Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org

[vmlinuz] writes "O'Reillynet is running an article about 'Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org' which explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects. The article also discusses the importance of a shorter release cycle."

Comments

Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes

[eosp]

If something's in beta, people won't want to use it because it just doesn't sound reliable. If it sounds like a stable, final release, people will be more willing to use it, thereby finding the bugs, thereby resulting in bugfixers, which leads to more reliable software.

Change the default

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the reason I am stuck with Microsoft office is because others will send me office documents and I have to use Micrsoft Office suite to open/change/modify them. As many others have noticed, openoffice doesn't work well with all the documents (Especially complex tables, etc).

Personally I prefer LaTeX and send pdf files. That works ok till I am working alone. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

Re:Change the default

[jshaped]

Thank you for bringing up LaTeX.
As a grad student in CS, the benefits of LaTeX are obvious.
But it's surprising how many educated people still do not understand what LaTeX is or how beneficial it is.
Example, last semester I turned in a project proposal (written with LaTeX) to a professor.
His response: "Aren't your margins a bit too big?"
I was speechless.

Re:Change the default

[Coryoth]

So, were your margins a bit too big? Or do you mean you sent him the latex source and he printed that out? Just because it's Latex doesn't mean you can't make shitty looking documents with it.

I suspect the OP was referring to the fact that MS Word has what are, by typesetting standards, very narrow margins that make for long lines of text. In practice narrow text actually proves to easier to read, requiring less left-right scanning with the eyes and making the end-of-line to start-of-next-line shift much easier and less prone to error. Professional typesetters are not idiots and have been studying and refining such things for a very long time. LaTeX defaults to the same margins you'll find in professionally typeset books and other publications - the same margins professional typesetters have come to use after years and years of experience and refinement. They look large if you're used to MS Word documents, but are by most other measures, the margin size that maximise readability and amount of text on the page.

Jedidiah.

Re:Change the default

[rco3]

*I* would expect people to use LyX. All the power of LaTeX, lots of easier to use.

It's not wysiwyg, it's wysiwym (what you see is what you mean). You type, with no latex code (unless you want to), doing all the latex stuff with pulldowns and key combinations - kinda like any other WP. You insert citations, references, etc. with dialogs. Your content simply gets typed and viewed in a format chosen for readability. When you want to see what it REALLY looks like, you preview in DVI or pdf with a simple keystroke.

The point is, this separates the content from the formatting. Especially in an office with standardized formats and relatively untrained typists/secretaries, this is great. One person can design the templates for LyX, and the typists simply type in and go. They actually don't need to know LaTeX at all, as LyX pretty much takes care of all of that. It's also got the best math equation editor I've ever used, bar none.

I've used LyX to write my master's thesis and several journal papers, and I don't know SHIT for LaTeX. I've got a reference that I can use if I need to... but I usually don't. It looks the way it's supposed to, it's easy to use, and the citations and cross-referencing mechanisms are superlative, both in terms of the underlying LaTeX functionality and in terms of LyX's user interface to those functions.

Basically, it's what I think a word processor oughta be. I think I would have torn out what little hair I have left if I'd tried to do that thesis in Word - it certainly wouldn't have been done as quickly. Did I mention that you can get LyX to spit out pdfs with the TOC, Lists of Figures, Index, etc. already hotlinked to their targets? Took me 10 minutes to figure out the line in the preamble to make that happen, which is a LOT quicker than having to try to manually create all those links. Yes, that's LaTeX functionality, not LyX - but LyX lets you have the best of both worlds.

I don't think anyone expects you to write all that LaTeX code and keep rendering to see if what you've typed works. Good news is, you don't need to.

All the more important...

[Anonymous Coward]

...now that Office 12 has been demoed. That means the specs for OpenOffice.org 4.0 are almost complete!!

Re:Indeed

[DoubleRing]

And yet you found the need to bold AND italicize the first word of your comment :P

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[jarich]

C'mon now. One of the most important open source projects in the world? I suppose that assumes that MS Office is one of the most important programs (suite...whatever) in the world? For real?

YES!

The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows! My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible.

When the office suite becomes a commodity, you'll see more defections.

OpenOffice.org is great, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org takes like 10 minutes on my computer. It's not going to win any awards for speed.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Quino]

I think it can be argued that, for wide-scale adoption of Linux, the first step will be the wide-scale adoption of OpenOffice over the MS office suite.

After that, switching out the underlying OS becomes transparent (Ok, more transparent for more people).

I guess I subscribe to the idea that a key foothold MS has (at least in the corporate world) is that all of our data is stored in their propietary file formats. Or, in other words, the problem in switching people over isn't that they have to run a MS os, they have to run the MS apps, in particular their office suite. Excel and Word are defacto standards to run a business -- and by extension the MS OS.

