Special Edition Using Star Office 6.0 433
| Special Edition Using Star Office 6.0 | |
| author | Michael Koch |
| pages | 1078 + index |
| publisher | Que |
| rating | quality: 5 stars; usability: 4 stars; weight: 1 star |
| reviewer | Robert Nagle |
| ISBN | 0789728338 |
| summary | Great for easing the transition to Openoffice/Staroffice. |
First, PC makers rarely have financial inducements to preinstall open source applications, especially when it eats into their upsell margins. Second, people have a misconception that documents produced in MS Office can only be read by MS Office (a fact which leads Richard Stallman to call for an end to all Microsoft Word attachments ). Third, subsidized prices and the wide availability of instructional material ensure that teachers use these commercial products for class and give assignments requiring them. Finally, consumers switching to an open source product need confidence that the open source application has equivalent functionality and adequate documentation to reduce the learning curve.
Fortunately, a first-class user guide on OpenOffice.org/StarOffice has been written, and that book is Michael Koch's Special Edition Using StarOffice 6.0. This book, actually a second edition, covers the new version and gives fuller treatment to StarOffice writer and the HTML editor. Despite the use of "StarOffice" in the title, this book actually covers both StarOffice and OpenOffice.org in depth.
An an aside, let me compliment Que editions for the legibility and usability of layout. (Que also produced the excellent Ed Bott's Special Edition Using Microsoft Office XP). Nice readable texts, lots of boxes, tips and cautions. Every chapter finishes with a helpful troubleshooting section.
Two immediate reactions: 1) Gosh, I didn't know OpenOffice/StarOffice could do all that! I was pleasantly surprised, for example, to learn the number of graphic capabilities the program has. 2) This book covers functionality in considerable depth, with enough content to satisfy the newbie as well as the advanced user. In addition to documenting the office software, the book also includes reference sections on StarOffice Basic, using data sources, building forms and macros. It also includes a chapter on Adabas, the database that comes as part of the StarOffice package (but not with OpenOffice.org).
Koch benefits from the fact that users already start with a good conceptual framework of what MS Office products are supposed to do. The biggest conceptual challenge in moving from MS Office to Star/OpenOffice is getting used to the idea of applying styles to text instead of just clicking on an icon for formatting. MS Office actually has terrific styling capabilities (and a usable interface for managing styles),but Microsoft's friendly GUI discourages users from thinking about document structure. Contrast that to OpenOffice.org, which nudges the user more firmly towards styles. Managing the different layers of styles in OpenOffice.org can be tricky and confusing, so Koch spends a considerable amount of time and space on that. Another chapter on sharing and exchanging information with MS Office users goes into exquisite detail about compatibility and formatting losses when converting documents, as well as the StarOffice XML file format.
Cordelia of Buffy the Vampire Slayer once said, "There are books about computers? Isn't that the point of computers, to replace books?" Perhaps I am just cheap, but when evaluating a user guide, I often ask whether the online help isn't good enough. Or whether newgroups/websites/forums are adequate. Or whether the user interface is intuitive or allows you to discover a solution by just playing around. Dozens of heavy thousand-page books clutter my apartment, leading me to wonder whether the convenience of a gigantic dead-tree reference guide outweighs the increase in clutter. Every time I move to another apartment, I keep lugging those gigantic SQL and C++ books I haven't consulted for years, but feel compelled to keep around. (Contrast that with the very portable and handy Oreilly's Linux Server Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips and Tools, (reviewed on Slashdot), which covers most sysadmin tasks AND can be stashed in a backpack without causing whiplash).
For the last two months (in which I used OpenOffice.org thoroughly), I performed a little experiment. Where was the best place to find answers to my OpenOffice.org questions? I tried consulting the online help, then the book, then the newsgroups and openoffice websites. Here are the results:
- Adding page numbers. The book had the best information, though what do you look under in the index? I eventually found it under "Numbers, Writer" (?!). Online help was useless. (The answer is to insert a footer and then insert a page number field in the footer).
