Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
bkazez
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
soullessbastard
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Yes, there are some folks rethinking the standard interfaces...such as Apple (with Keynote and Pages) and even Microsoft with Office 12 and earlier some of the UI design of Office:mac. On some platforms, it would even be possible to play around with alternative OOo interfaces by using OfficeBean (although I don't know of any off of the top of my head).
For office suites, however, I think the general interface paradigms are so commonplace now that any radical departure will be greeting by a nice resounding "WTF is this" from users. Case in point: OpenDoc. It was, in my opinion, a valiant attempt at shifting the focus for productivity suites off of individual applications and onto a free-form content-centric view. The idea never caught on with users, and ones I always saw trying to use it were just confused by the idea and were still asking questions like "what do I open to create a spreadsheet?".
Not to mention I can't get that stupid "I just did the Excel..." lady from the Video Professor commercial out of my head. With millions of users like that, I doubt things will really be able to change that much:)
ed
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
linguae
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
I would love to have a new, innovative, word processing software, spreadsheet software, and presentation software (although I use LaTeX and text editors for the former, so I'm not much of a word processor user anymore). However, OpenOffice's goal was never to become an innovative office suite (in the sense of revolutionizing word processors like Apple's Pages (or even LyX for that matter), revolutionizing spreadsheets like Lotus Improv, and presentations like Apple Keynote); it's goal was to provide 90% of MS Office's features and interface at a much lower price: free (as in beer and as in speech). And it does a decent job of doing that if you just can't afford MS Office (and, in some instances, a Windows or Mac OS license). I use OpenOffice on my computer. Even though I don't use it too often (I have been indoctrinated^Wintroduced to LaTeX, and don't have a need for spreadsheets and presentations [LaTeX can handle presentations, too]), I keep OpenOffice on my machine just in case I must work with MS Office documents.
OpenOffice is a very nice, pragmatic software project used for a free alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice isn't perfect and I actually prefer MS Office to OpenOffice for a few reasons (faster loading is the main key), but it is the no-cost solution to dealing with the MS world out there. OpenOffice didn't set out to become a revolutionary, innovative project. OpenOffice is an example of a program that tries to do a job that a $300+ program does, except offered for free.
Back to OOo 1.1.5
by
vanka
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
But how else can you do portable?
by
steve_l
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
As a member of the Ant team, I also have to bemoan their use of a non-standard build tool, given that there is pretty good support for C++ compiles in ant-contrib's , and with extra work C++ support could be improved.
without something portable like Ant or SCons, you end up needing either to
-build your own tools (this is what Microsoft's shared source version of.NET does; it builds things like NMAKE, their worst-in-class make tool, then builds the rest of the system)
-require a common toolchain on every box (e.g. Unix make+the unix commands; cygwin on windows)
The trouble with IDEs, is that they are either platform specific, or use their own configuration files to control the build. In Java Ant has finally become common enough (after 5 years) that it is broadly supported in IDEs, so you get the best of both worlds.
In C++ land, most people resort to the common toolchain, because only the ambitious fools with time on their hands bother to write their own build system. Does that mean it should't be done? No, just that it would be silly if every fairly large project came up with their own build tools. Instead every few years, we really ought to revisit the build processes and tools of the OSS projects, and see how they can be improved.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
As a member of the Ant team, I also have to bemoan their use of a non-standard build tool, given that there is pretty good support for C++ compiles in ant-contrib's , and with extra work C++ support could be improved.
.NET does; it builds things like NMAKE, their worst-in-class make tool, then builds the rest of the system)
without something portable like Ant or SCons, you end up needing either to
-build your own tools (this is what Microsoft's shared source version of
-require a common toolchain on every box (e.g. Unix make+the unix commands; cygwin on windows)
The trouble with IDEs, is that they are either platform specific, or use their own configuration files to control the build. In Java Ant has finally become common enough (after 5 years) that it is broadly supported in IDEs, so you get the best of both worlds.
In C++ land, most people resort to the common toolchain, because only the ambitious fools with time on their hands bother to write their own build system. Does that mean it should't be done? No, just that it would be silly if every fairly large project came up with their own build tools. Instead every few years, we really ought to revisit the build processes and tools of the OSS projects, and see how they can be improved.