpoint does, but that is feature I don't use (maybe in a corporate situation, the extra animations may get you promoted).

Re:Anybody using it?

[MC68000]

One of the things OO outshines MSO is... opening its own corrupt documents!

My experience is exactly the opposite. I've had OO crash on me many times while trying to open perfectly good MSO documents. Combining that with the obscenely large startup time, even on a 3.06 Ghz Pentium 4 with 512 MB of RAM, and I can say that the only great thing about this program is that it's free (Which may indeed outweigh paying out hundreds of dollars for a much better program, MSO).

And mods, I'm posting this with Firefox, so I'm by no means a critic of Open Source software in general, just this particular program, OO.

Re:Anybody using it?

[darthdavid]

Opensource software that ends in an odd number=unstable. Why would you be using unstable software for important work?

Re:Anybody using it?

[jonbryce]

Dixons / PC World (Britains largest computer shop) use it on their own desktops.

I don't know anyone who works there to know how they get on with it.

I've seen a couple of small charities use it, and they don't actually notice that they aren't using MS Office.

Re:Anybody using it?

[Thomas Miconi]

Guaranteed when I reload the complete document at a later point, equations will have been modified beyond recognition.

Obviously we need filter from OO format to OO format. I wonder if there will be any copyright issues though....

Thomas-

Re:Anybody using it?

[kaiwai]

Hmm, last time I remember, an unemployment rate of 5.x% is not considered tight. Maybe if you were an employer in NZ which has an unemployment rate of 3.5%, you *COULD* justify that statement, but the fact remains, its an employers market in the US.

Re:Anybody using it?

[neurologist]

I have just started using open office on my Mac. So far I have encountered one important problem using wildcards in find and replace with oowriter. Find and replace has a strange problem finding blank lines - in short it can't. For some unaccountable reason 'soft line' breaks (typed with Shift Enter) are found using \n, where end of line characters are found using $. Just to ensure it makes no sense at all if you replace using \n you get a normal LFCR inserted, not a 'soft return'. AFAIK you can't search and replace 'word'LFCR, (just the word gets replaced, not the newline) and of course you can't find 'word'followed by several newlines, let alone replace them. Short of using Java you can't find ASCII characters (or newlines) at all. I find my self needing this functionality a lot to cut down the size of documents, and of course I only discovered this problem recently as I had a deadline to meet. I'm aware of a complex java solution and will have to get to grips with it (yetch).

Re:Anybody using it?

[Werrismys]

About 400 users, and we converted.

OO Writer is better than Word. It handles images and footers better. PDF export is, as you say, excellent feature. We also have the open source PDF creator installed, but it creates bigger files with worse output than OO.

Impress is good, but it sucks at importing Powerpoint presentations. The only thing that correctly shows Powerpoint presentations is Powerpoint, or the M$ free viewer. The free viewer thankfully works perfectly even under Wine, so even Linux desktops can show those.

OO Calc is another thing... most Excel files have macros or some such. Excel can't be beat, even with its limitations.. people who have to constantly modify excel format files have M$ Office license also.

But, slowly, M$ office suite can be replaced. It's a good suite IMO except for Word, which I hate, but using it encourages lock-in to Win32 platform and one vendor and proprietary formats.

When OO 2.0 comes out it will most certainly tilt the balance somewhat.. All those who are on the verge of converting now in 1.1.x OO era... take a look at 2.0 beta.

Re:Anybody using it?

[SunPin]

Yes. Spent a year phasing OpenOffice into my business. The dealbreaker has always been the database. What I do with productivity software is simple--I write documents and work on spreadsheets. What I love about OpenOffice is that I can give my clients pdf versions of my documents. No worries about the rogue client that wants to play with the numbers to make a point. Furthermore, having a pirated copy of Microsoft Office is completely out of line with my beliefs (Buddhism) so I wanted it gone but I couldn't afford to just roll completely into OpenOffice. With the 2.0 beta, it's "good enough" and Microsoft Office is completely eradicated. I don't necessarily appreciate the flippant attitude of OpenOffice bug report managers. In fact, I think they're complete assholes but I know how to work around stuff like "xls file loads as Writer/web page". The problem is, regular people don't and will simply not use OpenOffice if they come across stupid anomalies.

Re:Anybody using it?

[paulatz]

I assume that you are saving in OOo sxw format. If you are saving in proprietary/secret MS format it is you fault.

Re:Anybody using it?

[dodobh]

TeX, and/or LaTeX rock for equations.

Re:Anybody using it?

[dodobh]

OO 2.0 includes a DB like application. And as for including MySQL, I wonder which of the two is worse, MySQL or Access.

Re:Anybody using it?

[JohnFluxx]

funny enough, you already said the solution. Enter in "= with the speech mark :)

Re:Anybody using it?

[mark_lybarger]

what kind of rpm is openoffice.org dependant upon? (besides the fact that you need lots of cruft to get koffice installed (qt, kdebase, kdelibs, etc,etc). i run have openoffice.org installed on my machines and no RPM software installed that i can see.

Re:Anybody using it?

[RenatoRam]

In the past I've used OOo (1.1.2) and python/UNO to automatically open, recover, convert and save with a name deduced from internal data more than 700 MSOffice .doc files that were recovered from a broken raidset.

Sure, on files utterly destroyed OO crashed, but in the end I recovered several hundred documents, saving tens of hours of tedious work.

And that was medical data that were NEVER backupped. Say thanks to OOo :-)

Re:Anybody using it?

[sadiklis]

DISCLAIMER: I'm not using OOo much and have not stumbled upon this personally, so consider it a rumor:

One post on a local mailing list said that a document writen as MS Word doc might crash Word XP on attempt to open it...

Re:Anybody using it?

[Anonymous Coward]

OOo-2 has a slightly faster startup, but I think your problem is that you're not using the quickstart.
OfficeXP uses the preloaded libraries from Windows and IE, whereas OOo (since being multiplatform) has its own libs and therefore needs the quickstart to feel snappy.

- Peder

Re:Anybody using it?

[theCoder]

Isn't that standard behavior for spreadsheet applications? It has been for as far as I remember. The standard convention for getting around that problem (formula vs literal) is to put a single quote (') before the equal sign. The single quote won't be show (if fact, it looks like OOo deletes it, requiring that you add it back if you ever have to edit the text).

Re:Anybody using it?

[neves]

Yes! OO saved my wife's M.Sc. thesis. In the eve of day to deliver it, MS Office corrupted the file and crashed every time she opened it. She was almost crying when I used OO to open it, deleted the corrupted data (weird chars in text), saved it again and word stopped crashing. Lucky she was to marry a nerd. Imagine if she was alone, as an usual windows user should be?

Latex...?

[sewagemaster]

wouldn't it be nice if there's a better latexOO/doc conversion? One of the biggest problem is with math equations, but isn't mathml also some sort of a standard that shouldn't be that hard to covert into? also there are lots of problems with tables.latex2rtf and some other sharewares are nice, but they don't seem to do the conversion too well...

Re:Latex...?

[Coryoth]

If you have to use OpenOffice, but want real equations in documents and presentations, there's always this. It's quite a nice little plugin for OpenOffice that uses TeX to render math to an image file, which it then inserts into the document. The TeX commands used to render the image are inserted into image attributes in the header so that you can go back and edit equations as well. Simple and ingenious, and ought to become standard for OpenOffice. As nice as their equation editor is, it's rendering is ugly as sin compared to TeX.

Jedidiah.

Re:Latex...?

[delire]

good timing && fantastic, thanks..

Re:Latex...?

[The_reformant]

I'm actuallt quite impressed with OO.orgs compatability with Microsoft Equation objects. I used it to open some pretty hefty .docs I made during my maths degree and although it took a little while loading the equations it seemed more stable than using word with lots of equations (I have problems with running out of memory and general system slowdown sometimes when working with lots of equations in word) I use OO.org on and off but sometimes end up drawn back to office due to familiarity but OO.org is a pretty damn impressive product. Adding some better scripting/macro capabilities should I thinkbecome a priority so people can make the same sort of mini-applications which are possible in excel/word

Re:Latex...?

[Coryoth]

Adding some better scripting/macro capabilities should I think become a priority so people can make the same sort of mini-applications which are possible in excel/word

Well, given that they now have support for scripting in Python, things will definitely get better. Of course there's still the issue of the underlying APIs that the scripts are using. Having not actually done any OOo scripting work I can't vouch for those. Generally, though, it does look like they are payng attention to making scripting both easy and powerful.

Jedidiah.