- I just created a hyperlink in the HTML editor. But the underlined style is bleeding to the text after the link. How do I stop that? Neither the book nor online help provided the answer, although the newsgroup did after 24 hours. (The answer is to press the End key or to select Format >> Default)
- How do I create an HTML style with the stylist which specifies the background color of a table cell? (No answer from anywhere, although Koch admits that that the StarOffice HTML editor is "temperamental").
- While drawing a flowchart on the Draw program, how do I save the entire image as a jpeg and not just the highlighted part? (By grouping the components together, the book helpfully advises. The online help offers nothing).
- On a spreadsheet, what is the keyboard shortcut for bringing the cursor back to the left column? (Keyboard shortcuts are easy to find in the book. Couldn't find it in the online help).
Generally, the book had the most reliable and in-depth information. That was especially helpful when trying to perform a complex action (like creating a table of contents). But the majority of my inquiries had to do with using the interface, not functionality. Often the sheer size of the book made daunting the simple task of finding a function on a dialog or a keyboard shortcut.
That is the paradox of super-sized application manuals. Surely one doesn't read them from cover to cover. But after an application reaches a certain level of complexity, the software interface is no longer intuitive, and you pretty much need a book just to find things in the interface. As one who does technical writing, it may sound funny to say, but often my favorite thing about these super-size manuals are the screenshots. I can't tell you how many times I've browsed through a book and come across a dialog box I never knew existed. On the other hand, when application manuals reach a certain size, navigating through "book interfaces" becomes almost as difficult as navigating through the software interface or help system.
Online help is good when you know what you're looking for (i.e., when you have a specific search term to look for). Books are good when you don't know what you're looking for. With books, the reader can flip through pages in the general vicinity of a topic and randomly stumble upon the right information. Books allow the user to bypass the outlined hierarchy of online help and learn the appropriate terminology for describing the task (which then makes it easier to find things in the online help).
A recent visit to a technical bookstore and a large chain bookstores showed no books on the shelf for StarOffice, but dozens of books on Microsoft Office, That is too bad, because Using StarOffice 6.0 provides much-needed in-depth coverage on an application whose user base will grow as tight budgets cause companies and public sector agencies to examine open source alternatives.
* PDF conversion (as well as docbook and Flash) export are available on the OpenOffice.org 1.1 Beta 2 build.
Other OpenOffice.org Resources:
Kaaredyret has the best English language OpenOffice links page . ooodocs.org has a lively Forum for OO users. Or if you want, you can look at a PDF of the official Staroffice Documentation (400 pages)
ROBERT NAGLE (aka idiotprogrammer )is a technical writer, trainer who doesn't think that open source documentation sucks . He works for Texas Instruments in Houston, Texas. You can purchase the Special Edition Using StarOffice 6.0 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Easy (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Open your old MS Office files, see they're all screwed up.
3. Finally get tired of the sllllloooooowwwwwww buggy office suite that makes it difficult to even put a stupid picture and resize it easily on a page, and go buy MS Office.
I've tried, I really have. Have since 5.x days, it still sucks.
Re:Easy (Score:2, Insightful)
And as far as the PDF conversion go, if you really are such a cheapskate that you don't want to pay for a quality product like Adobe Distiller, you can always use GhostView/GhostScript.
Print the Word document into a PS file, open it with GhostView and export it as PDF.
Re:Easy (Score:2)
GNU Ghostscript performs as well as or better than distiller in most cases, and it is more versatile. Plus it's Free (beer and speech). Adobe Distiller is in no way a quality product.
Re:Easy (Score:3)
And you expect an average office Windows user to be able to do that?
Even easier... (Score:3, Informative)
One side note: It will set itself up as your default printer, so you may need to reset your default printer after it's done w/ its installation.
Re:Easy (Score:3, Insightful)
Mod parent up +1, Insightful (Score:5, Insightful)
Outside of the fact thats it's free, OO is nowhere near ready for use in a business setting. Anything more than a simple letter gets screwed up in the word processor, and the WP is the most advanced part of 00. If you have anything embedded in an MS document, you can almost say goodbye upon opening it. When you have a busines, you don't have the option of telling clients "Hey, could you resend that in Word 2.0 format, my word processor is incompatible with any version of Word put out in the last decade." That's just not an option. Hey, I hate MS as much as most of you, but I wouldn't shoot my business in the foot or lose my job over my zealotry, right or wrong.