It's in that sense that I do think OpenOffice is incredibly important to the OSS world at large. The threat of being a credible (or higher quality, more useful) replacement is higher than with what's happened (and happening) with Firefox vs IE, since IE is also free. MS Office is far from free -- and I think it'll be easier to justify abandoning it because of the cash saved.

If I were MS, I do think OpenOffice is the one OSS project I'd be most nervous about, as it's one of the major threats to the monopoly, and an attack on one of the biggest reasons companies are forced to pay for the MS OS.

BTW, the web browser is probably the other "very important app" for the same reasons, and it's cool that Mozilla Firefox has grown so much. At work it doesn't matter that I choose to run Linux, since I'm running the same web browser as many people who are running Windows (my company is already formally supporting, and recommending, Firefox for internal use). Again though, imagine that IE was an extra app that companies had to pay money for -- I wonder what the Firefox adoption rate would be.

One last thing, it's no surprise that MS has from the beginning to "subvert" the web and web standards. It's all about the formats. I guess they simply arrived way too late to the Web to completely take it over. But I'm sure they know that if they had managed to switch everyone over to ms-propietary-html to surf the web, we'd be paying through the nose for IE and their OS and Office monopoly would be further protected.

Chip away, not sea change

[banglogic]

I agree that Open Office is one of the most important open source projects. This is because it won't be a Linux derivitive that makes its way onto the desktops of the masses first. It will be open, free applications that can reliably provide the benifit of expensive commercial applications on the *Windows* desktop. A company I work for is interested in an open source "Save to PDF" tool because, well, have you priced Adobe's Acrobat lately? Not cheap. So, they are willing to consider this open source replacement to distribute to the general population. It provides most of the functionality that most of their user base needs and saves them money. The users don't even need to learn anything new. But ask them to swap out their enterprise desktop? Forget about it. If Open Office can get there (and it will *long* before Linux deriviti do), the Corporate World(TM) will open its loving arms.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[jarich]

You sound mighty sure of yourself for someone who writes XP software. ;)

Let's take these FUD-esque statements one at a time. I've just booted my laptop to Kubuntu so I can walk through this.

Changing the screen resolution.

Right click on the background, select "Configure Desktop", click "Display", select your screen resolution from the drop-down.

Configuring display/mouse/keyboard drivers.

Configuring the display drivers we may have just covered. If you're thinking about editing your xconfig files, I've never had to Kubuntu. It's not like The Old Days anymore.

My keyboard and mouse worked out of the box. I can plugin in a USB mouse at any time and the system picks it up uses it. However, if you want to tweak the keyboard or mouse, click your "System" icon in the task bar, select the "Settings" entry. Select "Peripherals". You'll see both "keyboard" and "mouse" in the dialog. Tweak away.

Configuring a network

From the System/Settings dialog we were just in... clck "Internet and Networking". You can add network interfaces, configure the proxy, set up your wireless networks, configure Samba, etc and so forth.

Installing a printer

Back to the "Peripherals" screen. Click the "Printers" button.

I think you're comment about the menu items is related to the people who wrote the package you've installed, not the people who wrote the operating system.

Kubuntu is drop dead easy to use. You can still open a shell and go crazy (if you know how), but you don't have to anymore.

btw, they just released a new preview of their next version. They claim to have improved the Control Panel (kcontrol). I'm downloading it now to see what they've done.

Sorry OO just doesn't compare

[enmane]

Disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboi. In fact, I dislike a lot of what they do. I'm no OO fanboi. In fact, I'm quite disgusted with what they've done with the product.

The delta between Excel and Calc is too large to ignore.

The delta between Powerpoint and Impress is small at the moment and can be tolerated.

The delta between Word and Writer is negligible for _most_ users. For a basic word processor Writer is better but _a lot_ of people I know love the collaboration features of Word. I hate how Word keeps "thinking" for me and screwing with my documents.

The delta between MSO and OO in terms of speed is just a tad smaller than the distance from one end to the other of the Grand Canyon.

Now considering all that, OO is trailing, hugely. Now look at... http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=1147 20 and you'll see that OO is 5-6 yrs behind MSO. I've done my best to use OO and even to try and help. I am so disgusted by the developers and their responses to my pleas for improvement in key areas that I've stopped promoting OO to people that need a cheap office suite. If they need a free one then I still show it off. If they have some $$ then I show them where to get MSO dirt cheap. The new MSO 12 looks to blow the socks off of anything out there. If it all works like it is supposed to (huge IF) it will be a remarkable product.

In that case, I thank the OO development team for putting pressure on MS. Like everyone, competition causes one to raise their performance and I think MSO 12 will be a killer app. I just wish OO could have moved quicker.