Re:Latex...?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have just finished my thesis in Latex and now when OO.org 2.0 is out (or will be soon), I would like to switch to it. However, there are no converters from latex to OO.org. To be honest, there are no converters from latex to anything that are decent (supporting all the addons one can have), but I think it would be good idea to have one.

Something like Tex4ht http://n4u.ath.cx/htlatex/ would be good.

Re:Latex...?

[Coryoth]

To be honest, there are no converters from latex to anything that are decent

I find the LaTeX to PDF and LaTeX to DVI converters to be quite excellent (not just decent). I think you'll be able to find a LaTeX to Lyx converter that works quite well as well. If you want to convert to MS Word or OpenOffice then things get much trickier because, in the end, we're actually talking about different kinds of applications. TeX and to a lesser extent LaTeX are about typesetting, while Word and Writer are about word processing. There are many many things that you can do in TeX that just can't be done in Word or Writer. Expecting to have a converter that is "(supporting all the addons one can have)" is like expecting a photohop to MS Paint converter to support all photoshop's features in the resulting MS Paint document. It just can't happen. That's nto to say converters can't exist, merely that they must necessarily be restricted in what they can do.

Jedidiah.

Re:Latex...?

[Jagasian]

My god, who in their right mind would write up a Latex document in OO or Word? LyX is a much better application for Latex development. If you are willing to spend money and you want a similar application for Windows, try Scientific Word.

Re:Latex...?

[BenjyD]

Why switch away from Latex? I can't imagine having to go back to having to worry about figure positioning etc.

Latex is perfect for theses: you can just worry about the content and structure and the layout comes automatically from that.

Re:Latex...?

[kisak]

Thanks for that link! Have been looking for something similar. Have you suggested to OpenOffice developers to include the package? (Actually, don't even know where to suggest this, I will have to lurk around openoffice.org web site ...)

Re:Why use OpenOffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Microsoft Office is free?

Is that free as in freeform or free as in freefall?

More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[mao che minh]

OO.org really have their work cut out for them. I'd really like to see OO.org approach computer manufacturers like Dell and present a strong case as to why distributing OO.org with their systems will add value for their customers - perhaps as part of the free software suite Dell customers already recieve with new systems?

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell would charge something for it--whatever is less than Microsoft Works and other options.

I noticed some smaller PC builder selling preinstalled OOo for $30.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[Timesprout]

What they really need is to be approaching corporations and presenting a strong case why deploying OO will reduce costs and add value to their employees/customers/clients experience.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[bunratty]

OEMs distributing OOo is unlikely, as they're already distributing trial versions of MS Office on their systems. Does anyone know how much OEMs have to pay per system for the trial version? Would it really be worth it to ship OOo instead?

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[Penguinoflight]

I'd fully support that position. If you're going to talk for 1 hour on average supporting OOo it's worth getting $30 for it.

You have to remember, anyone silly enough to pay someone else to load their software isn't going to know how to use it.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[Lord Kano]

I noticed some smaller PC builder selling preinstalled OOo for $30.

I suspect that the charge is for the labor and future tech support. If people don't know how to download and install OpenOffice, then they will probably need some help using it.

LK

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[zecg]

More uphill? I disagree completely - while Firefox competes against MS's "freebeer" program already installed on most computers in the world today, this one competes against quite an expensive package. And guess what? It fulfills the needs of most users just fine, just as it handles most MS office documents just fine. YMMV, but it's freebeer.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[hendridm]

I suspect the problem is name recognition. They can probably get Word Perfect or Lotus Smart Suite for pennies a disc. Although OO.org is free, it doesn't have the recognition for lowly end users that Word Perfect or (*gasp*) even Lotus.

That said, perhaps more education is in order. My father in law wanted me to find him a "good deal" on a legal copy of Office 2003. When I showed him what it was going to cost, he balked. I suggested he try OpenOffice. He asked what it was, and after explaining to him what it was he seemed releuctant. He liked Office because he was used to it, and he had a hard time believing something that was free would be any good.

I installed it on his new machine, and he loved it. He couldn't believe you could get something that was just like MS Office for nothing! He was very pleased.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[roror]

I am not sure who, in US, distributes trial version of MS Office. No one distributes full version for sure. Almost everyone offers to install it before shipping for a fee that is close to the retail cost of the MS Office. The PC makers get a good deal for the windows XP, but, not for the MS Office. Even if they installed trial one, people will have to buy the office suit paying a hefty fee after the trial period is over.

So, I think in this case OO.o has a fat chance of starting a movement. May be a marketing burst like firefox did, but targeting the OEMs, would work. Preinstalled OO.o can do wonders.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[vandan]

Shouldn't be all that hard.

With IE vs Firefox, the argument about lower costs with Firefox is harder to demonstrate, as IE is free-as-in-beer.

With OpenOffice, people are aware of the obvious cost difference from the start ... without requiring one of us to sit them down and explain it to them.

Once the functionality is at the right level ( OOo 1 was close, OOo 2 might just do it - it's working damned well for us in testing ), people should flock to it.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[sconeu]

I am not sure who, in US, distributes trial version of MS Office

Toshiba.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[STrinity]

With IE vs FF, the Mozilla Foundation has the superior product. With MS Office vs OO.o it's pretty much a toss up -- they're both slow, bloated, and filled with annoying quirks.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[bunratty]

Also HP.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[Firehawk]

Yes, but don't forget the price point. People will change products when the functionality is significantly different at the same price or the price is significantly different for the same functionality.

Last I checked, MS Office cost a whole lot more than OpenOffice.org ...

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[MC68000]

Ahem.... MS Office is slow and bloated? I'm only a casual user, so I can't comment about how many of the amazing amount of features of MS Office are actually useful, but I take issue with your comment that MS Office is slow. I'd estimate load times of MS office to be around 1-2 seconds. Even with Quickstart enabled, OO takes 15-20 seconds to load.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[platypus]

I'd say that the problem is that many home users have the choice between a pirated MS Office (or more seldomly a OEM version supplied with the computer) vs. a free version of OOo. Many choose the pirated version, because they somehow, strangely, perceive this as being better from a price-feature POV - don't ask me why.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[eraserewind]

Well, I've got to disagree. Firefox is plainly superior to IE, but for all the wishing that we might do about OO.o MS Office is still a quite superior product. There is certainly enough goodwill towards OO.o for it to become very popular, but for too many things it falls short. (and I know that many of those are "unnfair" MS Office interop issues, but that's just the way it is).

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[STrinity]

You're forgetting one thing -- for you to get tech support from OO.o (something pretty much every business will want), you have to pay for the Star Office version.

Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE

[JohnFluxx]

How many businesses pay for tech support for MS Office? The small businesses I've worked in haven't The large ones tend to have their own support staff.

Fix Microsoft Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to Microsoft Office's suggest feature page and ask for
"Please add read/write support for the OASIS document formats found in OpenOffice.org 2.0."

Re:Fix Microsoft Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Already did that... But I don't know it was a Good Thing. They would probably allow to _read_ those files, but not write them (or atleast not with some extensions of their own).

This way, this document standard will also benefit them, as people will just treat them as ms-office documents. Then when they hit save, the whole thing will become an ms-office document.

Not only that, but even if you would (should you be able to) install support for _writing_ documents in this standard, a warning would be presented that not all the features in ms-office can be used with this document format. That will discourage people from using it.

However, if ms-office would simply _not_ be compatible with these documents, maybe some will actually get the idea and install OO.o.

Just my $0.02

Re:Fix Microsoft Office

[Scoria]

Why would Microsoft elect to support OASIS? If support for their proprietary formats were no longer a necessity, then Office would become increasingly obscure.

On the other hand, perhaps they might adopt a proprietary variant of the OASIS format. No intelligent businessman, however, would jeopardize his "bread and butter" product in order to satisfy a competitor.

Re:Fix Microsoft Office

[Doc Ruby]

Microsoft keeps its formats proprietary as a stragetgy to keep customers. It also solicits and uses customer feedback to keep customers. Sometimes the two strategies are at odds. It could be helpful to use its conflict against itself, if only to see which is a higher priority. Or it could produce OASIS support, if they prioritize customer demand. It might even have ripple effects of further undermining MS, if they deprioritize customer feedback to protect format hegemony. Helping tip MS to be less in sync with their market will keep the dinosaur's momentum headed for the big thud. This specific instance, though, is so obscure as to probably not register, so it might not be worth the effort.

Re:Fix Microsoft Office

[say]

They might need to support it, because when a lot of people start using OASIS standards, it would be an easy point for the FOSS enthusiasts ("Look! Our OO.o can open documents in open standards AND MSOs proprietary standards, while MSO can only open its own standard"). At least in the home market, that might be a major "selling" point for OpenOffice. I'm beginning to receive OpenOffice documents from completely computer illiterate people.

