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".

Anybody using it?

[lottameez]

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

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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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?

[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.

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...?

[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...?

[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.

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

[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

[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.

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

[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.

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.

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

[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.

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

[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: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.

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..

[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..

[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: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: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.

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

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:OS X port

[DuBois]

Been there. Done that:

Neo Office/J

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.

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

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

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: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: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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?