OpenOffice.org Team on OO.org (and Upcoming v2.0)

Aditya Nag writes "I recently got the chance to ask the OpenOffice.org team a few questions about OpenOffice.org in general, and their upcoming release. The questions were answered by Louis Suarez-Potts and Colm Smyth. Louis is OpenOffice.org's Community Manager, member and chair of the Community Council, and lead of many OpenOffice.org projects including the Native Language Confederation. Colm is a StarOffice Architect, and was responsible for defining the product concept for OpenOffice.org 3.0 (or StarOffice 9). The interview is fairly long and detailed, and there are a few interesting tid-bits, like Louis' assertion that there will come a day when there will be no proprietary file formats for Office Suites." This is the full interview from which excerpts were linked in the recent post about OO.o's beta candidate for 2.0.

My major Problem

[slashdot4ever]

dont get me wrong, i love ooo, and i would be sold if it wasnt for the crappy spellcheck. maybe i have been raised wrong, and schooled wrong. but i suck at spelling, and so does ooo. here is the test that i ran. i spelled the word "Meticulously" phonetically, or fonetically if you will. and in ooo 2beta, i get about 10 sugesstions that all start with the letter "r". same thing in ooo 1.1. so i guess that ooo has made no progression in this area. in wordperfect 12, one sugesstion, and it was right. in word i bet it would be the same (i cannot aford to try it). I also tried google, and it sugessted the correct spelling. would be that hard to develop a front end for googles sugesstion service for ooo? so it wouldnt suck? this is the major compalint that i have with ooo, and it is major in my opinion. Kevin

Re:Anybody using it?

[ThisIsFred]

I've been using it for more than a year now at the office. There's still no way to read MS Access database files, which is a major drawback. Other than that, I prefer Calc over Excel because of features that make data import/export/retouching easier. I also get lots of use out of Draw, something which MSO really should consider. 'Write' gets the work done, but as of 1.1.3, it has problems exporting to Word 97/2000/XP format (their name, not mine), where it dumps something in the file that totally screws up the formatting when MSO tries to read it (all the special mark-up is lost and the file can't be converted to a real MSO format). Reading Word files works fine, but sometimes it does not pick the correct font size and margin sizes.

Thus far, Open Office hasn't crashed on me or mangled any data, unlike Office 95/97/2000. They fixed the annoying hi-lighting bugs from 1.1.0, but it still has an annoying tendency to open up random new, blank documents when you open a document and an OO window is already open.

I have not tested the Word export problem on 1.1.4, so I don't know if it is fixed or not.

Re:Latex...?

[Coryoth]

If you have to use OpenOffice, but want real equations in documents and presentations, there's always this [ucl.ac.be]. It's quite a nice little plugin for OpenOffice that uses TeX to render math to an image file, which it then inserts into the document. The TeX commands used to render the image are inserted into image attributes in the header so that you can go back and edit equations as well. Simple and ingenious, and ought to become standard for OpenOffice. As nice as their equation editor is, it's rendering is ugly as sin compared to TeX.

Jedidiah.

Re:What I'd want to ask

[Coryoth]

Does the OpenOffice team actually realize there are real and serious interface usability and elegance issues with their program, and desire to fix this?

I think they do. Usability, consistency, and GUI cleanup were some of the major tasks for 2.0. No 2.0 doesn't magically correct everything, but as far as usability goes it makes great strides over 1.0. The other thing to note, of course, is that in the end OpenOffice is aiming to be a fairly close work-alike to MS Office to make transitioning easier. That means that it will have the same GUI and usability issues as MS Office, as well as any of it's own. The MS Office inherited usability issues aren't likely to go away all that soon unfortunately - not util OO get's enough of a userbase that it can forge its own direction in the Office application market.

Jedidiah.

Re:Until they..

[jonabbey]

2.0 / Star Office 8 is supposed to dramatically improve all of that. No more of that network install / workstation install crap.

Re:The problem...

[flibble-san]

As far as I know, the 'OS X hackers' are working on NeoOfficeJ. I don't actually like NeoOfficeJ though. It's old of date and quite buggy.

Re:Anybody using it?

[hermeshome.se]

Yes. Our company (7000+ employees) has migrated from MS Office to Open Office. Unfortunatly most comments in the beginning was negative. I do suspect that it was due to the transaction to a "new" program(s) and interface. People are used to use MS Office and with little to none real computer experience, it is scarry to try out "new stuff". Thus, everything new is dagerous and should be regarded as evil.
Now, two years later, nobody reflects over the fact that we uses another office suite. The only problem that we have are some conversion from Excel to OO Calc.

To sum it up. If you got a user base with good common computer skills there should be no problems. Just remind them to keep an open mind. If you then can point out that by changing office suite to a free alternative, your company saves money and maybe your job are a bit safer, you should be homefree.
Do not, however, engage in ideological arguements. That will only confuse, and poeple in general think any mid to big sized company are made of money...

Re:Anybody using it?

[johannesg]

We tried it. It failed to read our existing Word files correctly (standard company document features coming out wrong, that sort of thing), so we decided against using it for now.

However, we also reported every problem we could find and the good news is that quite a few seem to be fixed now. Once 2.0 gets released we'll reevaluate it for use in the office.

OOo Writer has at least one killer feature: PDF export, which is something we need badly and which is a pain with Word.

