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IBM Joins OpenOffice.org Community
Petrushka writes "In a press release today, with accompanying press FAQ, IBM announces a change in its relationship to the OpenOffice.org development community. The upshot is that they're making a long-term commitment to OOo; no organization has paid off any other organization for this; they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies. You may recall that an alleged shortage of assistive technologies that work with OOo has been one of the big criticisms leveled against the idea of governments standardizing on the OpenDocument format, which is a file format that OOo and several other office suites support."
One more step to not being locked into Microsoft (ie paying through the nose) for an application than can make writing look prettier, and is universally accepted \o/
which is totally what she said
OpenOffice.org itself doesn't lack assistive technologies. OOo on Windows lacks assistive technologies. OOo with GNOME or KDE integration gets the accessibility technologies of GNOME or KDE, respectively.
Still, it's a welcome sight to see IBM participating in OOo development. OOo just keeps improving with every new release, and I find that I use it more than Microsoft Office, although I have both installed at work and at home.
My blog
Ok for end users this is a good news. For monopolists not so heartening news.
Anyway what i would also like to see in Openoffice -
-It is terribly slow. Looks like a huge piece of bloat. It will be great if it can be faster.
-- "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" - TAE --
It's nice to have a big backer in the oo arena that isn't part of the whole m$oft mess. I also think IBM's timing was very well thought out here.
"Computers are a lot like Air Conditioners" "They both work great until you start opening Windows"
Having IBM back ODF is a blow to MS. Hopefully IBM's move will speed up the acceptance of ODF.
-- Cheers!
IBM has its own office package: http://www-306.ibm.com/software/lotus/products/sma rtsuite/
Is this another case of the one division not knowing what the other does, or is IBM giong to drop smartsuite?
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
I'm curious about the accessibility support for that helpful feature it has, where entering the password characters puts up random numbers of bullets while hieroglyphics blink randomly around the input box, apparently to distract and confuse shoulder surfers. Do they have a similar function for blind users? And how about sighted users and blind shoulder surfers? Shouldn't it make random annoying noises as well, to confuse them?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
We all now Open office is slow so lets hope We get the fast and Wonderfull Lotus notes interface on Open Office.
What's that as a level of investment? $50,000pa?
Deleted
they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies.
Please keep those people far away from interface design! ;-)
This reminds me of an issue we have at work. At work, we run OpenOffice now, it gave us flexibility and yet fully functional... except for one guy, the Editor. He installed it, and the next day went to me "Frankly, it sucks. I won't use it." So, we have this one Office 07 guy out there, and he keeps getting angry when he can't read any documents we send him, or we can't read his documents, yet it's our fault because we won't pay for Office '07 when everyone else is happy with Open Office.
I know this guy, he just went home, installed it, looked, went "this doesn't look like Office 07" and left it at that. Until we can woo this kind of person, however, I fear that OO, and any open standard wp for that matter, will never truely break into mainstream, because he is the Editor, in charge of a whole department.
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
It was all good until I read : "....they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies..." Lotus Notes is EVIL and must be killed, -- I forgive you Outlook & Exchange....,
I, for one, welcome our new IBM overlords.
Anybody want my mod points?
We'll get Lotus Notes into OpenOffice now - run for the Hills !
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
35 American developers is a big investment in terms of money. 35 Chinese developers, is a signficantly smaller investment in terms of money. In skill, ideally, the investment would be the same though. Obviously the OP was talking about the financial investment, not the skills IBM is investing into OOo.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
What if....
...you took OO.o as it stands now, rebranded it "Microsoft Office 2009 Preview" (just the splash screen, title bar and help text should be adequate) and showed it to someone who'd made such a complaint. Tell them that "Microsoft found people were confused by the change of interface in 2007 so they changed it back again to something which looks more like Office 2000" or other such bull.
I bet most of the complainers would announce themselves to be perfectly happy with this, and far prefer it to OpenOffice.
We use Lotus (Ami Pro/Freelance/123 etc) plus MS Office 2003 plus MS Office XP. Now we'll get OO. Gee I can hardly wait trying to open up some PM's 175 page converted Powerpoint presentation.
Focused companies can have a senior executive order their devs to get something Out The Door. Apple at its best the last few years has done this. Microsoft DID do this for 8 years from 1993-2001 until their code imploded for Vista.
Open Source projects with good leadership can deliver efficiently with a "soft" approach. I think Mozilla has done some great work. But when a "Bazaar" project splinters too much, then Open Source loses its advantage.