Re:Fix Microsoft Office

[Doc Ruby]

Moderation +1
70% Insightful
30% Flamebait

What is this "Flamebait" crap? MS devotees might argue that MS doesn't keep its formats proprietary as a strategy to keep customers. Or they might argue (why, I dunno) that MS listens to its customers. Saying the dinosaur is headed for the big thud might invite flames, but let 'em try - we can straighten 'em out with simple facts. That's the point of discussions: some people might flame in response to anything, but they can be set right, or outed as mere flamers, with rebuttals. No, this is just another case of TrollMods suppressing a post they don't like, but don't have the guts to disagree with in public.

Re:Fix Microsoft Office

[m50d]

Even just reading it would be good. I could send people documents without having to worry about them so much. (I use KOffice and there's no .doc export capability, so I have to do rtf and avoid using anything too complicated)

Re:Fix Microsoft Office

[Doc Ruby]

Moderation -1
100% Overrated

Meta-TrollMod'ing: my day is complete.

Exaggeration...?

[Infinityis]

"The interview is fairly long and detailed..."

I must have RTFA in the past too many times, as this seems a rather short interview. Even the ones Slashdot sends out have 10 questions, where this one come in at an overwhelming 6 questions.

Re:Exaggeration...?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The interview is fairly long and detailed..."

I must have RTFA in the past too many times, as this seems a rather short interview. Even the ones Slashdot sends out have 10 questions, where this one come in at an overwhelming 6 questions.

You just don't understand the Slashspeak. "The interview is fairly long and detailed" is the editor's way of saying "I read this article so the summary may be in some ways accurate this time... well, I read some of it anyway."

Re:Exaggeration...?

[a gremlin]

I find your sarcasm in the use of "overwhelming" here very underwhelming...

Re:Why?

[Penguinoflight]

Why not just post a torrent in base64 while you're at it?

One question

[stripe4]

Will there be a GUI installer for Linux version of OO.o 2.0? It's just that Slackware doesn't handle RPMS natively (I know rpm2tgz but this isn't the cleanest way) and I don't want to compile it from source.

Re:One question

[puddpunk]

Don't use such a shitty distro for fucks sake. The whole POINT of a distro is to package the available software! Why put a lot of extra work into making a GUI installer that works on linux when EVERY OTHER DISTRO EXCEPT SLACKWARE packages it natively. Even Gentoo does it!

Re:One question

[Penguinoflight]

Insulting slackware users isn't the answer. This will eventally get ported to slackware by a package maintainer, but it's really not worth the trouble for a 'beta candidate'

Why do the software developers always prepackage for the big releases that dont need any help? I say put that extra work into making the source usable.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the installer works, and it works the same on all those different distro's. People who just want to use OO.o will benefit from it, because no matter what supported OS they have to use, they can install OO.o in the way they're used to. Also the installer runs under Windows and works well on it too.

Ofcourse, you can still install OO.o through synaptic, YaST or whatever suits you. But the point is, is that there is a generic way that is provided by OO.o that will work for all. They don't need to put the user to go through finding out what OS they have and then learn them about their package manager. Instead, if you dont know how to install, then they can help you regardless of your distro, basically.

This is actually important for the acceptance of OO.o.

Re:One question

[TractorBarry]

Speaking from experience I know how hard it is to compile OO.o on Slackware :)

First download the tarball.

Now su to root and perform a network install:

tar -zxvf OO_tarball_name
cd OO_source_directory_name

./setup -net

Now return to your user and:

cd /opt/OO_directory_name
setup

Or see The instructions for full details.

Boy that's hard, I'd rather write a kernel driver using my feet to operate the keyboard anyday of the week. Damned unusable Slackware making me both think & type. It'll never catch on. Never I tells ya.

Re:One question

[Anonymous Coward]

1. ./setup -net is not a compile.
2. OpenOffice 2.0 Beta comes as a series of rpm files. I used rpmunpack to unpack it and move it to where I wanted it. Works fine for me. I've used it to read MS files that 1.1.4 had trouble with. Saved them in 1.0 format which I was then able to read with 1.1.4.

Re:One question

[eraserewind]

Out of curiosity, why do you need root to install an office suite (and beta software at that)?

My major Problem

[slashdot4ever]

dont get me wrong, i love ooo, and i would be sold if it wasnt for the crappy spellcheck. maybe i have been raised wrong, and schooled wrong. but i suck at spelling, and so does ooo. here is the test that i ran. i spelled the word "Meticulously" phonetically, or fonetically if you will. and in ooo 2beta, i get about 10 sugesstions that all start with the letter "r". same thing in ooo 1.1. so i guess that ooo has made no progression in this area. in wordperfect 12, one sugesstion, and it was right. in word i bet it would be the same (i cannot aford to try it). I also tried google, and it sugessted the correct spelling. would be that hard to develop a front end for googles sugesstion service for ooo? so it wouldnt suck? this is the major compalint that i have with ooo, and it is major in my opinion. Kevin

Re:My major Problem

[Anonymous Coward]

i spelled the word "Meticulously" phonetically, or fonetically if you will. and in ooo 2beta, i get about 10 sugesstions that all start with the letter "r".

Have you also got a speech impediment?

Re:My major Problem

[ThisIsFred]

I tried various mispellings, and OO 1.1.4 doesn't seem to have trouble with that word. If you're spelling it 'reticulously', then I don't think MSO or WP is going to have a clue, either.

Otherwise, if it's that off the mark, I'd venture to guess it's a bug that needs correcting.

Re:My major Problem

[dahlek]

I have to agree completely. It's spell check sucks. I've often had to resort to dictionary.com to look up a word - it sucks at phonetic spell-suggestions, and for a bad speller like me, it's a serious limitation...

"immiedietly" is an example - it simply will not give the right suggestions or anything remotely close.

Re:My major Problem

[sceptre0]

"immiedietly", "reticulously", and "metikulusly" all found the right words for me. The spell check doesn't seem to be that big of a deal. The thesaurus could definitely use some work though. But I guess thesaurus.com will work just fine.

Re:My major Problem

[BenjyD]

Troll posted verbatim from the last slashdot openoffice article. And modded up both times.

Re:My major Problem

[slashdot4ever]

well, i will admit that it is the same as the last post. but noone responded to that one, i thought i would give it another try and see if anyone replies with an answer. i dont see anything wrong with that Kevin

Re:My major Problem

[angle_slam]

As Jerry Seinfeld (I think) once asked, "ever wonder why the word phonetically isn't spelled the way it sounds?"

Re:Why use OpenOffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Linux?

OpenSource

[paithuk]

Since everything in the proprietary world of Microsoft and MacOS has to be copied or rejuvinated within the OpenSource community, is it possible that people are forgetting about innovation and focusing too much on mirroring what others do? Apple have come a long way simply through innovating, just like many modern successful businesses but without major goals of innovation, isn't it possible that the OpenSource community may be stuck forever in a game of catch up?

Re:OpenSource

[Penguinoflight]

Ask yourself what microsoft has done to innovate office in the last 5 years. Fortunately, office software isn't a moving target to compete with. Innovation is only the best thing to do in this case, not the only thing to do.

Personally I'd just like to see OO get a better UI, and move away from JAVA. With all the help from Sun, Java is probably here to stay, but we can hope for the UI improvement.

Re:OpenSource

[ticktockticktock]

OpenOffice uses Java?

Re:OpenSource

[paithuk]

Microsoft employees are encouraged to innovate but until a few years back, their functional departments caused a lot of red tape issues and progress was very slow. This has all changed now and the company has been split up into individual divisions who are allowed to work freely without having to consult the chairman or the CEO on decision making. This will encourage Microsoft to innovate more, but to be honest I was really talking about them since they became successful a long time ago and it's a whole different game when your goal is to remain on top... If the OpenSource community want Linux to ever become mainstream the UI has definately got to improve (like you mentioned) and people need to start thinking about what new things we might do with our available resources. Since OpenSource isn't driven like a commercial entity, I'd be surprised if the level of innovation could ever match those of companies like 3M, Cisco, etc, which questions whether they'll ever be an opportunity to "take down Microsoft". But isn't it worth trying? I'm not quite sure why you want to move away from Java? Is it because you want to lock people into using your platform (which is of course the key to success)?

Re:OpenSource

[delire]

"Since everything in the proprietary world of Microsoft and MacOS has to be copied or rejuvinated within the OpenSource community, is it possible that people are forgetting about innovation and focusing too much on mirroring what others do?"

Uh what?

