New York Times Plugs OpenOffice Suite

MrNovember writes "The New York Times (registration blah blah) describes a new choice for office suites. The writer seems a bit slanted toward OpenOffice but it's a fair discussion of its pros and cons. The article has identified some interesting compatibility issues to those who aren't using OpenOffice but might. Again we see major media discussing open source as an actual alternative to a longstanding standard. The article concludes amusingly with 'Every now and then, you get what you don't pay for;' just tack on 'Open Source' to the beginning for the perfect sig." We've gotten numerous submissions recently from people whose [company/school/whatever] is switching to OpenOffice.

OpenOffice.org Compatibility

[javajeff]

I find the compatibility to be great with the exception of bullets. A bulleted list in OpenOffice.org will not appear like one opened in Word. However, a bulleted list in Word will appear as a bulleted list in OpenOffice.org. Aside from bullets, OpenOffice.org performs great with tables, spreadsheets, presentations, and documents. I have not tested any documents that contain macros or advanced formulas, since I rarely use those features. OpenOffice.org is great for users with basic needs.

Since my resume contains bullets, I have not been able to uninstall Word. OpenOffice.org is my default application for all Office filetypes.

Regards,

javajeff

Reg Free Link

[ALoverOfPeace]

link [majcher.com] (it fills out the form and refers you, it's not a trick)

installed last night..

[josepha48]

I downloaded this a few days ago and last night I finally installed it. I tested it out on the few word docs and excel spreadsheets I have at home. It worked okay, but then I do not do that much with word and my word and excel docs do not test many features. I do more with email and html.

So far it starts up quicker than staroffice and there is no so desktop which is nice. It failed to recognize my jvm during the install, but I'm not that bothered by that just yet. I am using it on Linux and installed it as root, and ran into a problem with permissions it seems. I had to change ownership to (chown -R : ) to then run it as myself. It would start up and then crash right away until I did this. Or I could run it as root. Not sure why though, and now I dont care as it works. It does use lots of disk space but then so does MS office and SO 5.x. So far I am pleased with it, as it gives me yet another option to deaeling with MS docs and excel spread sheets... I give it a thumbs up ;-)

OpenOffice dash problem

[cel4145]

Well, I know this isn't bug fix central, but here it goes:

The Times article says "The word processor idiotically flags any phrase containing a dash -- like this -- as a spelling error."

Now, it doesn't seem like it is flagging it as a spelling error for me, otherwise it would just underline it; instead, as soon as I type a few letters after a dash, it turns the dash into a question mark. The way around it is to insert the dash into the text later (such as in the example above, type "like this," then go back and insert the dash). But this is really annoying when writing.

Anyone using OpenOffice know what causes this problem, or how to fix it? Or at least what causes it? Seems like solving this problem will be important in getting OpenOffice widely accepted since dashes are commonly used in writing.

Re:Batch-mode Converters?

[Verteiron]

I don't know about VBA from Office, but OpenOffice has an Autopilot that does mass conversions. Run OO's word processor, go to File, Autopilot, Document Converter. Seems to work pretty well for me. It also imports templates and such and automagically guesses where you're keeping most of your Word files.

Comparison of how MS & OO handle the same docu

[sootman]

here [brianashe.com] is a page I made showing how Windows/MSOffice, Windows/OO, Linux/OO, and Mac/MSOffice handle the same document--a document, as it happens, that comes straight from Microsoft.

OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

It's OpenOffice.org, not OpenOffice, OpenOffice is trademarked.

From the faq: 8. Why should we say "OpenOffice.org" instead of simply "OpenOffice"? [openoffice.org]

great trick

[Kallahar]

One great trick I found for converting excel files to HTML files. Excel does an awful job, writing an html page 10 times the size it needs to be, and the code is IE-centric. However, openoffice can open .xls files, and then save as html, and it outputs nicely formatted, standard HTML at very respectable sizes.