IBM must be angry at Microsoft's previous moves. So this announcement says they're committing about a million dollars into Microsoft's direct competitor. I'm not sneezing at 35 extra devs.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
wtf.. it's nothing to do with being a superior application, it's to do with it being bundled with machines by default and then everyone being locked in because the file format is pretty much closed. When it comes to jpegs and the like, any viewer works. When it comes to text files, any viewer works. When it comes to files with *shock horror* text with different sizes, colours and styles, everyone seems to want or expect word. The only thing that I think makes Office stand out is Outlook, which I find is a pretty decent application to use, though it's not really very secure.
which is totally what she said
It's also worth pointing out here that the upcoming version of IBM's Lotus Notes product includes internal support for ODF documents (.odt, .ods and .odp). Based on what I see in the beta, it looks to me like the ODF support is provided by an embedded and tweaked version of OOo, but I think it's still worth adding Lotus Notes to the list of apps that support ODF.
Notes 8 is built on the Eclipse RCP, BTW, and runs nicely on Linux (which is my platform of choice) as well as Windows and OS X. I imagine it can run just about anywhere Java does. To be honest, I don't think the new version is hugely better than previous versions, and I've never been a big fan of Notes, but for Linux users whose companies use Notes it's really nice to have a native client rather than mucking about with Notes under WINE, or running a Windows OS on another box or in a VM. As an OOo user, it's also very nice to know that I'll soon be able to send ODF documents to my colleagues secure in the knowledge that they can read them.
Disclaimer: I work for IBM, but I'm not a spokesman for IBM. IBM is happy about that state of affairs, and so am I.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
if they are trying to kill OO with low quality code? I hope not, but China? Crap, I have seen the code that comes from there, and it makes their toys look positively great.
Am I the only person who thinks that contributing any interface code from Lotus Notes is a *bad* idea?
The correct way would be to promote "choice" for customers by offering yet another standard and bribe countries like Azerbaijan, Loolooistan, and Iamsodumbistan to make it an ISO standard. It should offer features like "Page break as in Lotus Notes Style" or "autospace like in IBM370/155 JCL //job card punch format" that no body else can offer. Howzthat for product differentiation? Instead is joining OO.org. How sad, the business acumen is so lacking in the Internation BUSINESS Machines!
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
MS Office actually load its whole suit in memory, *at boot time*.
But there's a taskbar widget for OpenOffice.org that can do the same stuff if you want to get the same startup speed and you don't mind wasting a lot of RAM.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Who cares how many companies are joining OOo development when the "superb OOXML" is soon an ISO standard?
m ments/browse_thread/thread/2a07b8b50038d8c8/2429b3 3859cf05c0?fwc=1
Who says OOXML is a superb standard? Our own Miguel, of course: http://groups.google.com/group/tiraniaorg-blog-co
However, I have not yet heard from Miguel why all the corruption is needed to speed up a "superb standard"?
Before you start dissing something try learning something about it first.
Take a look at the interface that they're contributing. It's damn cool.
If IBM (and sun) really want to make a dent in Office, they should work on MsPM and Visio clones. In particular, if they first do the file format library (open, read, write close files), then it allows other OSS projects to move forward. Then followed up with clones/improvements. By doing these 2, they pretty much remove one of the large blocks to corporate adoption.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I hope they add a .lwp filter.
This is a useability interface which is being plugged in to both Notes and OO.
Do try to pay attention.
Right now, our productivity apps are essentially feature-set upgrades on the old MacWrite/Microsoft Word for Mac paradigm we all learned back in the 80's. Most of the menus and icons remain conceptually unchanged. Hate it or like it, at least the 'ribbon' in the latest version of Office is slightly different. Unless OO.o goes somewhere new, why should anyone buy it other than to "stick it to the man" at Microsoft? And before someone points out that you don't "buy" OO.o, In the government space someone is going to get paid, either for a license or for a service contract.
IBM and other corporations who want to fund OO.o with a long term goal of lining their own (corporate) pockets need to think beyond the clone. Until they do so, OO.o will remain nothing more than a sales tool in a marketing brochure. What would serve the world better is an OO.o that rethinks our document world.
A sig?!? I don't think so.....