I really hope you didn't intend too much emphasis on the everything in that comment. If so however, you show great and promising talent - but sadly not in this field..

I'd reccommend you look at advancing other disciplines, like Generalism or any of the other Great Profanities.

Re:OpenSource

[Penguinoflight]

I think java gets in the way of OO development. There's no legitamite reason I know of to use more than one high level language in a single project. Java is a cross platform language, but it's really too slow to use for a production application like openoffice.

It bothers me personally for the following reasons: 1) installing java is a pain Sun can't make a installer, and there always seems to be a problem with linking.
2) Openoffice is significantly hard to compile without using more than one language.
3) Nobody makes statically linked binaries for OO.

It's really about focus. Creativity in a project should be within a bound. Unless your creativity is limited somewhere, all you get is chaos, which isn't usable.

A language like C/C++ has enough foundation for plenty of creativity, this project would just make so much more sense written in one language.

Re:OpenSource

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree. Though to be fair, WP's spellcheck is a very good bit of software.

Re:OpenSource

[ThisIsFred]

I'm willing to guess there was quite a bit of innovation and feature-packing going on in MSO over the last five years. But here's the problem: I don't need most of those features, and neither do my users. Some of the things are counter-intuitive and frustrating to a lot people. I also don't need the MS Office price tag, either. Use only what you need to get the job done and save money. Isn't that what this is all about anyway?

Re:OpenSource

[uss_valiant]

Ask yourself what microsoft has done to innovate office in the last 5 years. Fortunately, office software isn't a moving target to compete with. Innovation is only the best thing to do in this case, not the only thing to do.

IWM ProWord is a very innovative product based on MS Word. Its features speak for themself, but it's only available in German, for now. You'll never lose time formatting the document again. Among its features:
- True templating
- An efficient touch system ("10-Finger System") for editing and formatting
- Numerous services, eg international address and form letter service, office printing, transform a document into a letter or into a book, ...

Look and Feel
Features
IWM ProWord

Re:OpenSource

[nine-times]

I dunno. Innovation can be nice and all, but then again, it's a little hard to control innovation. I mean, it's great to say, "we should be innovative," but you try to create new paradigms for document management from scratch. It's not so easy as all that, there isn't always agreement about what needs innovation, since sometimes a convention is the convention for good reason. To clarify further: I think it's great to reevaluate old conventions, looking for better ways to go about things, but perhaps asking for innovation is a little like asking for inspiration-- it doesn't always come on command.

Besides, it's not clear that innovation is really what's needed from OOo. Businesses (which are arguably the primary market for Office apps) are often far more interested in things like reliability, productivity, interoperability, and costs (both up-front and support costs). The fact that it's similar to MS Office might even be a plus, in that it requires little new training. That software is "innovative" is of much smaller appeal.

However, I will totally grant that a *major* innovation that will account for a large improvement in reliability, productivity, interoperability, and lower costs would catch a lot of eyes. However, going back to my first point, how do you force that innovation along?

I guess this response is written largely because I've read a number of posts on /. which claim that OSS isn't innovative enough and copies proprietary software too much, but it strikes me that very few of those posts include any innovative ideas themselves. They merely complain or urge others to be innovative and creative, which I believe people are probably already trying to do, but coming up with brilliant ideas is a little harder than sitting down and deciding to come up with brilliant ideas.

Re:OpenSource

[Ogerman]

However, I will totally grant that a *major* innovation that will account for a large improvement in reliability, productivity, interoperability, and lower costs would catch a lot of eyes.

I don't see OO.org as an innovative project; I see it as a transitionary project. There's really not much innovation left within the current "word processing" paradigm. After all, it's nearly 30 years old now! So I see OO.org as a temporary free alternative for while the really innovative stuff is being worked on. I say transitionary because OO.org is a good way for people and businesses to begin migrating their documents out of proprietary formats into something future-proof. The future is web-driven document management systems where content and presentation are cleanly separated and all information is stored in a database instead of scattered throughout local and network filesystems in various formats. I'm not talking about the hack-job web groupware solutions available today where everything is done in a regular word processor and then uploaded to some intranet site. I'm talking about all work being done within a highly integrated, rich-web interface.

However, going back to my first point, how do you force that innovation along?

You put highly visionary people in charge of teams of highly motivated programmers who agree with the vision. (-: Have you noticed how fast the Blender3D project is moving along? Perfect example.. it's new, it's exciting, and everybody wants to help out. Not so many people are really that excited about doing OO.org development. It's not the cutting edge, it's pretty dull and boring work, much of it is re-inventing wheels. Yet OO.org is still very necessary at this time, so my thanks and appreciation to all those who are slugging away doing the hard work for the benefit of us all!

I believe people are probably already trying to do, but coming up with brilliant ideas is a little harder than sitting down and deciding to come up with brilliant ideas.

Software is a very evolutionary field. There really aren't any major breakthroughs.. just a bunch of baby steps of progress. Now, there are paradigm shifts, in which the combination of available technologies enables new approaches to old problems. (Such as my prediction that rich-web intranet apps will obsolete today's concept of word processing..) But it's really unfair to say that Open Source projects are "just copying" proprietary software because that proprietary software had a long history of copying other proprietary software and making small improvements along the way. It's really no different. (And it's why software patents are so bad for everyone. Even ol' Billy G admitted that back in the mid 90's.)

Re:OpenSource

[hazah]

Since OpenSource isn't driven like a commercial entity, I'd be surprised if the level of innovation could ever match those of companies like 3M, Cisco, etc, which questions whether they'll ever be an opportunity to "take down Microsoft".

You're right. Software, in general, is not driven like a commercial entity. Software is driven by a contribution of ideas. Companies make it easy to facilitate the environment. But companies are business, and business is, like software, a colaboration of ideas. I don't think that the actual goal of OSS is to "take down M$". It happens to be a convineant side effect.

The thing is that software is driven by the same thing that drives business, which drives commercial entities. It's just problematic to treat it as a commercial entity due to it's nature. So I would argue that OO.o (oooo) is not playing catch up, as much as solving the current set of problems that they heard of. Or trying to. Office is just another aproach to the same problem, by someone else. OO.o is simply maturing into it's own tool for you to compete with, in today's glorious market.

Karma free article text

[Anonymous Coward]

If the site gets slow, mod this up. Otherwise, keep it at 0.
-----
An Interview with the OpenOffice.org Team.
Aditya Nag
email(@)adityanag(.)org
adityanag(@)gmail(.) com
Date: March, 2005

This article was first published on :www.newsforge.com. UPDATE: The article was written by Bruce Byfield, but the Interview in the sidebar is mine. In fact, it's an extremely cut down interview, which is why I have posted the entire interview here.

I asked the OpenOffice.org team a few questions about OpenOffice.org in general, and their upcoming release. Questions 1-3 were answered by Louis Suarez-Potts, while questions 4-6 were answered by Colm Smyth of Sun Microsystems. Louis is OpenOffice.org's Community Manager, member and chair of the Community Council, and lead of many OpenOffice.org projects including the Native Language Confederation.

Colm is a StarOffice Architect, and was responsible for defining the product concept for OpenOffice.org 3.0 (or StarOffice 9).

Ques.1: What are the core strengths of OpenOffice? What do you think are the features that will help you replace the dominent office suite?

Ans. 1 : OpenOffice.org (as we must refer to it) is to begin with open: that's its key strength, as it that element allows a vast community to inspect, improve, and work on the source. In terms of the application, well, it depends on your audience. A so-called knowledge worker would key features such as the built-in PDF export or Shockwave Flash (for presentations) to be very important, as it makes it easy to share non-editable files. They'd also like the new component (new with 2.0), Base, which is our Access equivalent. Only it works better and is a real relational database. Other things that make the application important include, in 2.0, a very good Calc, which is the equivalent of Excel, and what is probably the best presentation software.But that's just for starters. OpenOffice.org is, with 2.0, using an open standard file format, the OpenDocument. By using this file format, which is open and a standard, we thus defy proprietary exclusion and dependency. There is no possibility of vendor lock in with an open standard. Furthermore, because it is sophisticated XML, it can work with other equipped applications, meaning that developers, companies, can employ OpenOffice.org in heretofore unknown ways; innovation is engendered in this manner.

Finally, what is the key feature in OpenOffice.org 2.0 that will replace
the status quo? Offhand, I'd say it is simply that it does what people
want easily and simply and does not also drag them into stuff they never thought they had to do. Good software is not something you are saddled with for the rest of your life, it's what gets the job done.

Ques. 2: Do you believe the day of proprietary formats will ever come to an end?