Travis

Re:OpenOffice.org Compatibility

[unixmaster]

This is known and fixed on openoffice.org cvs. Just check http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=2 199 [openoffice.org]

GNOME OOo users: That stupid exit-on-startup bug

[Platinum Dragon]

To my fellow OOo users running under GNOME, you may have encountered a problem where the program will often fail to start properly. This is not a crash. OOo is simply being purged by the GNOME session manager [openoffice.org] due to its relatively long startup time. I was a bit surprised to encounter this problem in 1.0, having thought it an OO bug. However, this article led me to search Issuezilla for a solution, which thankfully was determined.

There are a couple ways around the purge. The easiest one is to add "unset SESSION_MANAGER" to the soffice startup script. One file, all GNOME users happy. A somewhat more intrusive and wide-ranging solution is to add "exec $PATH_TO_GNOME-SESSION/gnome-session --purge-delay=0" to ~/.gnomerc. Supposedly, this will solve a similar problem with Opera, according to the bug comments.

Stellar Product

[behrman]

I wind up doing a lot of work with some larger spreadsheets (storage system implementation documentation), as well as some fairly massive CSV imports from perl scripts. I haven't needed to do a lot of formulas/macros in the spreadsheet (since most of my spreadsheets are a result of perl scripts, I just make the script do it!), however, I've found that OOo has wound up working much much better than Excel for me. It's faster, it has better importing, great interoperability with my cow'orkers using Office, and the file sizes are smaller. Plus, I can install a copy on my laptop, both work desktops, and my three PCs at home (running Win2k, WinXp, and Linux across the 6 boxes that I use) without any fear of Microsoft Visual Gestappo Suite XP coming down on me, or my employer. I've been playing around with StarOffice for the last few versions and found it a bit cumbersome and broken (imports not working right, limited versions of Office formats to export to, really slow on my dual P2-233 linux box). OpenOffice, however, has completely impressed me.

Resumes

[MAXOMENOS]

A couple of Resume points:

1. Employers are often willing to accept HTML format instead of Word format for resumes.
2. Microsoft doesn't take Word format resumes on their website .. they insist on ASCII only. Now isn't that interesting?

Re:Well...

[Jason Levine]

Sun has Enterprise licenses that drops the per-user cost the more licenses you buy. They have various levels from $50/user for 150 users to $25/user for 10,000 users. At 1,000 users, a company would pay $40,000 ($40 per user). (SOURCE: http://www.sun.com/service/support/sw_only/star_pr ogovw.html [sun.com] click on "StarOffice 6.0 Licenses")

I couldn't find MS's volume licensing, but even if they gave a huge discount from retail (say 75%off the retail price of $450 for Office XP Standard), the 1,000 user company would still wind up paying $112,500.

In other words, Star Office would save the 1,000 user company $72,500. (Companies might shy away from the free Open Office because there's no official support channels whereas you can call up Sun with tech support inquiries.)

Re:Linux + OpenOffice IS ready for the desktop

[KjetilK]

I just did the same thing, and I have major pains. I'm in it for the freedom, so it is OK by me. My parent's had an easy choice too: "well, you could stick to your old win95 computer, but you would not get any support from neither MS nor me"...

I'm on Debian Woody, and I've been fiddling with both KDE 2.2.2 and 3. Configuring the HP OfficeJet T65 is a major pain. I have an ad hoc-solution now that works OK on PS files. But those PS files created by KWord look nothing like they did on screen, and often, some of the words are lost at the end of lines.

I haven't got OpenOffice to import anything but it's native format. Is there some kind of subprocess that is supposed to do the filtering, that just dies? It's a hell to debug this stuff.

The really bad thing is though that this box is not on the net right now, so it is too hard to get to the docs and to the updates. Last night, I burnt OO debs on a CD, and when I got home, it turned out that the CD was corrupted.... Arrrrgh!

Well, I'm going to quite a lot of pain, some of it is definately not Linux' fault, but I think that if I hadn't been into it for freedom, I wouldn't have bothered.

Freedom is still Linux major selling point.

Re:There's only 2 major gripes for the linux versi

[HiThere]

I seem to remember that TrueType was an Apple product with MS collaboration.