And unlike Word, OOo Writer hasn't yet gone and destroyed any of my documents. Word tends to do that, and I believe it is using its Intellisense to sniff out approaching deadlines so it can concentrate its evil powers where it can do the most harm. Example: last week we lost a day's worth of work on a document when it was inexplicably eaten by Word at the end of the working day. Yes, we keep backups. No, they don't run halfway through the day. And then the next day it happened again with the same document, repeating the same changes as the day before. Buh...

Re:OS X port

[DuBois]

Been there. Done that:

Neo Office/J [planamesa.com]

Re:Latex...?

[Coryoth]

Adding some better scripting/macro capabilities should I think become a priority so people can make the same sort of mini-applications which are possible in excel/word

Well, given that they now have support for scripting in Python [openoffice.org], things will definitely get better. Of course there's still the issue of the underlying APIs that the scripts are using. Having not actually done any OOo scripting work I can't vouch for those. Generally, though, it does look like they are payng attention to making scripting both easy and powerful.

Jedidiah.

OGO's biggest weakness not mentioned

[FattyBoeBatty]

Ever tried installing it? It's *incredibly difficult*. It's not an open source package that a sys admin can simply decide to try out quickly. Installing it involves loads of time and all sorts of system-specific tweaks. Our organization investigated moving to that platform but abandoned it when realizing how large of an undertaking it would be (in both time and skills) to even get it running.

I've heard that the 1.0 release's main focus is making installation easier, however, it can't even be installed on RHEL [opengroupware.org] I really don't see the installation improving at all if they continue to ignore one of the most popular platforms out there.

-Fatty

it's not 'marketing'

[mgkimsal2]

From what I recall, there is another product called 'openoffice' which has a trademark on that name. The openoffice.org team gets around that issue by enforcing the ".org" in their literature and promotion efforts.

the URL

[mgkimsal2]

http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/faq-other.html#7 [openoffice.org]

Re:Latex...?

[Coryoth]

To be honest, there are no converters from latex to anything that are decent

I find the LaTeX to PDF and LaTeX to DVI converters to be quite excellent (not just decent). I think you'll be able to find a LaTeX to Lyx converter that works quite well as well. If you want to convert to MS Word or OpenOffice then things get much trickier because, in the end, we're actually talking about different kinds of applications. TeX and to a lesser extent LaTeX are about typesetting, while Word and Writer are about word processing. There are many many things that you can do in TeX that just can't be done in Word or Writer. Expecting to have a converter that is "(supporting all the addons one can have)" is like expecting a photohop to MS Paint converter to support all photoshop's features in the resulting MS Paint document. It just can't happen. That's nto to say converters can't exist, merely that they must necessarily be restricted in what they can do.

Jedidiah.

Re:My major Problem

[dahlek]

I have to agree completely. It's spell check sucks. I've often had to resort to dictionary.com to look up a word - it sucks at phonetic spell-suggestions, and for a bad speller like me, it's a serious limitation...

"immiedietly" is an example - it simply will not give the right suggestions or anything remotely close.

Re:The problem...

[Macrat]

You need to get out more. NeoOffice/J is updated monthly and is using the latest release OOo 1.1.x code.

Re:Still cannot import SVG

[Coryoth]

It is being worked on [openoffice.org]. No, it hasn't made it into 2.0, but it looks like they have a provisional svg2draw translator - it just needs a little more work. It's not like they are completely ignoring the issue.

Jedidiah.

OpenOffice and Java

[Tincan2k]

No. OpenOffice doesn't use Java. OpenOffice does however provide a Java binding to a component model called UNO (Universal Network Objects) which can be used, among other things, to remotely automate OpenOffice. There also used to be some Java components that use a direct Java to C++ bridge to integrate with OpenOffice but I don't know the status of those. Java is less of a requirement and more of an option.

Re:One question

[TractorBarry]

Speaking from experience I know how hard it is to compile OO.o on Slackware :)

First download the tarball.

Now su to root and perform a network install:

tar -zxvf OO_tarball_name
cd OO_source_directory_name

./setup -net

Now return to your user and:

cd /opt/OO_directory_name
setup

Or see The instructions [openoffice.org] for full details.

Boy that's hard, I'd rather write a kernel driver using my feet to operate the keyboard anyday of the week. Damned unusable Slackware making me both think & type. It'll never catch on. Never I tells ya.

Re:Anybody using it?

[ThisIsFred]

This is sort of cheating. It's not reading Access format files, it's using Microsoft drivers to query the database. I don't have this option on Linux. There are tools that read OLE streams on Linux, but they often choke on Access files or don't read the contents of tables.

Re:Anybody using it?

[fireduck]

OO 1.97 routinely mangles formulas entered in Writer. I'm trying to type up notes for my students. Maybe 7-10 page documents with a few formulas per page. Guaranteed when I reload the complete document at a later point, equations will have been modified beyond recognition. Half the time its copied earlier formulas in place of later formulas. Other half, it's odd bits of half formulas. Usually they involve really odd size changes as well (original formula's frame size with new formula either stretched of crammed in). That's the only frustrating aspect I've come across.

Re:Anybody using it?

[runningduck]

Have you checked out the Navigator in OO.o?

If you structure your document with heading styles (all documents should be built with styles), the Navigator provides an outline view. You can re-arrange items in the Navigator, promote or demote heading and all the contect moves with the headings.

I actually find it more functional than MS's outline view.

Re:My major Problem

[BenjyD]

Troll [slashdot.org] posted verbatim from the last slashdot openoffice article. And modded up both times.