Evolving ODF Environment: Spotlight on SoftMaker

Andy Updegrove writes "In this fourth in-depth interview focusing on ODF-compliant office productivity suites, I interview Dr. Martin Sommer, of Germany's SoftMaker Software. Most people know about OpenOffice, StarOffice, and KOffice, the ODF poster child software suites. But there are also other products available as well, including this one, which bundles word processing and spreadsheet capabilities (with more modules on the way), runs on both Windows, Linux and mobile platforms, is designed for home users, is available on-line, is localized in many languages - and is dirt cheap, besides. It's also been selected by AMD for use in connection with its ambitious "50x15" plan, which hopes to connect 50% of the world population to the Internet by 2015. This interview series amply demonstrates how a useful standard - in this case ODF - can rapidly lead to the evolution of a rich and growing environment of compliant products, providing customers with variety, choice, price competition, and proprietary as well as open source product alternatives - in stark contrast to the situation that has prevailed in office suite software for the last many years."

Both of three things!

[knewter]

runs on both Windows, Linux and mobile platforms

I found the article both informative, entertaining, and grammatically confused.

I tries Microsoft Office out the other day

[Procyon101]

I was using a Windows box the other day. Overall, the OS seemed solid and polished, so I installed MS Office.

Office opened up, I typed some characters... simple first steps. All seemed to be in order, so I go to try it out with some of my documents.

I go to open a document I have opened with a few other Word Processors.. nothing. Word can't read any of my standard ODF documents. All my other word processing software can read Word docs, but Microsoft can't read the basic, common denominator standard. So much for that.

So, on to spreadsheets. Open up an open document format spreadsheet with Excell. Excell somehow thinks this is a CSV formatted file of all things. I can't use any of my existing spreadsheets on this new software.

Rather than spen untold painful hours converting everything, I uninstalled office and installed OOo for Windows. It seems that MS has alot of work to do to bring their office suite up to par with current standards. As it is, it seems barely useable, *IF* you can get access to a Windows machine and only if that machine has MS Office installed, which is a fairly rare combination from where I stand. I wonder why I don't see more "Windows isn't ready for the desktop" comments, because from my vantage point, that's the impression I get every time I struggle to use the damn stuff.

Re:Catastrophe coming

[amliebsch]

Why do you think it's being demanded by government offices all over the world so soon after becoming a draft?

Why, for the same reason that all government offices make any decision, of course: because it's the sensible, logical, cost-effective thing to do.

Re:Has anyone ever sent you an ODF document?

[killjoe]

"I use OOo daily, and no one has ever sent
me a document in anything other than Word. I'd be amazed if it happened."

Nobody has ever sent you plain text? Nobody has ever sent you HTML (even in email?), nobody has ever sent you a PDF file?

I find that incredibly hard to believe.