And don't even think about defending the spreadsheet. It might be OK for balancing your checkbook, but don't try graphing, as it's horrible. Also, even moderately advanced spreadsheet functions (that I use very often) are missing from MS Office. As for compatibility, graphs often lose their axes among other problems.
The presentation software has similar problems - font issues (admittedly, much of the font problems were in Linux, so it's hard to isolate), images getting trahsed, other embedded stuff getting completely lost, etc.
Bottom line is OpenOffice is NOT READY for a business setting. I tried like hell, I really did. It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke, and how sad is that considering their competition in the matter is frigging MICROSOFT!
There are other options if your goal is running an office suite under linux (obviously these don't help you if you're trying to avoid MS): codeweavers crossover is a little buggy, but if they've made it more stable since I gave up on it, well, it's better than OO and has no compatibility problems. I would suggest VMware - you'll need a lot of RAM to run it well, but that's cheap, and it's pretty much rock-solid.
Re:Mod parent up +1, Insightful (Score:4, Interesting)
I offer myself as a contradicting example. Daily I use OpenOffice in a business setting. I am CEO of a successful 100 employee company. On a daily basis I use Writer, the Presentation Manager and Calc. The only problem I have had is font differences between platforms: I use OO on FreeBSD on a Thinkpad and most of my employees use Microsoft Office on Dells. Some times when they prepare parts of a presentation and send them to me for integration, I find the differences in fonts create minor problems. I was thinking of asking them all to switch to OpenOffice, but there was some resistance.
I do admit to being a farmer in my off-hours. However, I wouldn't touch Linux if I could avoid it.... I also have already ordered a copy of Using StarOffice 6.0 in response to this review.
thanks,
fletcher kittredge
There are better ways to work than the MS way. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke, ...
< joke>Sounds as if OO is ready for business use. It's got MSOffice's essential characteristics.</joke>
When you say ``...It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke ... '' do you mean: ``It's different from MSOffice.''? If your mission in life is to run MSOffice, then you will be happiest running Windows and MSOffice. If your mission is to work with data, and produce structured documents, you shouldn't be using an office suite at all.
Re:There are better ways to work than the MS way. (Score:3, Interesting)
I will admit, I haven't tried 1.1 yet, as their regular versions are buggy enough to throw me off their betas. My attitude may change when I see that though, so assume my comments are restricted to 1.0.
When you say ``...It's klunky, it's bloated, slow as hell, and the UI is an absolute joke ... '' do y
Re:Mod parent up +1, Insightful (Score:4, Interesting)
First, I'll debate usability and the general UI of star office all day long - it's horrible. It's also slow and bloated, all things that have nothing to do with file formats. And, as I said, the spreadsheet is completely unusable.
Additionally, interoperability with MS is a requirement - there's no such thing as an "independent program" anymore for 99% of the population. You can say it sucks for them that they have to perfectly reverse engineer the MS file format, but that's life. The business world requires MS compatibility. So you can say it's not their fault, but it's irrelevant.
There's nothing wrong with it for creating documents in most other formats, and at least for me, it's good enough so I can read MS Office documents not available in other formats, which is all that I need MS compatibility for.
I can show you a lot of MS documents that got so corrupted as to be unusable. This will be an issue of how complex a word processor you need, of course - but if you only need something simple, then I can recommend a lot of WP's that are faster and smaller than 00. Put it this way - it doesn't have the functionality or interoperability of office, and it doesn't have the speed of other options, so it doesn't win in any case.
Luckily nobody demands that I produce documents in the MS Office formats. If they did, perhaps I'd have to purchase MS Office (for MacOS X).
This isn't a troll or anything, but what do you DO? Are you in school? Because when you get a job, you WILL have to use MS, unless you are lucky enough to be a hard-core unix geex, at which point you'll end up at a place that lives in LaTeX-nirvana. Otherwise, get ready for shitsville like the rest of us.
in my experience (Score:4, Insightful)
I've really had no problems with slowness when using files I've created 100% natively.
As far as documents being screwed up, the only consistend problem I've seen are some stylesheet issues and bullets, sometimes an occasional font issue.