Whatever, the basic idea is so good that its worth is obvious. And I beleive that progress is underway. Don't both KDE3 and Gnome2 support "anti-aliased" fonts? That's a partial answer. Now what is needed are some decent tools for building those fonts. If I recall correctly, the idea of a font is a collection of objects that know how to draw themselves are various sizes and resolutions and which can be mapped to a keyboard. One way to specify this is with Bezier curves (+ hinting), but I don't see any reason that it shouldn't be possible to specify programs that would do the same thing:
draw(char#, rect=(top, left, height, width), weight, color=false, solid=true, underline=false, ...)

FontMaker used to show one a rectangle and allow one to specify which dots were black for which letter (rather like an icon designer). Fontographer, it's sequel, changed this to specifying the same thing in terms of what appeared to be Bezier curves, with hints for things like how lines ended, how you specified holes inside of letters, etc. These programs allowed the Mac to have MANY custom fonts that did just what was needed. The pixelated fonts looked ugly at every size but the design size, and appropriate reductions, but the bezier fonts looked good at many sizes. (There were scaling problems with things like serifs, size of dots, etc. which created esthetic problems if you deviated too far from the design sizes, so even scalable fonts look better at appropriate sizes.)

I haven't gone searching for projects like these, but they would certainly be a "good thing(tm)".

I have one issue with open office

[jilles]

I downloaded and installed OOo right after it was released. I generally like the software. However, there is one show stopper issue that keeps me from migrating completely. It is currently not possible to make crossreferences to paragraph numbers. If for instance you have a document with a numbered list of references at the end, it is not possible to insert a cross-reference in the text to one of these numbers. The same applies to tables, figures, sections, formulas and headings.

Since I write scientific articles and need to be able to do all of the above, I can't use OOo (I use framemaker right now). I checked with issuezilla and this is something they are aware of, even though there doesn't seem to be much activity on the issue. I really hope they fix this soon.

I love Open Office, even if it's not perfect

[surfimp]

I work as a web developer, so my main need for .DOC files exists in creating proposals, contracts, letters and similar for correspondence with my clients. Like many other Windows users, I've been using the various Word products for as long as I've been using computers.

I've always found Word to be one of the least-intuitive, poorly-supported applications that I've ever had the displeasure of working with. To say that I hate Word with a passion would not be an understatement. To make matters worse, with each new release, the number of Word's "features" seems to expand nearly geometrically, while my ability to use nearly ANY feature decreases by some sort of evil inverse proportion. Microsoft needs to hire Jacob Nielsen [useit.com] to conduct some usability studies on the app, seriously.

So for me, ANYTHING that can help me to escape from the grasp of Word sounds good. I've got the 1.0 release of OpenOffice and I love it. Sure, it's got bugs vis-a-vis opening and saving Word files perfectly, and the bulleted list thing is really annoying (although some Windows people think they look really cool! LOL), but since most of my documents need to be created for hardcopy printing only, I'm learning to love OpenOffice.

Openoffice.org -- real life use

[hobit]

I'm writing a big course-pack for a class that I teach. I debated about using Latex or Word and, mainly for "free" reasons, settled on openoffice.org. I'm running this on an XP box and hope to be running it on my Linux box at work also.

So far I'm pretty happy. The UI is okay, and things are pretty nice. However, I've had a lot of problems. (all in OO writer)

• I had serious problems with bullets. They all just changed to bullets with the number 10 in them. After spending about an hour on this, I found it as a fixed bug [openoffice.org] with a workaround.
• I've had the program crash once and my machine crash once (due to something else.) Both times I've lost work because there is apparently no crash recovery.
• Saving as HTML doesn't seem to work very well. In this directory [umich.edu] you can see the HTML [umich.edu] file has had some of its graphics messed up pretty badly, while others are just fine. I think that if I group each drawing into one drawing this problem will go away. But still...
• The spell checker is nice, but I can't see away to get it to ignore punctuation. So everytime I have two puncutuation marks back-to-back it calls it an error.
• You can't change the default bullet that is generated by hitting the "bullet on/off" button. You'd think it would use the list1 style or something, but it doesn't.
• If you want to contribute to openoffice.org you have to sign your code over to Sun. As far as I can tell, this means they can use it for whatever they want (StarOffice for example...)

I've also found that the bib. tool needs a lot of help. Also, right-clicking seems to cause menus to pop but based upon cursor position, not mouse position. I guess that is okay, but it seems like I have to click twice to get the right-click menu that I want (once to move the cursor, once to pull up the menu.)