Ans. 2: Not entirely, no. But for things like office suites, yes. What would determine a move to open standards is the size of the market. I can see scientific arenas, say, using proprietary formats and software because of limited markets.

Ques. 3: One major advantage of OOo is the internationalization. Do you see this opening up new markets in developing countries?

Ans. 3: Yes! Very much so. And we've been the leader here. OOo has provided the nucleus for any number of local efforts to gain control over software production and distribution. Our native-language confederation, which I help lead and helped create, has enabled millions to use office software in their language and to get support for it. It's really a fascinating and important point. Open source is not happening only in the US. In fact, much of OSS is happening in India, China, Brazil, Europe, where governments are trending to using FOSS (free/open source software) and away from proprietary and monopolistic software for reasons that are as much political as pragmatic and economic. Political, because FOSS offers a way out of the hegemony of US software products and English

Why use Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

When Windows is free?

Re:Why use OpenOffice?

[Coryoth]

When Microsoft Office is free[ed2k link]?

Considering the utterly prohibitive costs to a small business should they ever be subject to a BSA audit while using the "free" version of MS Office, I'd say it's actually pretty expensive. Honestly, an audit can be a business changing experience. It just isn't worth the risk.

The last small company I worked for was busy transitioning as many staff as they could over to OpenOffice. They weren't doing this because OpenOffice was cheaper, they were doing this because they didn't have to bother with the task of filing and managing licenses - the reduced cost was just a bonus.

Jedidiah.

Can it really be true?

[bmw]

The main focus of our efforts and the most important benefits that customers will see is improved usability and significantly improved interoperability with Microsoft Office formats. This addresses the day-to-day needs of many more end users and makes
OpenOffice.org/StarOffice a real alternative.

I really hope they mean this. Dealing with MS Office formats has got to be insanely difficult and as of yet no one has really been able to do it well (not even Microsoft!). Life would be so much better if there was another office suite that could handle all the MS formats without choking on everything but the simplest of documents. I've got great hopes for OO.org 2.0 but you'll have to excuse me if I'm still a bit skeptical.

Re:Can it really be true?

[ThisIsFred]

I really hope they mean this. Dealing with MS Office formats has got to be insanely difficult and as of yet no one has really been able to do it well (not even Microsoft!).

No kidding! But it's never going to happen that way. Jeez, assert yourself. Why not pick a suitable format for your document storage needs that will be readable in 10 years, and then pick the application that can read it, and best fits your budget?

Re:Can it really be true?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it possible that the EU case can fix this???

OS X port

[flibble-san]

Come on guys, stop being idiots and work on an OS X port.

Re:OS X port

[delire]

It may be they feel the 'market' for OSX is too small; given the snowballing trend of rolling out Linux desktops in goverments and large enterprises (and the existing predominance of Windos) it's perhaps likely that OO on OSX will always be playing catchup.

Re:OS X port

[DuBois]

Been there. Done that:

Neo Office/J

Re:OS X port

[mailtomomo]

NeoOfficeJ.

Re:OS X port

[Anonymous Coward]

There is an official port. Just use Apple's X11. And then there's NeoOffice/J.

Re:OS X port

[nine-times]

Not to downplay the appreciation the NeoOffice guys deserve, but it sure would be nice if the OpenOffice guys jumped on board and started releasing OSX native versions parallel to the Linux/Windows versions.

I mean, I'm glad that NeoOffice is out there, but by not being an Official port by OpenOffice, it has fewer people working on it, and work being done on OpenOffice is done without regard for the OSX port.

Until they..

[AuSerpent]

...make the install dummy proof I won't be recommending it again. I recently had the nerve to suggest that my mother-in-law try it out. She is just a regular internet user. She uses email, browses the web, and has used Microsoft Office on occassion so I thought it would be a snap for her. I emailed her a link and small description of Open Office and she was thrilled to give it a shot.

Well the downloads (even the stable) for the office suite are a zip file. The zip file extracts to a directory with a horde of different files. She had no idea what a zip file was and when I finally talked her through extracting it she was baffled by the tons of files.

Installing it this way may seem like a trivial task to the average computer geek but to your casual user this is a very intimidating process and if it weren't for me on the phone with her she would have never figured it out. I don't want to do install support to every person that I think might find use in Open Office so I'm just going to bite my tongue or suggest they shell out some cash for a CD they can pop in and have it hold their hand through the process.

Re:Until they..

[flibble-san]

the people who did The Open CD have packaged OpenOffice into an installer. Good idea but something the original team should do.

Re:Until they..

[jonabbey]

2.0 / Star Office 8 is supposed to dramatically improve all of that. No more of that network install / workstation install crap.

Re:Until they..

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX installers get this right.

You download a file, which is a disk image. It mounts on the desktop, opens and shows a *single file* (a "package", which is actually a directory with lots of files, but you don't need to care). "Drag this file to your Applications folder, double click on it and it starts".

No need for an "installer". Uninstallation is "drag this file to the trash". No worries about local settings getting lost during upgrades.

How hard is that to do?

Re:Until they..

[jalefkowit]

The 2.0 beta install experience is much cleaner -- the ZIP has a nice setup.msi, you double click, it goes. No more of the kajillion files (which were a real drawback of 1.x).

Re:Until they..

[Anonymous Coward]

As if that was a bug!
It was actually a quite handy feature, you insensitive clod.

Re:Until they..

[Seumas]

Well, by all means, let's bitch and moan about the old version without even trying the new version to see that the installation could not be any simpler (and is, in fact, far simpler than even MS-Office).

Re:Until they..

[CastrTroy]

I'm not sure which version it was, but the "kajillion files" were all 1.4 MB in size. This allowed you to put the program on floppies and install from there if necessary. Not everybody has these fancy schmancy cd-rom things.

Re:Until they..

[Coryoth]

You download a file, which is a disk image. It mounts on the desktop, opens and shows a *single file* (a "package", which is actually a directory with lots of files, but you don't need to care). "Drag this file to your Applications folder, double click on it and it starts".

How hard is that to do?

If you're making a cross platform application like OpenOffice, very. Okay, it's quite easy, but the drag and drop disk image installer will weigh in at some ridiculous size. Because you need to be able to have it "just run" you need to include everything that you might need in the diskimage - you can't guarantee that every platform is going to have the required libraries. Next note that OO uses Java, mozilla, and python, among other things, so you're "package" is going to have to include a full version of each of those "just in case", let alone all the other small libraries that they make use of. Even if you do a static compile it will still be HUGE.

Jedidiah.

Re:Until they..

[jalefkowit]

So put that version out as a separate installer. Call it the "Marty McFly Time Machine Edition" or something.

Seriously, they could have at least put all those files in a subdirectory so that you didn't have to wade through them all to find the setup executable. On Win32 it invariably showed up at the bottom of the list, so you'd open the folder and be confronted with a long list of files that double-clicking did nothing. D'oh! A little organization would have improved the install experience greatly...

Re:Until they..

[ThisIsFred]

Speak for yourself. I don't want that Windows set-up autorun, 50,000 confirmations-before-install crap rammed down my throat. OOo's set up program name is 'setup'. What is so difficult to understand there?

In all honesty, I don't even like that. I'd prefer a directory heirarchy that I can put in a tarball. Leave the final tweaks, like the filetype registration and icon copy in a bunch of separate scripts. For the non-technical user, they can put a setup script in the archive root directory all by itself so it'll be nice and obvious.

Re:Until they..

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, setup.exe amongst a hundred files is a bit hard. They could put 001~zillion in a subdirectory to make it easier for Nana.

Re:Until they..

[Feztaa]

Jesus Christ, it's 2005. I don't remember the last time I saw a floppy drive, much less a floppy disk. I think it's fair to say that any computer that has a floppy but no CDROM is too old to run openoffice anyway.

Know your target audience...

Re:Until they..

[Jagasian]

You might want to consider using an operating system with a better package manager. On most Linux distros, installing OO is as easy as clicking on an entry in a GUI package manager listing of available packages. Even better, many distros install OO by default, when doing a desktop install.

Re:Until they..

[mandreiana]

Why don't you try OOo 2.0 which this article is about before you troll? You would have learned this is much easier.

You can also donate $$$ and asking for a fix of this in the comment field when only ooo 1.x was available. But it's easier to whine. Feel free to buy MS Office and whine to MS, I'm sure they'll listen.

Re:Until they..

[Sithgunner]

Last time I tried out the version 2.0 beta, they finally dropped putting tons of files in the zip with setup.exe in the bottom of the long list.

It was more like 10 files with setup.exe visible as the user opens up the zip folder.

The problem...

