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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.
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.
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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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.
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