Given all of these complaints I still expect I'll finish this using OOo. It seems to work well enough and I'd like to move away from MS tools if possible.

Re:I have one issue with open office

[Anonymous Coward]

If for instance you have a document with a numbered list of references at the end, it is not possible to insert a cross-reference in the text to one of these numbers. The same applies to tables, figures, sections, formulas and headings.

Since I write scientific articles and need to be able to do all of the above,

If you write scientific papers, you should be using LaTeX [ctan.org]. Get the style file for the journals you submit to, and your paper will be formatted to suit them.

The combination of emacs, auctex, reftex, aspell and latex works together seamlessly to provide far nicer output than MS-anything, for less effort. Reftex in particular makes these references trivial to keep straight. They're all on your Linux installation disks right now.

Re:Who do you call for tech support?

[flyfishin]

Okay so you want to purchase a product. MS offers gives some freebie support. Unlimited installation support isn't really that big of a deal.
Now lets do some math for the home user. You can buy StarOffice and get one free support incident. After that it is $25 per incident for phone support or $20 for emailed suport. I can spend $400 to buy a copy of MS Office and I get three free support calls(let's assume you install once and call for help) or I can buy StarOffice for $75, get one free call for installation, and pay for a two calls. Here's the totals MS(purchase + 3 support calls(1 for installation)) $400, StarOffice(purchase + 3 support calls(1 for installation)) $125. That's MS: $400 Sun: $125. After that point MS is $10 more per call. Yes, I think the MS deal is unreasonable for a home user.

Re:Honest question about OSS

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to work on OS infrastructure projects, work for a company that has a significant interest in seeing OS succeed. You could work in IT & spend time coding on top of samba, wine, OO.org for that company's infrastructure needs. You could work for a company that needs to build on top of this code -- that needs special functionality.

I work in the "Test" field writing highly specialized applications to test cell phone chips on big monolithic proprietary test systems. That's way far away from infrastructure tools -- it's applications programming with a high degree of specialization. I think that you'll find that most people on slashdot do something of the same... they write specialized code for their company... and there's lots of money to be made coding specialized apps that noone would ever care about being open sourced.

So, as you are an open source programmer working on OpenOffice... _sell_yourself_ to a CFO/CIO & tell them that you can save them $X million on Infrastructure -- just in migrating them from MSO to OOO & that you will support it for $XXX thousand per year & support their needs for specialized code in the process. Tell them that you will personally fasttrack their needs into your contributions to OOO, so that they become standardized (maintained by the OS system, freeing you to work on other specialized needs of the company). Talk to them as well about the free publicity that it will gain for their company as they become associated with such a valuable OS project by employing you.

Re:Honest question about OSS

[Hairy1]

First of all many of the development team work for Sun, who I suspect are paying the developers very well. Sun will be paying the team through the proceeds from the sale of StarOffice, although I think they could package OpenOffice and sell distributions and support much like Red Hat. The model now is for companies to cooperate to fund development of mainstream apps as open source, rather than pay ongoing license fees for the same type of software as closed source.

The second point is that there is no god given right for software developers to be able to make great gobs of money. Its a bit like a farmer complaining that people can grow their own food. Open source is here to stay - its part of the software ecosystem - deal with it.

How I fixed the ugly fonts.

[Linuxathome]

1. Ugly fonts

Follow the instructions on changing the interface font from the OpenOffice.org font guide [openoffice.org]. Be sure to add the changes (with the checkmark) and check the two boxes next to the newly added changes (you'll see what I'm saying when you do it). That should do it for your interface font.

For your other font ugliness problems (i.e. ugly fonts in the documents), the reason this is occurring is because true type fonts are not installed correctly. There are two remedies to this: 1) Do what the font guide from OpenOffice.org tells you (the hard way) or 2) if you have Linux Mandrake installed, run "Drakfont" and add the true type fonts found in your windows partition (c:\windows\fonts -or- /mnt/windows/windows/fonts directory, or if you don't have a windows install partition, just copy all the fonts in that directory from a friend's windows system to a temporary directory and have Drakfont load the true type fonts from that temp dir).