Other than that - Saving $400 and being able to use native versions on Windows & Linux makes Open Office worth every single penny I didn't pay.
Re:in my experience (Score:2, Insightful)
OO.o is Amazing (Score:5, Informative)
Most people take open source apps for granted, but this is one app that is DEFINITELY worth your cash. Ifd you really want to be part of a free software community, buy StarOffice 6 from Sun.
I'm confused (Score:3, Insightful)
I haven't used Office 2003, I will admit, so what are all these crazy features? Not being familiar with it, I'm not sure what you mean. As for XML...yeah, people had this idea that all these companies that previously used proprietary file formats now will make them clear...ye
StarOffice+Education (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:StarOffice+Education (Score:5, Informative)
I've heard of it (Score:4, Insightful)
I know it exists, I don't use it though. Several reasons:
(1) I use AmiPro (back, way back before it was bought out) and I am *comfortable* with it.
(2) Don't like the bloat
(3) If it ain't broke, don't switch.
Re: Special Edition (Score:3, Flamebait)
This has been going on for a decade now. Same with "Learn [xyz] in 21 days", "Teach yourself [abc] in 7 days", "The /Idiot/Dummy/s Guide To [abc]".
In stores now! (Score:5, Funny)
Re: Special Edition (Score:2, Funny)
No... (Score:5, Insightful)
No offense to the various free options; but they're just not there yet. At least not there enough to get people [who by nature resist change] to change.
Re:No... (Score:2)
It's all a question of having everybodies cal's show up together be seachable and exposed to each other by default.
Re:No... (Score:2, Informative)
Also, MS Office dominated the market long before it developed a shared calendar component.
Re:No... (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't you think that's a bit of a generalization? Maybe *you* resist change, and maybe *many people* resist change; but how many people buy a new car every year? A new house? Move 5 times before finally settling down? Take 3 vacations a year?
Actually, I could just as easily make the claim that people can't get enough of fresh, new experiences. It's just as much of a generalization. To write off something new on the ground
Re:No... (Score:2)
Re:No... (Score:2)
Writing it off isn't what I was doing. There *are* quite a few companies moving to non-Outlook/Exchange. A generalization is just that, a simple generalization. Even if you refute the idea that people resist change, you still must acknowledge the time and resources needed to train people [or allow people to get used to] a different product.
Re:No... (Score:2)
woohoo, pdf conversion... (Score:5, Informative)
Add a new printer that uses postscript, and have it use the "FILE:" port. That way whenever you print to it, it will print to a file in postscript. Windows will name it
Yes, it does lack some of the more advanced PDF features, such as clickable table of contents, or fill-in forms.. but it gets you a viewable PDF.
-molo
Re:woohoo, pdf conversion... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:woohoo, pdf conversion... (Score:2)
Re:woohoo, pdf conversion... (Score:5, Informative)
Easy, Peasie, Japaneasie
Re:woohoo, pdf conversion... (Score:2)
Its a notable feature that users on both windows and linux will find very accessible and valuable.
Re:woohoo, pdf conversion... (Score:2)
[abiword on unix]
AbiWord --print=file.ps file.doc
ps2pdf file.ps
KOffice 1.3 has a similar --print command-line argument.
[abiword on win32 - follow the instructions in the parent post. it'll work for abi or any other win32 program too]
[wv anywhere]
wvPDF file.pdf file.doc
Both run well on Win32, OSX, Unix, QNX, and BeOS, which is a few more platforms th
try RedMon (Score:2, Informative)
From the redmon directions:
PostScript written to a RedMon port can be converted to a PDF file using Ghostscript.
Install a printer driver for a colour PostScript printer, e.g. Apple Color LaserWriter 12/600. If you select a black and white printer such as Apple LaserWriter II NT you will end up with your colour images becoming greyscale.
To use RedMon and Ghosts
Re:woohoo, pdf conversion... (Score:2)
For added coolpoints, you could use the Adobe Acrobat Distiller PPDs [adobe.com] for the postscript printer that's attached to the PDF: port - this will allow custom "paper" sizes for example.