The main problem with OOo is not the lack of coding power but the heavy processes OOo has inherited from Sun. Throwing in few dozen coders don't make any real impact until the ratio between managers insisting byte-by-byte level docs and engineers producing new code is fixed. These processes which work as only German flexibility can just causes the workhours per lines of code being probably higher than in any other open source project. Yes, it is probably the largest open source project, too, but it would be essential for some people to recognize that just documenting after documenting is not going to fix the issues in code and the lack of polish (e.g., threading, Win95 UI). At this point it is already useless to have heave docs for OOo 2.0 when OOo 2.3 is almost out of the door but the code written for 2.0 is still there. Code should be documented, of course, but these byzantine requirement for documentation remind me of days when I was writing software for telecom operators where coders were hopelessly outnumbered by the hoards of middle-managers/document writers/hand-wavers/etc.
This is pretty cool.
I was working with an engineer from IBM who had a Linux laptop setup by IBM for his work computer. It used OOo, as well as a Linux version of Lotus notes. (I know many of you hate Notes, but like the Mainframe, it'll be around forever b/c my company runs many critical apps off of Lotus notes databases)
He also had working VPN (I think it was IBM's connectivity software), so he could connect back to his office LAN from my office.
I was very impressed. He said that many of the engineers were piloting the new Linux desktops/laptops.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
Wow, that should cost IBM, what, about $35 a week, right? I'm so glad they are behind open source. I can't wait to see the new "pwintew pwevewences" dialog.
[que Flash Gordon Theme Music by Queen]
China - a-ah - saviour of Open Source
China - a-ah - you've saved everyone of us
Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha
China - a-ah - it's a miracle
China - a-ah - land of cheap labor
In short, It works. You don't have to change anything just say it's "A new version of Office" and few people notice. The reason is that 90% of users, the only feature they use is _maybe_ change the font or font size. And File->new and File->save. That's about it for most users.
Perhaps you could detail for us what precisely *is* superior about Office Apps?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
IBM should release Lotus 1-2-3 as open source. It was once the de facto industry standard and there plenty of people who remember it. It is one of the most well-documented application programs ever, and its @ functions are still cloned to this day. It ran on all platforms from DOS to Windows to UNIX. The WKx (WK4, WK3, etc) file format is very well documented and an industry standard. I'm not sure IBM even remembers they own 1-2-3's source, since they got it with their purchase of Lotus to get the groupware stuff that was all the rage in 94 or 95 before the Internet took off. If IBM released 1-2-3 as open source, and maybe used their 35 Chinese developers to update it a little, it would be the new industry standard plus GPLed so no one could ever take it away from us again. I imagine a few months after the open source 1-2-3 was released, people would have trouble remembering there ever was an Excel.
I don't even know if I want to read the rest of your post. When did I say bundled with Windows? I said machines. I know it's not always there by default, but it is the only option you get for buying an office application suite with a Dell PC for example. IMO it is dominant for the same reason that Windows is dominant, but I've always been happy to edit text documents using whatever I have to hand (Wordpad is fine for me, and I wrote a 13000 word essay on whatever version of Word that came with Windows 3.1 at one point). Word processing to me doesn't seem very different from when I first did it in the early 90s, there is no reason to me that people should have to pay so much for office other than pure greed and monopolism on Microsoft's part.
"And likewise, as I said, the open-ness or close-ness of the format has zero to do with why MS is dominant. They are winning because they are the superior app, and people prefer their product. But rather than compete on the basis of application superiority,"
That is a load of ass. People like it because they think that something is free *must* be worse, and also because the standard isn't open, they do end up with weird inconsistencies. Like one guy had a shadow being shown around the edge of his document (that had been created in word and he had tried to read in open office) and couldn't figure out how to remove it. The only thing that has stopped me converting the whole company to open office is that Outlook is a great email client that everyone is used to (and that I wrote the timesheet system to interact with Excel and cba to rewrite it for OpenOffice at the moment).
Actually I think the secretaries here would be happy to try a different word processor if I asked them nicely. I gave one of the girls an ancient machine with Linux on it, which she then overwrote with XP and realised how much faster Ubuntu was (rather than taking my word for it, which is fair enough really), then switched back. Most people only use MS because they don't know the fucking alternatives even exist, or there are Windows only apps that they want/need. I'm spending more and more time in Mac OS these days, though it's easier to use Windows at work just for ease of integration with the domain. Anyway, go take your flamebait elsewhere...
which is totally what she said
Posting anonymously as I don't want to be caught feeding the trolls..
