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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.
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...
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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?
"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.
...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.
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.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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.
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.
- 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
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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.
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.
My other OS is the MCP!
"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.
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.
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.
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.
in the last answer, colm mentions collaboration features in 3.0 - anyone know where there might be more details on 3.0 features?
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