Associated Press Reviews OpenOffice

blacklily8 writes "Peter Svensson of the Associated Press has reviewed OpenOffice and declared it a Microsoft Office killer: 'Microsoft Corp. killed off the competition for office software suites and became a de facto monopoly in the area, with what result? The competition is back and, this time, it's free!' Svensson thinks the better Word/WordPerfect file conversion, ability to save as PDF, and new BASE database component make the beta a better candidate for success than the previous versions--and when the kinks get worked out, step back!"

Comments

Not quite there yet

[Mori Chu]

I say this as a person who desperately wants to ditch MS Office:

OpenOffice isn't quite good enough yet.

The look and feel of the program is a bit too rough. For example, they inexplicably have a huge "Styles" pane on by default that covers 1/4 of the document.

Also, the compatibility is not what it should be. I create Word docs in oowriter, but then when I open them in real Word, the page breaks are all wrong! What used to fit on one page wraps to a second, or vice versa. It's quite frustrating when I prepare a lot of Word docs for printing by others, when I know that essentially all the others are using real Word. I have to reboot and examine the document to make sure of what it really looks like.

Ditto for ooimpress, the PowerPoint clone. It is hard to use it for lots of small reasons; death by a thousand cuts. It isn't easy to pull up a Slide Sorter view and move the slides around, cut and paste them, select ones from one file and put them in another file, and so on. When I create a new slide, it ignores my Master Slide template and the dimensions of the text areas come out all wrong. It also again doesn't look the same as a real PowerPoint file, and when I view the same slides in real PowerPoint, the text falls off the edge or bottom of the slide. Argh!

I realize the challenge OOo is up against, and I applaud their efforts. But OOo is no Office killer, not yet. More work needs to be done.

Re:Nice review

[Anonymous Coward]

Neo office

NeoOffice/J uses a combination of Carbon and Java and features Aqua menus.

OO is STILL lacking some features

[Tsu Dho Nimh]

To get me to completely stop using MSFT Office, FrameMaker, and a few other programs, here's what OO has to add.

1. Import SVG and edit it ... at least a simple subset of the language. It can export its drawings as SVG, so what's the problem with importing and editing?
2. Have the ability to put an overbar on text, which is the common way to indicate a negative signal on chip pins.
3. Have an outlining mode that works like MSFT Word's outline, where you can selectively see or hide levels, drag levels into position, etc. Right now, OO has an "outline", but you can't do much with it. I use outlines as an editing tool, to reorganize material in a document.
4. Stop mucking with my HTML: I would like it to be able to open, edit, and save an HTML file without changing the existing code. OK, Word is far worse in this regard, but OO still messes up HTML.

Re:OO is STILL lacking some features

[the_2nd_coming]

solution to number 4.....

Use An F***ing TEXT EDITOR!!!