OpenOffice.org Team on OO.org (and Upcoming v2.0) 251
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.
Timothy (Score:4, Insightful)
You're a Slashdot regular Timothy, if you want to say your articl'es a dupe then don't beat about the bush just say "Yep, this is a dupe".
Anybody using it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:2)
Choose ADO as the database type, and enter something like this (all on one line):
Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;
Data Source=c:\somepath\myDb.mdb;
User Id=admin;Password=
Click on the "Tables" tab and you should know right away if it worked.
That's as goo
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, I am. We have many office docs stored on the network - word docs, spreadsheets, etc. I knew from day one I would use OpenOffice. (This is in an environment of sales people. We are all self-employed and bring our own machines.) One of my co-workers had Word but not MS Office, so she couldn't read the spreadsheets on the network. I showed her how to install OpenOffice. Now she reads the spreadsheets.
I told the head honcho who wasn't pleased about this. He said the office may end up going all Microsoft
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:2, Interesting)
In general we've spent the past two years moving away from MSFT and into OO and generic hardware. We're getting IT spending down to a point where I'm not hearing complaints from mangagement any longer. We're even considering installing MacMini's as the new default hardware.
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:2)
All I really want to do is have text files (like any text file, regardless of extension, since I always use my own random extensions ) to open up in Calc, not Writer, without having to first select "txt/csv" from the drop down menu.
Why doesn't it realize that I want to open something as a spreadsheet from the speadsheet program!
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:5, Informative)
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:Anybody using it? (Score:5, Interesting)
My experience with Openoffice has been very similar to yours. We produce very large reports with custom made headers and footers. Lots of embedded pictures, and quite a few tables along the way. OO can open them, but the tables are misaligned and the headers/footers are screwy. I am really looking forward to OO 2.
One of the things OO outshines MSO is... opening its own corrupt documents! Yes, most of MSO SNAFU's are recoverable by OO (at least the content). Give it a try, you'll be amazed and your users will worship you.
OO is the real underdog of Open Source. I see lots of people bringing Linux and Mozilla when they discuss open source, but in my opinion the real fight against propietary software will be carried in the office arena.
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:5, Interesting)
While we were at my other brother's house, he wanted to create a mortgage spreadsheet to show my father various options to buy a house. The computer there only had Linux and Open Office, but my brother was able to whip up the spreadsheet in no time on his first try using OpenOffice. He only ran into a few small bumps where certain items were located in different menues, etc.
So this was a real kind of spreadsheet application that he'd use at his work all the time, and he was able to integrate into OpenOffice just fine within a few minutes. He was amazed at how smoothly it was, and even more amazed that it was available for free (as in beer, not speech).
On top of that, he occasionally sends me various complicated spreadsheets that he's made up for personal finance things on Excel, and all of them have opened just fine in OpenOffice. In fact, they work better there than in Apple's Appleworks!
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:2)
It works very well for all our in house needs, which are mostly spreadsheets and word processing.
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I've got about half our office on it. We moved to StarOffice 5.2 after the BSA sent us letters demanding that we explain our software licensing before someone comes and inspects things for themselves. The other half of the office are using some pretty complicated spreadsheets with stacks of VB code, and it's just not feasible to port it to OOo ( even though it would be technically possible ) at the moment.
At the moment I've got all the OOo people on the 2.0 beta. It's working very nicely. The compatibility with Office is much better. Documents that used to have severe formatting issues now work either flawlessly, or damned close.
I've done some simple dialogs in OOo for our sales department. They enter a prospect's code and get a combo box showing all the locations and contacts for that company. They select from combo boxes and hit a button to copy all the info into a word processing document. Simple but effective. The scripting language isn't as easy to use as VB, but it's not too bad, and the macro recorder makes things easier.
I've also done a Perl-Gtk2 database front-end for them which is working remarkably better than MS Access. I've written a little Perl module, at http://entropy.homelinux.org/Gtk2-Ex-DBI/ [homelinux.org] ( screenshot available at that link ) that makes Gtk2-Perl apps designed with the Glade GUI builder data-aware. It handles all database querying, via DBI, 'paints' records onto your Glade-generated form, detects user-changes, updates the database, etc.