"MS Office was never "bundled" with Windows. If you can send me a Windows install CD which also installs Office, I'll cut you a check for a million dollars. Such a thing doesn't exist, and you are a liar."
You are a moron. MS Office is bundled with OEM PCs, not windows. You buy the PC, you get office. You may have paid a small premium for this software, but it really is a small premium. Microsoft know that giving this software away will pay dividends at a later date.
For project management, you can use the recently-released "OpenProj"
http://openproj.org/
For Visio-like work, OpenOffice.org already includes the vector-drawing tool "Draw." It needs better templates and gallery items, but it's working fine as a Visio replacement in our office.
http://www.openoffice.org/product/draw.html
MS Office DOES NOT, REPEAT NOT "load its whole suit in memory, *at boot time*.
/. !!
Way to go
Dunno whether parent was trolling or just a fucking idiot but please don't mod stupid crap like that "informative".
But can it open Visio Docs? ...No
Therefore not very useful, yet.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
this announcement says they're committing about a million dollars into Microsoft's direct competitor. I'm not sneezing at 35 extra devs.
Many hands make an easy task. Ideally, every company would allow their employees to contribute back to software that's useful to them. 35 full time developers is a great gift that will solve several focused tasks. Nothing to sneeze at, but free software will go on with or without such gifts.
You can hardly call it a standard when only one company controls it and it's not consistent with itself over time. Users really do hate that kind of thing and OOXML is never going to gain real use. Nine months after the release of Vista, ODF is still more used. M$'s made a huge blunder trying to pretend they are all the good things free software is while pushing a massive forced format change over. They have given all of their customers a reason to shop and recommended their competitors - that is, anyone else in the world. The rest of the world is united in their support of a real standard and it's going to win.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
It is fine to have differing programs, rather than clones. But they MUST be able to open, read AND write to the MS format. Otherwise, nobody wants to shift. A good example was a neighbor was on Apple works. I tried for 3 years to move him off of Apple works. His number 1 gripe was no way to get all of his works files into office and back to works. But his system died (hard disk failure), and when he bought a nice new mac OSX system, he made the jump, and slowly moved his new files over. And this was for a relatively few number of files.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I do see a lot of value to this move, however, beyond just improving accessibility for Windows users. On the one hand, this may make accessibility more cross-platform, so it will be easier to migrate from one OS to another; with OO.org already cross-platform,
Application level quirks like this are a symptom of non free software disease that should not be imitated. If Windoze had decent accessibility built into their OS, this would not be an issue. They don't so every application developer has to reinvent the wheel and build their own. In the free software world, the solution is built into the X display system and revealed by various window managers and applications. Yet another solution to a problem that's been solved dozens of times over is not a big help. Those solutions will be migrated to OO.org to overcome this temporary roadblock until the world realizes that Windoze itself is their problem.
The only justification for this is the high profile FUD M$ spewed in Mass. It's not a technical issue, it's a political one. The ease with which the problem can be dealt with is yet another political victory for free software.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
Bill, Bill, Bill .... I thought you weren't going to stealth post here any more?
I have been a very, VERY loyal user of Lotus Wordpro ever since it was AmiPro 1.1. OpenOffice.org Writer allows me to work in much the same way as Wordpro (not like some other unnamed cr*p from M*******t) but there is no filter to import my existing Wordpro documents. This was possibly going to be addressed in Google's Summer of Code but I have not yet seen any results. Anyway, if IBM is this committed to OpenOffice--and since they've discontinued SmartSuite development--they ought to put one or two of these coders on writing the SmartSuite import filters for OpenOffice.org. Anybody know a name/email/phone# of a real person at IBM I can discuss this with? Thanks...
--Ray
I'm not sure why I'm replying :) but actually Word has always had some pretty nice features. Most recently comments and annotations are amongst them, along with versioning features. People I work with use them all the time for collaboration.
.doc format and it doesn't look the same as your collaborator's, it sucks (and I know, different versions of Word have this problem).
;)
I remember when people were saying "people don't need Word" when the big feature was tables.. which are obviously a very handy feature people use all the time, once they know about them. It just takes a while for the new features to percolate, and then you can't live without them. Usually the latest versions of programs will have them (or brand new software), not the copycats.
Word has always been a very good office suite, and even if it weren't, the sad reality is if you open a
In case you think I'm a shill, I haven't purchased or used Word in over 5 years. I use OpenOffice, which commendably has kept up with the significant features, though not always elegantly. I'm sure OpenOffice has innovated with some nice features, but as a general user, I have no idea what they are (aside from leading with built in PDF support, oh yeah, and being free for anyone to use or build on). Though with OO's XML support, there should be a lot of interesting third party (especially server) software available. And before Word, there was WP, and before that, WordStar.