[eldacan]

I thought the problem was a lack of OS X hackers willing to work on OOo... Then in a sense OOo isn't the only one to blame...

Re:The problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

The way I understand it, OOo told the OS X hackers to wait for 2.0 because then it would be easy to do the port. The hackers eventually got tired of waiting and left. Now that 2.0 is almost here, the Mac port has been canceled because of a lack of developers.

Re:The problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Im going to buy a Mac Mini just for OS X and to gain experience on more usable software practices. I think its perfect for this. Your app success depends on the usability on OS X ALOT. It maybe a good application, but let down by the UI and hence a FLOP, just for that reason alone.

At the price of the Mac Mini, its worth its weight in gold for this alone, even use PearPC.

Re:The problem...

[flibble-san]

As far as I know, the 'OS X hackers' are working on NeoOfficeJ. I don't actually like NeoOfficeJ though. It's old of date and quite buggy.

Re:The problem...

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats stupid, its DILUTION of the brand, and we NEED branding, like Firefox. etc Stick to one brand and keep it at that otherwise it confuses people.

Re:The problem...

[Macrat]

You need to get out more. NeoOffice/J is updated monthly and is using the latest release OOo 1.1.x code.

Re:The problem...

[Macrat]

I think you are a bit confused.

OpenOffice.org is like Mozilla. I big pile of stinking code.

NeoOffice/J is like Firefox. An app that regular users can easily use on their platfrom.

Re:Why use OpenOffice?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would be bloody well impressed to see the BSA come to my office in Ghana :D

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Coryoth]

Does the OpenOffice team actually realize there are real and serious interface usability and elegance issues with their program, and desire to fix this?

I think they do. Usability, consistency, and GUI cleanup were some of the major tasks for 2.0. No 2.0 doesn't magically correct everything, but as far as usability goes it makes great strides over 1.0. The other thing to note, of course, is that in the end OpenOffice is aiming to be a fairly close work-alike to MS Office to make transitioning easier. That means that it will have the same GUI and usability issues as MS Office, as well as any of it's own. The MS Office inherited usability issues aren't likely to go away all that soon unfortunately - not util OO get's enough of a userbase that it can forge its own direction in the Office application market.

Jedidiah.

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

OO 2.0 is very usable, I dumped MS Office now infavour of OO, I would never have done this for 1.x

Its ready, for me at least. Never again shall I use MS Office.

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Okay. So is the OO2 beta candidate usable enough for end-users to try it out then in your opinion?

Feature request: portability

[jgarzik]

I have been waiting for ages to be able to build OpenOffice.org on 64-bit. When I'm unwinding from a long day of kernel work, I do silly things like porting Fedora Core to Alpha AXP or PA-RISC 64. OpenOffice.org and Mozilla are the two big packages that are a pain to port to new platforms.

It would really be nice if 0.000% of the openoffice.org effort devoted to press releases and promotion went instead to increasing the portability of the code :)

This lack of portability is really a pet peeve of mine. With Linux or NetBSD, you can run the same application on practically any hardware platform, just by recompiling... presuming the software was written without 32-bit assumptions. Linux (and NetBSD) becomes your portability layer, presuming your application meets some minimum standards.

Another pet peeve is that every big application re-invents cross-OS portability, which actually exacerbates the portability problem.

In my position, when you have 1000 packages to get running on Alpha AXP, each application's portability glue becomes a portability hindrance. As an example, Mozilla's portability layer is the reason why Mozilla does not build on alpha today.

Re:Feature request: portability

[Anonymous Coward]

It would really be nice if 0.000% of the openoffice.org effort devoted to press releases and promotion went instead to increasing the portability of the code

Two things:

- people that can promote open office != people that can increase the portability of the code
- promotion->more people know about it->more users and developers

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Definately.

I offer installable CDs for ppl that ask for MS Office. If they dont like it I suggest they go out and fork out a few hundred pounds for it. I even email my bank back with theyre documents they send me in word format , i send them back in BMP format and ask them for the money to buy MS Office to read theyre Word 2.0 documents :D

Works a charm.

dont the scientific community use open formats

[The_reformant]

In the article they said they thought the scientific community would use proprietary formats due to a smaller market however from my experience most of the scientific community uses latex and postscript which I beleive are open (some use pdf too which im not too sure about the licencing status of)

Re:dont the scientific community use open formats

[bluGill]

Think something like the output from their electron microscope. Something just common enough that someone makes it (instead of building it in house), but not so common that enough people care to make an open version. I don't know if electron microscope is a good example, but think on those lines, not documents which are open standards.

Re:dont the scientific community use open formats

[BenjyD]

MS Word format is becoming more popular. I was considered something of a weirdo for asking about LaTeX styles for the last conference paper I submitted. Very annoying, as Word is so hard to use compared to LaTeX, and its output is much uglier.

PDF is the standard format used, and is an open format.

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

What strides as 2.0 made in GUI and usability? From the screenshots of the beta, I see none.

OpenOffice only does what I tell it t do!

[Achra]

Seriously, this is the single reason that I use it over MS Office (except when I can't help it, like with Rational Soda and RequisitePro).. I used to work next to this guy, he would say "Wow, I never expected it to do that!" in joyful glee whenever MS Office did something truly bizarre with his formatting. Sometimes he would cry when undo didn't work. Office Interface

Re:OpenOffice only does what I tell it t do!

[Coryoth]

Oddly it is for the same reason that I favour TeX and LaTeX. They do precisely what you tell them to do. You can always step in and say "No, I want you to do exactly this! no matter how stupid it looks". Of course the downside is that it all relies on arcane commands, but one you know them you can pretty much do what you want.

Jedidiah.

Clueless about DBs

[leandrod]

> Base [...] is fully relational

It is not much as compared to other transgressors like MySQL or even PostgreSQL, but it is sad how developers can't grasp that SQL is in violation of the relational model. Claiming anything SQL is relation is like claiming 2+2=5 is some kind of 'improved' or 'practical' or 'good enough' algebra.

Re:Clueless about DBs

[Anonymous Coward]

How is SQL in violation of the relational model?

Re:Clueless about DBs

[turnus]

Could you please elaborate a bit on why SQL is not relational? I do use it a bit, am not an expert, and would appreciate a little education on this issue.

Re:Clueless about DBs

[Anonymous Coward]

It's one of those things that people rant about, either because they're utterly pedantic, or ignorant and contrarian.

Yes, SQL is not a pure relational language. However, it cleaves somewhat to set relational theory, as described by Codd and according to general understanding of set theory. Get over yourself. STFU.

Re:Clueless about DBs

[Arkywator]

2+2 always makes a 5. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Dialectical ABC.

Re:Clueless about DBs

[leandrod]

> Could you please elaborate a bit on why SQL is not relational?

You'd be better reading Date, Darwen and Pascal; but in a general way, SQL is full of conceptual errors and arbitrary limitations.

As for arbitrary limitations, the biggest one is lack of user-defined types. But the real problem is the conceptual side; for example, SQL allows for tables that are not relations, because a relation is a set and without a primary key an SQL table is just a bag.

The end result is that SQL is a lot less powerful and more complicated than it should be. And incidentally this is why people keep thinking they need an OODB or XMLDB or whatever, each of which are actually necessarily less powerful and more complicated than the relational model too.

Re:Clueless about DBs

[leandrod]

> it cleaves somewhat to set relational theory

It doesn't. It allows for bags (tables without a key), which definetly aren't sets and do a lot to complicate the SQL standard and hinder performance. And it uses a broken 3VL.

> as described by Codd

It do not even comply with Codd's rules, and these are obsolete already.

Re:yah uhm ok then

[Anonymous Coward]

I could do with less messages that end with "k thnx". Is there a more obnoxious web phrase that exists on the Internet? If there is, I'd like to know.

Why Use Windows?

[Elranzer]

When Linux is better.

how does it *reduce* costs?

[mgkimsal2]

How would it *reduce* Dell's cost to distribute OpenOffice with their systems?

Re:how does it *reduce* costs?

[bunratty]

How would it *reduce* Dell's cost to distribute OpenOffice with their systems?

It would be cheaper than distributing WordPerfect, maybe?

Re:how does it *reduce* costs?

[mgkimsal2]

OK - if it's *replacing* something else, then yes, I can see it might reduce costs. If it's just an additional CD or file on a CD, I can't see it reducing costs. I could see it potentially *increasing* costs, but I don't know what their support costs are for other bundled software.

naming

[juju2112]

I don't get why they want to call it "OpenOffice.org". No matter what they, naming your product after your website is just stupid. And then to be all anal about it. "It's .ORG! You have to say the .ORG part!

ugh.