You will either need the adobe ps driver (w
Re:on a mac... (Score:2)
What is missing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, Access sucks horribly - but walk into any mid-size office and I bet you'll find at least one 'mission critical' Access database or (worse yet), applications written with a VB frontend and Access backend. IMHO, this is what's missing to make it really competitive.
Re:What is missing... (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't see any reason why VB couldn't be employed with similar degrees of success (given a sufficiently capable programmer).
Why VB is worse. (Score:2)
As an erstwhile tech support person, it's been my experience that pure Access solutions tend to stand up to multi-user better than VB front ends.
Re:What is missing... (Score:2)
We have 15 people in our company.... (Score:2)
Re:What is missing... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What is missing... (Score:2)
Fire up Gnutrition and you'll see what I mean. Gnutrition would make a great Access database, but it makes a terrrible MySQL frontend. Basing it on MySQL makes the setup complicated, leaves you with another daemon chewing up processor cycles when you're not using it, and virtua
Re:What is missing... (Score:5, Insightful)
Access for what it is, which is a low end database for semi-technical people, does a pretty good job. It's fantastic for ad-hoc reporting and querying on the desktop. File import is ridiculously easy. The GUI while having a learning curve works well, and the scripting language is pretty frigging powerful.
In my shop, the accountants use access and excel side by side. Some tasks have evolved over the years using these tools to the point where if we wanted to get these users 'off' access and excel, we're not quite sure how to do it.
I don't know if this is necessarily a bad thing. The people get their work done using tools they're comfortable with. From their point of view the tools are too robust to take away.
From our point of view, being hooked on M$ tools isn't good. The work process probably should be vendor independant.
To keep this post from going off topic, let me adress these concerns in the context of using OO.o as a replacement for M$ tools.
Does OO.o offer line by line implementations of M$'s Office scripting languages?
Does OO.o's database offer
GUI database design?
Tight integration with the spreadsheet app?
In no way at all do I mean to slam the fine, outstanding work that the OO.o team has done. As a programmer myself, I'm astounded by what they're accomplishing. What I'm trying to say is that folks doing real mission critical work are used to M$ tools. They don't want something new, unless the change is going to be invisible to them. They're accountants, not software guys.
Another way of looking at this. Try talking to a carpenter about a hammer that requires a side swing to work, instead of a down swing. And that the hammer will work on 75% of his nails. And it's picky about whether he's hammering into oak or pine.
So anyway, while some may think that Access sucks, it fills a role. OO.o doesn't have anything like it. Yet.
But a tight GUI and scripting language on top of MYSQL would be frigging cool. We'd have a scalable personal database.
Re:What is missing... (Score:4, Interesting)
1. People who use MS Office as a document creation system.
2. People who use MS Office as an application development system.
I think that anyone who is honest in their evaluation of OOo will say that OOo can replace MS Office for type 1 (document) people, but really can't be used as a replacement for type 2 (application) people. And if you're thinking of trying OOo, you need to decide what type you're in and if you're in type 2, you probably shouldn't bother.
And, if you're in type 2, you might never switch over. I'm not sure if the OOo people have any intention of making OOo the application development tool that MS Office has become. I think that they're focusing more on the document creation angle.
Does OO print better than Word? (Score:5, Interesting)
The main problem (from a print shop's perspective) with Word is that it is printer dependent. People compose a document, print it out on their inkjet and expect it to print out exactly the same on any other printer. (It almost never does.)
Is OO any better at this? Or does it mimic this "feature" for compatibility?
Re:Does OO print better than Word? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Does OO print better than Word? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that it can make collaboration impossible. A few years ago we emailed a 40-page .doc to a client to review a detailed
spec proposal. We had a phone conference set up with a bunch of people,
and some peoples' docs were 39 pages long, others 42 pages. It became
so hopelessly confusing trying to figure out where in the document
peopl
Re:Does OO print better than Word? (Score:3, Informative)
No they are not. That's in fact the reason that they are called TrueType. The whole deal about TrueType fonts is that the OS either embeds them if the printer is TTF compatible, or rasters them for the printer. Unlike for instance Postscript Type-1 fonts; the Type-1 font for "times" installed on your computer can, a
Education (Score:5, Insightful)
Because education is not necessarily to do with computing. I know some highly educated people who would stare at me blankly if I showed them a regexp, for example. Why? Because it's not their domain of knowledge. They, in turn, could perform the same trick on me.