Word has always been PART OF a very good office suite. If you ignore Access.
It isn't uncommon for a large software company to offer competing products when they need to support legacy products for large contracts, or aquire them through aquisitions. Microsoft offers the "Works" office suite along with "Office." The same question can be asked of them... why not offer "Personal Office" instead of confusing the market with the "Works" suite? They may be going in that direction, I don't know. This annoucement is interesting, and I welcome it! Open Office could use all the help it can get.
-1; Troll???
/. moderators would have a bit more ... oh, wait!
"Disagree" == "Troll"?
I personally don't agree with the above comment. There are other arguments for and against MS Office, these are lame - but "Troll" moderation?
I would have thought that
hackerkey://v4sw5/7BCHJMPRUY$hw3ln3pr6/7FOP$ck6ma8+9u6L$w4/7CGUXm0l6DLRi82NCe3+9t5Sb7HMOPRen5a17s0DSr1/2p-3.62/-5.23g3/5
Is important that Open Office keeps getting improved and all the help from IBM is welcomed. At some point (if not already there), the dominant MS Office will have to make a revolutionary step in order to justify the price tag.
:)
Users will look at the quality/price ratio although a bit difficult if you have to divide by zero for Open Office
An open and standard document format was agreed upon AND supported by all manufacturers. But as long as something like MS is in the way, I'm afraid that will not happen soon.
What person will donate an airborne act of love?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=280723&threshold=-1&commentsort=1&mode=nested&cid=20375627
http://slashdot.org/~twitter
Just a related note, anybody thinking that only few Linux zealots are making a big noise about OOXML by complaining few editorial omissions in the OOXML specs I suggest people to take a look at one example of comments about the spec:
http://www.jtc1sc34.org/repository/0904c.htm
In the zip file you'll find tens of Word (!) documents that contain an incredible long list of comments. They undeniably underline the fact that the spec was never properly reviewed, more likely it was constructed in a hurry and knowingly omitted some key definitions. If you don't agree, just please read the docs again, the amount of criticisms is just breathtaking!
First of all I do not create feature rich documents. Most of the documents write are in plain old text. I use Ubuntu with OO.org. When I need to send a resume to a would be employer I _ALWAYS_ send it in MS Office formatting because its very likely they will be using some version of MS Office. To be more relevant to the article I think its great that IBM is joining the OO.org team. There may be some sort of conspiracy or something going on for them to join but I personally do not see anything of that sort. I do believe that having a open-standard document (ODF) is good for everyone in the long run so that no single vendor can just change things in their closed format with the drop of a coin which breaks everything in the older format. I bet it gets real complicated for governments trying to keep track of digital documents. --kc2keo
The page you are referring to is showing the Notes client as it was over 10 years ago. The current version can be seen here: http://download.boulder.ibm.com/ibmdl/pub/software/lotus/lotusweb/product/nd8/demo/shell_popup.html/
And as you probably did not know - the IBM is bundling the OpenOffice applications with the current Notes version. AS can bee seen here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-qK34CzKjM/
You don't pay attention to them when you're entering your password, but if the aren't the same or if they aren't moving you do notice instantly.
A certain very large agency of the United States Government who may have been or may still be a really big Notes shop really wanted this feature.
If you were to fake a login box to someone, you'd have to have the images move correctly. They are not linear and are not tied solely to password. They are a combination (hash) of the private key and the passsword. You cannot duplicate them without having either recorded them visibly or else knowing the password AND having the private key (which is stored in the ID file itself).
The Notes client used public/private key based encryption as far back as 1990. It has always been the most secure product in its class, and remains so.
In addition to the gliphs, each key you press as you enter the password produces 1 or more than 1 "X" characters so that you can't count the x's to get password length.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Why isn't LaTeX the documents standard?
That hall of shame piece has several inaccuracies, and is QUITE old (1999, for Notes v4.x; it's now 2007 and Notes is at v8). Do you go around criticizing Linux for issues it had EIGHT years ago?
As for the inaccuracies, just about everything in that article concerning the mail interface is BS because the screenshots were for a very nasty customized mail template. Their criticism of that mail template was correct, but that interface wasn't the one supplied by Lotus.
they're devoting about 35 of their developers in China to OOo; and they'll be contributing accessibility code from Lotus Notes to improve current support for assistive technologies.