I get that it's marketing, but I don't agree with it.

Re:naming

[Tsiangkun]

interesting, I've always found that .org part of the name odd. I wonder why they didn't just go with something not already in use, I think something like 'Cubicle' would have worked well.

Re:naming

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, well what about the .NET framework then?? I mean is it really that stupid?

Naming a brand or product like that is just a by-product of the electronic world we live in today.

Re:naming

[Anonymous Coward]

GNU/Linux! Say it! Guh-noo slash Linux!!

Re:naming

[XiQ]

There is a company in the Netherlands that's called Open Office, they provide OSS for company's.

OpenOffice.org in the Office.

[ebrusky]

I run a small computer company and I use OOo for all of my business activity. I also recommend OOo to many of my customers and then also ask for a small donation to help the OOo team. I am also trying to convince a couple of local schools to switch to OOo inorder to save money. Though there is resistance, mainly because people don't want to admit that they have wasted their money. The clients of mine that have tried OOo have all given me positive feedback. I have a few complaints, though that may be a bit strong, when working with embedded tables in documents formatting gets screwed up often, and there is an odd scrolling issue on my system when I work with spreadsheets. But these are fairly minor issues. I can't wait to start playing with OOo 2.0 I just need to wait for the stable version.

OGO's biggest weakness not mentioned

[FattyBoeBatty]

Ever tried installing it? It's *incredibly difficult*. It's not an open source package that a sys admin can simply decide to try out quickly. Installing it involves loads of time and all sorts of system-specific tweaks. Our organization investigated moving to that platform but abandoned it when realizing how large of an undertaking it would be (in both time and skills) to even get it running.

I've heard that the 1.0 release's main focus is making installation easier, however, it can't even be installed on RHEL I really don't see the installation improving at all if they continue to ignore one of the most popular platforms out there.

-Fatty

Re:OGO's biggest weakness not mentioned

[ThisIsFred]

Are you talking about the RPM of the beta version? I've had zero problems installing it on Linux or Windows.

Still cannot import SVG

[Anonymous Coward]

They talk about open standards and XML, yet I still cannot import a SVG into an OpenOffice document. The primary open vector graphics format, which also happens to be in XML, and it is not supported!!!

Re:Still cannot import SVG

[Coryoth]

It is being worked on. No, it hasn't made it into 2.0, but it looks like they have a provisional svg2draw translator - it just needs a little more work. It's not like they are completely ignoring the issue.

Jedidiah.

it's not 'marketing'

[mgkimsal2]

From what I recall, there is another product called 'openoffice' which has a trademark on that name. The openoffice.org team gets around that issue by enforcing the ".org" in their literature and promotion efforts.

the URL

[mgkimsal2]

http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-other.html#7

Office installs on new systems

[jvmatthe]

I am not sure who, in US, distributes trial version of MS Office. No one distributes full version for sure.

My wife's laptop, a just-discontinued Compaq with Windows XP, came with a trial version of Office installed that could be activated to be a full version.

For what it's worth, she did allow me to remove it and install OpenOffice.org instead. So far, so good, with a few hitches here and there.

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Coryoth]

What strides as 2.0 made in GUI and usability? From the screenshots of the beta, I see none.

What exactly are you looking for? A rough outline of the design goals is here with specific target improvements for 2.0 here. For very specific improvements actually made not just target concepts you can read through this and look for all the "ease-of-use" improvements made. There are actually a lot. Yes, some are small. No, OOo 2.0 is not somehow magically a perfect usability application. It is an issue, and they are focussing on it. It is an incremental process however.

Jedidiah.

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh... well I was referring specifically to the 2.0 beta candidate. I mean, it's beta. This usually means it isn't ready for general use.

Being sucked in to MS Office suite by SharePoint

[Bertwo]

Would love to move to the OpenOffice platform. Microsoft has simply ceased to have any innovative thinking within its Office suite. This is even more painful after experiencing the absolute joy of Firefox for the past few years. But we're looking at implementing Sharepoint at our company. My initial reaction to the product itself is quite positive. There are many features that will help us. But, it as a bit of a Trojan Horse (I know, not the best analogy). In order to maximize Sharepoint's functionality, we need to upgrade to the 2003 Office suite. Arrrrrrrgh. MS is cleverly further embedding a stagnant product into our company (Office), while sucking millions of dollars from us in upgrade fees.

Mod Parent Up

[STrinity]

I wish I hadn't replied to this topic so I could mod the parent out of flamebait. He's absolutely right -- OO.o has a worse GUI than the Proxomitron's default psychedelic skin. There are simply too many buttons, the default set seems randomly chosen, and trying to reorganzine the toolbars is like sprinting through quicksand. The devs need to look at AbiWord and Firefox.

TRY OUT NEO OFFICE, FOOL

[TheLittleJetson]

iWork is great, but I use this thing called a "spreadsheet", so I need OpenOffice. Plus, you can't beat OpenOffice's compatability. It doesn't just read .doc's, it will read .doc's with embedded objects and such.

There's a somewhat native version of OpenOffice in the works, at www.neooffice.org -- it's a Mac .app that uses Mac menubar, mac fonts, anti-aliasing, and other stuff that's fun. Interface is VERY snappy compared to running under X11.

iWork is a nice product, I've been using Keynote since 1.0, but it really doesn't make a suitable drop-in MS Office replacement. Plus, what's a more reasonable price than free?

Language bindings

[Quixote]

Didn't RTFA (hey, this is /.!), but one thing I'd really like to see are bindings for OO formats for languages like Perl, Python and Java. I recently had to use Perl to create an OO table from some data, and used the OpenOffice::OODoc series of modules, but they looked rough around the edges.

Been using it about a yesr in a mixed environment

[SuperKendall]

I work in an evironment where most people use Word.

However, about a year ago Word (and other MS Office software) started to fail to load on my windows 2003 box. IT couldn't figure out what was going wrong, so after a few tickets I finally gave up and just installed Open Office.

I've been using it ever since, at home and at work. I would say light use but I've had to mix heavily with other Word users and it's worked fine - mostly Powerpoint and Word use, not so many spreadsheets.

One thing I would say is that PDF export alone makes it worthwhile to use. I really prefer sending out PDF's when sending documents for review that I'd rather others not edit easily.

OpenOffice and Java

[Tincan2k]

No. OpenOffice doesn't use Java. OpenOffice does however provide a Java binding to a component model called UNO (Universal Network Objects) which can be used, among other things, to remotely automate OpenOffice. There also used to be some Java components that use a direct Java to C++ bridge to integrate with OpenOffice but I don't know the status of those. Java is less of a requirement and more of an option.

Better yet, demand standrad support outside

[SuperKendall]

Even better than telling Micrsosoft they should support it, is try to get on standards bodies in your own company and attempt to include a need for Oasis compliance from software you procure.

When they start loosing contracts, they might become more accommodating.

Neooffice J is the official OS X port

[SuperKendall]

I seem to remember reading a few months ago that NeoofficeJ was the official OS X port of Open Office now.

It works quite well, I've been using it for a while.

Pages and OO both useful in different ways

[SuperKendall]

Pages is more of a layout program, basically "Indesign for the rest of us". OpenOffice (NeoOffice J on the Mac) and Word are more for stright-up document creation where you just want to type a lot. Actually I kind of like OO's method of offering completion for words used in-document (as well as other words too).

I stil use both, even though I have to admit Pages is pretty cool.

Forgot to mention another key feature - completion

[SuperKendall]

I should mention that one thing that would keep me from returning to Word if I have a choice at all is the document completion.

ESPECIALLY for corporate documents, where you are endless repeating the same thing in order to accommodate different document formats or to make a point, OO's in-document word completion is mighty useful. That is, OO offers you word completion as you type based not just on a dictionary but also on words contained in the document.

So if you are writing a document with SNAFU all over the place, then just typing "SN" will let you complete rather easily. Again, with documents usually produced in a corporation this can save a ton of typing!

One time my girlfriend has to use OO for some emergency project where no Word was available, and while at first she was not to sure about the interface being different, she did like the completion when I showed her how to use it.

Re:yah uhm ok then

[fd0man]

kplzthx is worse. I think that's the worst I've seen. *shrugs*

Anyone got any hints on the trademark issue?

[NoMercy]

I don't much like the sound of the extra .org, and can't see how it frees them from trademark issues, the FAQ only states they don't own the 'OpenOffice' trademark.

Digging around in forums has given me some very muddled answers relating to the ukrane and ripoff copies of openoffice being sold.

Figures....