I've just started on a Perl-based report writer that outputs to PDF via PDF::API2. Obviously this is to replace Access reports. It's coming along very nicely.
OOo 2 has a database engine and front-end, but honestly I find that ( at least currently ), Access is far more powerful, easy to use, and stable. Of course the OOo 2 one is young and improving, but I think that no matter how good it gets, the Perl-Gtk2 way is always going to be much better ( and more fun ). Perl really is a nice language to be programming in, and Perl-Gtk2 is just so simple and logical, and yet powerful and fast that it really is a compelling option.
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:2)
Powerpoint files were a pain until a release a few months back and loading a few more fonts - since then about a dozen people running it have found no problems with powerpoint files. Two users have MS Powerpoint, and they can read the OpenOffice generated stuff OK, while others can view theirs. Win4Lin used to be used exclusively to run MS Powerpoint, but now no-one is bothering to do that, they all just run OpenOffice.
Printing setup wasn't put in an ea
Been using it about a yesr in a mixed environment (Score:2)
However, about a year ago Word (and other MS Office software) started to fail to load on my windows 2003 box. IT couldn't figure out what was going wrong, so after a few tickets I finally gave up and just installed Open Office.
I've been using it ever since, at home and at work. I would say light use but I've had to mix heavily with other Word users and it's worked fine - mostly Powerpoint and Word use, not so many spreadsheets.
One thing I would say is
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:2)
Acid test was when one of the owners came in and wanted to edit a spreadsheet for his other business. He sat down, opened his email, load
Re:Anybody using it? (Score:2)
Latex...? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Latex...? (Score:5, Informative)
Jedidiah.
Re:Latex...? (Score:2)
Re:Latex...? (Score:3, Informative)
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 b
Re:Latex...? (Score:3, Informative)
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 wo
More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:2)
how does it *reduce* costs? (Score:2)
Re:how does it *reduce* costs? (Score:2)
Re:how does it *reduce* costs? (Score:2)
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:2)
Office installs on new systems (Score:2)
For what it's worth, she did allow me to remove it and install OpenOffice.org instead. So far, so good, with a few hitches here and there.
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:2)
Toshiba.
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:2)
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:2, Insightful)
That said, perhaps more education is in order. My father in law wanted me to find him a "good deal" on a legal copy of Office 2003. When I showed him what it was going to cost, he balked. I suggested he try OpenOffice. He asked what it was, and after explaining to him
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:2, Insightful)
With IE vs Firefox, the argument about lower costs with Firefox is harder to demonstrate, as IE is free-as-in-beer.
With OpenOffice, people are aware of the obvious cost difference from the start
Once the functionality is at the right level ( OOo 1 was close, OOo 2 might just do it - it's working damned well for us in testing ), people should flock to it.
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:More uphill than FireFox vs. IE (Score:2)
You have to remember, anyone silly enough to pay someone else to load their software isn't going to know how to use it.
Fix Microsoft Office (Score:5, Insightful)
"Please add read/write support for the OASIS document formats found in OpenOffice.org 2.0."
Re:Fix Microsoft Office (Score:2, Insightful)
This way, this document standard will also benefit them, as people will just treat them as ms-office documents. Then when they hit save, the whole thing will become an ms-office document.
Not only that, but even if you would (should you be able to) install support for _writing_ documents in this standard, a warning would be presente
Re:Fix Microsoft Office (Score:2)
On the other hand, perhaps they might adopt a proprietary variant of the OASIS format. No intelligent businessman, however, would jeopardize his "bread and butter" product in order to satisfy a competitor.
Re:Fix Microsoft Office (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fix Microsoft Office (Score:3, Interesting)
They might need to support it, because when a lot of people start using OASIS standards, it would be an easy point for the FOSS enthusiasts ("Look! Our OO.o can open documents in open standards AND MSOs proprietary standards, while MSO can only open its own standard"). At least in the home market, that might be a major "selling" point for OpenOffice. I'm beginning to receive OpenOffice documents from completely computer illiterate people.
Better yet, demand standrad support outside (Score:2)
When they start loosing contracts, they might become more accommodating.