Am I the only one unsure if this is good news or not?
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
Overall I really like OO but I have to admit that I have started to use Office 2007 (pirated of course) on Win XP because of the lack of sufficient/user-friendly equation and formula editting in Word/Writer.
I am working on a graduate degree in math and I really need a good text/doc editting program that will allow me to input formualas/equations/matrices etc with ease!
Dunno about the rest of Office, but speaking as someone who does word processing 8 hours a day, Word allows me to work much more efficiently and comfortably than OOo Writer - even with all those crashes and stupid bugs that the former exhibits, and leaving format compatibility issues completely aside.
I could enumerate Writer's deficiencies point by point if you really want, though I've already done it more than once here (in the form of links to a bunch of OSNews posts)...
The fact is :
- OSA.exe is installed into your startup folder *BY DEFAULT* and is ran everytime your system boots.
(And that's what I said above. I also pointed, for people who actually enjoy the advantages of such things that similar plugins exist for OOo under GNOME and KDE)
- Also, (not what I was referring to, but any way) since Windows XP there's a thing called Prefetch (and also in Vista, named SuperFetch, according to a page pointed out by
Now if you pay attention, you'll notice that, because OSA.exe is executed at startup, it *IS* detected by prefetch/superfetch and thus the whole MS Office gets listed into c:/windows/prefetch. I've actually seen overcrowded prefetch directories to the point that Windows XP loads almost every file into memory at startup and the net result is huge slow-down.
As explained in the Wikipedia article, almost anything you run in the first minute after starting is at risk at ending in the prefetch list. It's not a problem for joe 6packs that follow their routines (log in, fire up IM, fire up email). It's a problem for geeks that are fast clicker. Today you started some app to tweak some settings, and because you started it too fast after startup, that setup/config programm is going to stay forever in the Prefetch directory.
So in conclusion :
Indeed, the default behaviour of Office is to load everything at startup, and because of Prefetch/Superfetch, this tendency doesn't immediately go away when you disable it.
In Linux the behaviour is the contrary. By default OpenOffice.org is installed as a vanilla application, but if you want you can find the corresponding desktop applet for your DE (GNOME or KDE) in you package manager, install it, and configure it to automatically open into the taskbar and preload openoffice.org
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The PPT file is a bit more than 1 megabyte and only one slide (out of 138 or so) contains a large WMF image. Granted, the computer I used to open the file isn't new (Celeron 900, 128M RAM, Windows 98), but I had to wait like 5 (five) minutes for the presentation to open just because of that WMF file, which had to be converted, too. And that was with OpenOffice.org 2.0.4. Seeing the file without having to open it in OOo and wait for a long time means using the PowerPoint Viewer.
The total time to open the file was about 15-30 seconds less with OOo 2.1. After exporting the WMF, I discovered that it was 36Mb in size.
I am going to download OOo 2.3 as soon as possible after its release, because I read that it contains a speedup related to images (specifically, a speedup of image lists, which may solve another problem I saw when using earlier 2.x.x versions).
It's called QuickStarter. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quickstarter fore more relevant information.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Writer/ToDo#Lotus_WordPro_filter
When I ask for details, vague anecdotal claims like "it allows me to work more efficiently" don't cut it.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I can only assume you are joking regarding Microsoft being better.
I have never worked anywhere that DIDN'T use Lotus until I came here. Needless to say, LookOut lacks so many features that I expect as standard out of Lotus Notes (automatic stationery, database integration, easily view all messages in all folders at the same time, etc.), that I guess I'm just spoiled. I could only wish they'd upgrade us here to Lotus, but I can't expect that to fit in their budget anytime soon.
I won't even get into the issues of how the nightly backups of Exchange fail when someone has their mail open, and how LookOut's "archive" feature never works!
LOL, my confirm-you're-not-a-script is "against". How fitting.
Okey dokey here you go.
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// Notes is like Linux. Secure, Complex, and sometimes ugly.
I wouldnt say Linux was especially complex, the unix philosophy of everything as a file makes unix systems far less complex than other systems...
VMS and z/OS seem a lot more complex, tho this could be down to my lack of knowledge of these systems (people with a lack of unix knowledge often claim unix to be complex)...
Windows however, is a lot more complex than any unix, but most users don't realise this because they never really look beyond the frontend interface.
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