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.
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.
Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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.