Exaggeration...? (Score:4, Interesting)
I must have RTFA in the past too many times, as this seems a rather short interview. Even the ones Slashdot sends out have 10 questions, where this one come in at an overwhelming 6 questions.
My major Problem (Score:2, Informative)
Re:My major Problem (Score:2)
Otherwise, if it's that off the mark, I'd venture to guess it's a bug that needs correcting.
Re:My major Problem (Score:3, Informative)
"immiedietly" is an example - it simply will not give the right suggestions or anything remotely close.
Re:My major Problem (Score:3, Informative)
OpenSource (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OpenSource (Score:4, Insightful)
Personally I'd just like to see OO get a better UI, and move away from JAVA. With all the help from Sun, Java is probably here to stay, but we can hope for the UI improvement.
Re:OpenSource (Score:2)
OpenOffice and Java (Score:2, Informative)
Re:OpenSource (Score:2)
Re:OpenSource (Score:3, Interesting)
IWM ProWord is a very innovative product based on MS Word. Its features speak for themself, but it's only available in German, for now. You'll never lose time formatting the document again. Among its features:
- True templating
- An efficient touch system ("10-Finger System") for editin
Re:OpenSource (Score:2)
It bothers me personally for the following reasons: 1) installing java is a pain Sun can't make a installer, and there always seems to be a problem with linking.
2) Openoffice is significantly hard to compile without using more than one language.
3)
Can it really be true? (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenOffice.org/StarOffice a real alternative.
I really hope they mean this. Dealing with MS Office formats has got to be insanely difficult and as of yet no one has really been able to do it well (not even Microsoft!). Life would be so much better if there was another office suite that could handle all the MS formats without choking on everything but the simplest of documents. I've got great hopes for OO.org 2.0 but you'll have to excuse me if I'm still a bit skeptical.
Re:Can it really be true? (Score:2)
Until they.. (Score:5, Interesting)
Well the downloads (even the stable) for the office suite are a zip file. The zip file extracts to a directory with a horde of different files. She had no idea what a zip file was and when I finally talked her through extracting it she was baffled by the tons of files.
Installing it this way may seem like a trivial task to the average computer geek but to your casual user this is a very intimidating process and if it weren't for me on the phone with her she would have never figured it out. I don't want to do install support to every person that I think might find use in Open Office so I'm just going to bite my tongue or suggest they shell out some cash for a CD they can pop in and have it hold their hand through the process.
Re:Until they.. (Score:5, Informative)
2.0 / Star Office 8 is supposed to dramatically improve all of that. No more of that network install / workstation install crap.
Re:Until they.. (Score:2)
In all honesty, I don't even like that. I'd prefer a directory heirarchy that I can put in a tarball. Leave the final tweaks, like the filetype registration and icon copy in a bunch of separate scripts. For the non-technical user, they can put a setup script in the archive root directory all by itself so
Re:Until they.. (Score:2)
Re:Until they.. (Score:2)
Re:Until they.. (Score:2)
So put that version out as a separate installer. Call it the "Marty McFly Time Machine Edition" or something.
Seriously, they could have at least put all those files in a subdirectory so that you didn't have to wade through them all to find the setup executable. On Win32 it invariably showed up at the bottom of the list, so you'd open the folder and be confronted with a long list of files that double-clicking did nothing. D'oh! A little organization would have improved the install experience greatly...
Re:Until they.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Until they.. (Score:2)
How hard is that to do?
If you're making a cross platform application like OpenOffice, very. Okay, it's quite easy, but the drag and drop disk image installer will weigh in at some ridiculous size. Because you need to be able to have
Feature request: portability (Score:5, Interesting)
It would really be nice if 0.000% of the openoffice.org effort devoted to press releases and promotion went instead to increasing the portability of the code :)
This lack of portability is really a pet peeve of mine. With Linux or NetBSD, you can run the same application on practically any hardware platform, just by recompiling... presuming the software was written without 32-bit assumptions. Linux (and NetBSD) becomes your portability layer, presuming your application meets some minimum standards.
Another pet peeve is that every big application re-invents cross-OS portability, which actually exacerbates the portability problem.