[TheRealMadScientist]

...I finally finished emerging the ximianized-OO on gentoo last night. emerge sync emerge portage etc-update rinse lather repeat

Software pricing is conducive to the monopoly

[cookie_cutter]

By introducting a new, desirable design element feature into a stagnant product, Microsoft makes the product more desirable. But the ratio of desirability level to number of design elements is less in the combined product than in the new feature alone. However, the user has to either buy the whole product or no product at all, so if the new feature is critical, they must purchase it; they can't pay less because they don't want to use the bad components.

However, consider a software pricing model based on how often a piece of software is used? If a product is only desired for a particular feature, and that feature is not required in every case where that product type would be used (say, when you don't need SharePoint functionality), then alternatives to the product could be used any other time.

Under this scheme, the amount of money a software producing company could derive from their product would be proportional to how often that product was used. And if the user experience for the product isn't always preferable to that of it's alternatives, then the alternatives will be used much more of the time, and the company would derive much less profit.

Consider it like a software subscription, only much more finely grained. People could set up accounts with a software service provider, and only have to pay for when and how much they used the software.

This could change the software industry's economics in other ways too. For example, while someone won't buy an office suite if they only make one slide show every few months, they might be willing to use the service if they only pay for a few hours worth.

Re:What I'd want to ask

[maverick97008]

What exactly are you looking for?

I use the menu hotkeys a lot in excel, the most common one I use is +E D (Edit/Delete). In Excel that deletes the cell, in spreadsheet it deletes the worksheet!

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Coryoth]

I use the menu hotkeys a lot in excel, the most common one I use is +E D (Edit/Delete). In Excel that deletes the cell, in spreadsheet it deletes the worksheet!

So by usability you mean "reproduing key for key every shortcut and menu entry from MS Excel"? That's not usuability. If you want to delete the contents of a cell in Calc you can use the delete or backspace key or if using the menus: Alt+E O. If you want to remove the cell completely then you'll want Alt+E E, which is hardly less usable than Alt+E D. I don't see the problem.

For reference, to delete the worksheet in 2.0beta you now need to use Alt+E S S D, which is hardly something you'll do by accident very often.

Jedidiah.

Jedidiah.

We ship OOo as standard on our PCs

[Quizo69]

I run a tiny computer sales company (compared to Dell) here in Sydney, Australia, and we try to ship with as many free/OSS apps as possible. This includes OOo, Firefox and Thunderbird, and many others.

Benefit to us - free software which we don't have to get licencing agreements for.

Benefit to end users - Best of breed, secure software which will never lock them into one vendor.

Sure, we don't sell many computers compared to Dell, but if bottom tier vendors like ourselves all do the same, it could be the death of a thousand paper cuts for Microsoft Office.

Shameless plug if you need a computer in Sydney:

http://www.altitudepc.com.au

but it does equal 5

[Rhinobird]

It's true! 2+2=5...for sufficiently large values of 2.

TheOpenCD makes install nearly painless ...

[timothy]

Check out TheOpenCD (http://www.theopencd.org/) -- OpenOffice.org is one of the things included. (1.1.3 is the version listed on their site ... it would be cool to see a more 'bleeding edge' version, but the project's point is more working, high-quality Free software for Windows, and most -- all? -- of it is cross-platform, so if you can deal with The Gimp, and OO.o, and audacity (etc) on Windows, you might be just as happy using them on Linux, and perhaps have more stability at the same time.)

Installing just about any software for non-computer-types (I say as a just-barely-a-computer-type) can be intimidating, depending on how considerate a job was done of packaging it; you're right that it's rather a mess as provided from the OO.o site, though for the usual (vs. ideal) audience probably not a huge deal.

TheOpenCD makes the install really smooth, though, at least as good as any payware Windows installers I've seen; if you download the ISO and mail or bring it to your mother-in-law, she could probably install it with minimal help. (And it's a handy thing to keep around in case you encounter / need to use a "bare" windows machine without a decent browser, or office suite, or photo-editing tool, or ogg vorbis player ... :))

Cheers,

timothy

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Anonymous Coward]

Why dont you bloody well get your finger out and try it yourself you lazy shit. Im not your personal reviewer.

Re:OpenSource--Innovation

[Yes BlueBerries]

I think there still is innovation possible for word processors, but to get to the innovative stuff you need to work on stuff that is under valued. One example is possibly having a translator incorporated with a word processor that with change a document into another language or modify language to another regional dialect. You would probably want to give the document a look over by someone from the targeted region (check for cultural mistakes), but it would probably save a lot of time.

Before you can do neat stuff like that you need a really good grammar checker and you need to think went you develop it of how it will fit in with future cooler projects. Technical questions about what are all parts of speech possible in all languages that will be translated need to be known. In some languages one word can be used as more than one part of speech (noun, verb, preposition, interjection, adverb, adjective, conjunction,...), an example is form. One needs to be able to add new words to the program and have a way to correctly add possible parts of speech of the new word and note if the answer given is not verified. Ideally, one could pick the URL of an online dictionary, parse out the part of speech, and verify the spelling or if the user doesn't have internet access at the time mark it for either nothing (temporary ignore word), let user add it with what they know/think it is (good help menus on grammar needed) and modify it if needed, or skip the word in the analysis.

I think WordPerfect would have the easiest time with this. They bought out Grammatik back in the 90's (possibly mid 90's). I had an old academic DOS version 5 copy and would love to upgrade it to something that can read the newer proprietary formats (I save files in RTF). It is great for reviewing if your grammar is becoming sloppy. This old program finds mistakes like switching from and form around, has modes for style of writing (i.e. will flag slang and phrases/words that aren't politically correct in business writing). It all fits on one 3.5" floppy. In the last ten years I never noticed grammar typos like with form and from from people using WordPerfect, but every few months notice them in online newspapers. I think OpenOffice.org has the potential to do the translation stuff, but it will be hard to come up with the right standards and find people who are well versed in multiple languages (i.e. Chinese, Arbic, Spanish, English,....). Note also, in some languages one word/character might stand for more than one part of speech at a time.

I don't have the full background in multiple languages to help, but hope someone else does and will volunteer. I also don't know if Open Source projects can use people who worked on old proprietary software for similar problems without risk of patent problems down the road.

NeoOffice/J

[quarkscat]

I agree with your sentiments, up to a point.
Several years ago, OOorg was dominated on their
mailing lists by persons who essentially wanted
OOo to be an Office (MSFT) look-alike. IMHO,
this detracted from the real benefit of F/OSS,
a common source tree that could be built on any
number of different platforms.

While OOo's decision to focus primarily upon the
X11 platform might be considered to be a drawback,
I would consider a single source tree to be a
real advantage. Maintaining a common look/feel
cross-platform makes it easier to "switch gears"
when using it on another OS. Instead of trying
to match MSFT on the basis of the GUI, the effort
to out-perform MSFT on features and functions
would create a product better than MSFT's.

That said, the OOo project has forked specifically
for the Mac OS X platform in the NeoOffice/J
project, if you insist upon an Aqua interface.
Otherwise, just install the available X11 code
on your Mac OS X, and use the OOo binaries for
the Mac platform (using X11). Simple enough.

Re:NeoOffice/J

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree with you.

It is damn rare for it to matter that there is a cross-platform look/feel.

And any benefit gained is lost, much more, by not doing the right thing on a platform. Many many PC companies learned that when they ported their product to the Mac and didn't make it Mac-like. They all got their asses handed to them.

Mac users are fucked unless the NeoOffice/J is good; and damn, that is a horseshit name, by the way. I spent 6 months ignoring what I thought was a Japanese port of OpenOffice[.org].

Re:new Sony Network Walkman

[Uber Banker]

hello

3.0 tease - more info?

[flacco]

in the last answer, colm mentions collaboration features in 3.0 - anyone know where there might be more details on 3.0 features?

Re:Why use OpenOffice?

[Tribbin]

Free as in 'free to not use it'.

Re:Why use OpenOffice?

[timothy]

"Why use OpenOffice / When Microsoft Office is free?"

1) Free-as-in-shoplifting isn't quite the same thing ;)

2) Microsoft Office doesn't run on my top two platforms of choice, and I doubt it will anytime soon.

timothy

Sponsor someone to write an Aspell interface

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice is currently based of MySpell and has no support for Aspell. Perhaps you could sponsor someone to write such and interface and thus receive better spelling suggestions...

Downloading OASIS OpenDocument plugin for MSOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

Go to Microsoft Office's suggest feature page and ask for "Please add read/write support for the OASIS document formats found in OpenOffice.org 2.0."

That link seems not to work unless you fall for the MS-Passport thing. Do you have an alternative means of contacting them?