My then-girlfriend-now-wife put herself back through college a few years ago, to become a qualified dispensing optician. The first year I could keep up with her courswork easily without going to the classes - fairly simple algebra/geometry plus a bit of jargon learning to do. The second year, I had to study the books carefully to give her any help. The third year? Forget it, I was way out of my depth.
Being highly educated doesn't necessarily equate to being interested in computing.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:Education (Score:2, Insightful)
Anyway, the point is, I have tutored a number of Nobel laureate candidates and field research leaders on how to sort their e-mails by date or last name. So yeah - education level is irrelevant to computing knowledge.
OT - No more Word! (Score:5, Informative)
I have had to educate some on why we don't take them anymore. Here's the mail I sent out:
As we use many different programs to layout, archive, and read files, we require file formats that do not depend on any one program.
Please send all documents saved as .RTF (rich text format). This is an open standard, and one that all word processors can read. It also saves to a smaller file size, and is better for archiving as it contains no proprietary code.
In MS Word, Your .DOC files can be saved as .RTF as follows.
1. Open your document
2. Go to the 'File' menu
3. Select 'Save As'
4. In the dialog box, type a new name for your document if desired, then in the 'Save As Type' drop down menu, choose '.RTF Rich Text Format'.
5. Click 'Save'
6. You're done!
You may also click the 'Options' button in the 'Save As' dialog box and choose '.RTF Rich Text Format' for the drop down menu "Save Word files as". This reminds you to save them as .RTF files.
In other word processors and page layout programs, you may be able to 'Export' your open file as .RTF.
So far, no complaints. I hold the cards in this situation (do it this way or no publishing), and the computer stuff is completely up to me, so YMMV.
It does feel good to kill the .doc files one by one, and if my explanation has a little FUD in it, oh well.
I learned alot from MS.
re: smaller file size (Score:2)
Not always. My resume, for example, is much smaller as an actual MS Word
No more word.. indeed.. (Score:2)
I did look into Open Office for my workplace where long manuals are written in MS Word, but the
And get this, I was applying for a job as a 'LINUX software engineer' and I was told my resume in plain text looked too ugly, if I wanted to redo it in Word because it looked better! *gagh*
In short, Word is going to stay for now... *sniff*
Re:OT - No more Word! (Score:2)
<snip polite, non-zealous, informative mail>
Contrast this with RMS's version [gnu.org] linked to in the article. Any reasonable person would respond positively to the parent poster's mail. Any reasonable person receiving RMS's mail would (i) forward it to their colleagues to laugh at (ii) reply with another, bigger Word attachment.
'Buttress of the Microsoft monopoly' indeed!
The Boss Pays For Most Copies of Office (Score:3, Insightful)
If the boss intends to upgrade existing software, that's a window to preach about OOo. Best shot, though, is try to introduce it to people launching a new operation and staffing up, with no investment in legacy software.
Why have so many people not heard of it? (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenOffice has basically no visibility. If you don't read one of a few technical websites, where the hell are you going to hear about it? Educated people don't necessarily read NewsForge, and they aren't going to see advertising for OpenOffice in Time or whatever they are reading. Word of mouth works, but it is slow to start.
When OpenOffice comes preloaded on the PC Aunt Bettie and Uncle Lou buys from Dell (educated people buy from Dell, you know), or it gets advertising during Friends, then people will hear of it.
As to why people who have heard it aren't using it... Well, sorry, but it does -not- read all MS Office docs correctly. I blame OOo for that no more than I blame Mozilla for not supporting ActiveX, but it's still true. As long as people are still sending MSOffice files around and expecting you to be able to read them and/or modify them, then Open Office is going to have a big hurdle to overcome.
Re:Why have so many people not heard of it? (Score:2)
Things are bad enough with exagerating.
While OpenOffice may lack commercial visibility, StarOffice is on Fry's and CompUSA's retail shelves all over America.
Yes, StarOffice is not free, but at about $70 it's $400-500 cheaper than MS Office.