In my position, when you have 1000 packages to get running on Alpha AXP, each application's portability glue becomes a portability hindrance. As an example, Mozilla's portability layer is the reason why Mozilla does not build on alpha today.
Re:Feature request: portability (Score:3, Insightful)
Two things:
- people that can promote open office != people that can increase the portability of the code
- promotion->more people know about it->more users and developers
dont the scientific community use open formats (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OpenOffice only does what I tell it t do! (Score:2)
Jedidiah.
naming (Score:4, Interesting)
ugh.
I get that it's marketing, but I don't agree with it.
it's not 'marketing' (Score:4, Informative)
the URL (Score:4, Informative)
OpenOffice.org in the Office. (Score:3, Interesting)
OGO's biggest weakness not mentioned (Score:2, Informative)
I've heard that the 1.0 release's main focus is making installation easier, however, it can't even be installe [opengroupware.org]
Re:OGO's biggest weakness not mentioned (Score:2)
Language bindings (Score:2)
Anyone got any hints on the trademark issue? (Score:3, Interesting)
Digging around in forums has given me some very muddled answers relating to the ukrane and ripoff copies of openoffice being sold.
3.0 tease - more info? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Why? (Score:2)
Re:Why use OpenOffice? (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering the utterly prohibitive costs to a small business should they ever be subject to a BSA audit while using the "free" version of MS Office, I'd say it's actually pretty expensive. Honestly, an audit can be a business changing experience [infoworld.com]. It just isn't worth the risk.
The last small company I worked for was busy transitioning as many staff as they could over to OpenOffice. They weren't doing this because OpenOffice was cheaper, they were doing this because they didn't have to bother with the task of filing and managing licenses - the reduced cost was just a bonus.
Jedidiah.
Re:One question (Score:3, Informative)
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
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.
Re:One question (Score:2)
Why do the software developers always prepackage for the big releases that dont need any help? I say put that extra work into making the source usable.
Re:What I'd want to ask (Score:3, Informative)
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. T
Re:What I'd want to ask (Score:4, Insightful)
What exactly are you looking for? A rough outline of the design goals is here [openoffice.org] with specific target improvements for 2.0 here [openoffice.org]. For very specific improvements actually made not just target concepts you can read through this [openoffice.org] and look for all the "ease-of-use" improvements made. There are actually a lot. Yes, some are small. No, OOo 2.0 is not somehow magically a perfect usability application. It is an issue, and they are focussing on it. It is an incremental process however.
Jedidiah.
Mod Parent Up (Score:3)
Re:Would Have Cared More Before... (Score:2)
TRY OUT NEO OFFICE, FOOL (Score:2)
There's a somewhat native version of OpenOffice in the works, at www.neooffice.org -- it's a Mac
iWork is a nice product, I've been using Keynote since 1.0
Pages and OO both useful in different ways (Score:2)
I stil use both, even though I have to admit Pages is pretty cool.
NeoOffice/J (Score:4, Interesting)
Several years ago, OOorg was dominated on their
mailing lists by persons who essentially wanted
OOo to be an Office (MSFT) look-alike. IMHO,
this detracted from the real benefit of F/OSS,
a common source tree that could be built on any
number of different platforms.
While OOo's decision to focus primarily upon the
X11 platform might be considered to be a drawback,
I would consider a single source tree to be a
real advantage. Maintaining a common look/feel
cross-platform makes it easier to "switch gears"
when using it on another OS. Instead of trying
to match MSFT on the basis of the GUI, the effort
to out-perform MSFT on features and functions
would create a product better than MSFT's.
That said, the OOo project has forked specifically
for the Mac OS X platform in the NeoOffice/J
project, if you insist upon an Aqua interface.
Otherwise, just install the available X11 code
on your Mac OS X, and use the OOo binaries for
the Mac platform (using X11). Simple enough.
Re:The problem... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The problem... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Would Have Cared More Before... (Score:2)
Re:Would Have Cared More Before... (Score:2)
Neooffice J is the official OS X port (Score:2)
It works quite well, I've been using it for a while.
Re:OS X port (Score:4, Informative)
Neo Office/J [planamesa.com]
Re:Still cannot import SVG (Score:5, Informative)
Jedidiah.