Besides, even if OOo did not exist, StarOffice is definitely worth $70.
I hold out hope that OOo will surface in some weird way.
Re:Why have so many people not heard of it? (Score:3, Insightful)
There are many things on the shelves of Fry's that you've never heard of. Being one box on a shelf of hundreds of titles isn't visibility.
But at least it is available, and that's a good thing.
Re:Why have so many people not heard of it? (Score:2)
I used OO for a big project (Score:5, Interesting)
Why? (Score:5, Informative)
But that's not to say that it has to be that way. The majority of today's workforce wasn't raised on computer technology. We shouldn't rush to overthrow the tried-and-true in today's corporate market. Open source, Linux, etc., should be implemented in the schools. Today's students will grow up having the means with which to understand the open-sorce movement and perhaps grow it to be a true option in their workforce of tomorrow.
Gratuitous plug: StarOffice 6.1 (Score:5, Interesting)
6.1 is in its second beta refresh, which from Sun generally means that the next release will be final.
6.1 has two features that make it VASTLY better than 6.0: antialiased fonts (no more disappearing text in a window!!!) and substantial speed/performance gains. There are, of course tons of other features--much better MS office support, export to PDF, etc. etc.
6.0 has been my office package for the last year or so, out of necessity. 6.1 will be my package out of choice.
Book as advertising (Score:5, Insightful)
And as always, choice is good, and more useful when you're aware of your choices.
I'll look hard at OpenOffice... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I'll look hard at OpenOffice... (Score:2)
Every time I tried using WordPerfect, I'd end up deleting the invisible </B> code, and then all of a sudden, my entire document is in boldface. So, the only way to use the damn thing is to turn Reveal Codes on.
So, now I'm no longer editing styled text, I'm editing really ugly markup "codes". Which entirely defeats the purpose of a graphical word processor to begin with -- I might as well be using HTML or WordStar and inserting print
Talking points: (Score:5, Insightful)
This article nicely summed up a talking point:
"Did you know that Open Office can convert word files to PDF for free?" is a great one.
Another would be:
"Did you know that that program Mozilla gets rid of pop up ads?", or;
"Did you know that Google, the largest search engine, uses that open source Linux?"
The more these are posted and said, the more managers and decision makers will notice. They are simple and memorable (and as Microsoft has noticed, they don't even have to be true.) For good fun, use Microsoft's techniques against them.
Leaving $$$ on the table (Score:5, Insightful)
Regardless of its zero-cost to the manufacturer, any PC maker could easily include an 'installation fee' to add a small - but significant - margin to the MSRP of their product. FWIW, a PC manufacturer who installed OO and charged a small fee (which would still be much less expensive than office suites by Corel, MS, etc) could theoretically make better margins on the open-source office than their proprietary counterparts. They would also be able to offer an even more cost-effective PC solution for their clientele. I can see Dell jumping on this in a heartbeat.
Plus, if the PC maker is really savvy, they could also sell support contracts for OO, thus increasing their revenue even more.
Re:Leaving $$$ on the table (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? Have you seen those contracts? How do you know that it's not already a small fee?
Last I heard, licensing of Corel's Office Suite (which includes WordPerfect, Quattro Pro, and some presentation and address book software, neither of which people have heard of) was something on the order of $12 per machine. How much more nominal can you get? Especially since they g
Re:Leaving $$$ on the table (Score:3, Informative)
That killed off any WP business for our company.
Open Office Strengths and Weaknesses. (Score:5, Informative)
The different components have different strengths. I rate Star / Open Office Writer very highly, it does allow you to structure documents well and it's support for tables is excellent, one of the few areas where it betters Microsoft office.
The Excel replacement I don't think is nearly as mature. I generally use it to open other peoples Excel docuemnts on my Linux box and for this it works very well. However, when it comes to usability features for display, such as ease of splitting into panes, adding autosort or even easily hiding rows or columns it doesn't compare. All the advanced features, such as pivot tables, work much better in Excel.
Presenter and Draw are a mixed bag. I find Presenter now opens most powerpoint documents well enough to read on LInux but authoring is a different story. I tried to use draw this morning to produce a simple flowchart and it simply wasn't very intuative, doing tasks which are simple in Powerpoint such as adding text inside a shape wern't easy. Powerpoint (and all of MS office, for that matter) is very good at presenting the correct context sensative menu options when you right click on something, Star Office has some way to go in this regard.
However, my biggest problem with Star Office on Linux is font support. It simply dosen't seem to interface nicely with the other fonts installed on my Linux box, and reading all the documentation and newsgroups has helped, but it is still a chore. This is particularly apparent when converting Word or Powerpoint documents, quite frequently it will replace fairly common characters like full stops (periods) or quotes with a question mark, often making the supplied document unreadable. I find it strange that some very sophisticated conversion filters for graphics and embedded objects work well but these fail, if anyone could tell me if the book addresses these issues I would be interested to know. I have always found saving OO documents to Microsoft formats to work well.
So, in summary I am going to use OO on Linux as my primary document editor, which just leaves Windows for the occasional Powerpoint, and this book seems like a useful purchase to help with this.
Re:Open Office Strengths and Weaknesses. (Score:2, Informative)
-- Users not familiar with either Powerpoint or Presentation found Presentation easier to use and faster than Powerpoint. For example, I don't present often, and put together a 17-slide presentation with fonts, graphics, animations, and pictures in 4 hours from my first stab at Presentation. In Powerpoint, I gave up after 6 hours, because PP did not want to let me do anything if it wasn't in a wizard.
-- Users who where
exporting .Doc with OpenOffice (Score:5, Interesting)
Viewing it under word, you would find that the bullet points are plain wrong, sometimes it has embedded numbers in the bullet points.
This is one of those problems that makes it a no-no while exchanging documents with your customers(who use MS Office).
1.1 Beta + SDK is Awesome! (Score:5, Informative)
The way it works is that OpenOffice can run as a server and listen on a port. There are many examples of document conversion given in the SDK, so that you can essentially use OpenOffice as a Web Services platform. When the document is added into their document management system, I run an external process that converts the documents to pdf, then to text, and then imports them into the MySQL database.
It's pretty darn sweet! The conversion works incredibly well for the purposes of getting the text content out of the various formats.
As a side note, I've been using it for my personal use for quite a while. The filters are absolutely outstanding for working with and using Microsoft file formats. I have incredibly complex documents, and it opens them quite well. The PDF conversion is excellent and is really nice to have. Check out the 1.1 Beta, as it's been really stable in my experience.
Word to PDF (Score:3, Insightful)
Here's a file format that can bloat your Word files to enormous sizes! And make viewing them very slow! For free!
RTF is much better for the vast majority of users. Plus the Acrobat reader does NOT deal well when used as a browser plug-in - it hangs very often on every machine I've tried it on over the last several years. Works much better run outside of the browser, though, plus the latest version 6 is much, much snappier when scrolling through said PDF files. YMMV.
Re:Word to PDF (Word!) (Score:2)
Moving the Mountain (Score:4, Interesting)
Each release, one or two new killer features that people actually want, and over the years we will see an application that has a reputation as a killer, not just a clone.
I predict that in 3 years time, MS will be playing catch-up with Mozilla and OOo, finding that OSS is not just an interesting development methodology, but more vitally, a much faster tool for market research. I predict that in 10 years' time, MS will finally produce the villain who designed the Paper Clip, and we can dance on his head.
OpenOffice usability (Score:2)
I like Abiword for the same reason, but OpenOffice is a full suite. Incidentally, most of the problems I've been having are fixed since I started using
Anybody know this? (Score:2)
So: does anyone know if it's possible to replace Excel for this function?
TWW
I wish OO.o was skinable (Score:2, Insightful)
the default cross platform set is horid.
can't they make them look better?
Re:I wish OO.o was skinable (Score:5, Informative)
If you're intrepid enough to compile the sucker (takes over a day) you'll find the icons are simply windows .bmp formatted files that you can replace with whatever you want. This results in the creation of an alternate set of .res files that you can then drop into any OOo distribution. This is the approach that Ximian [ximian.com] uses to bundle a different icon set into their 'enhanced' OpenOffice.org included with Ximian Desktop.
It is also possible to use completely alternative widget sets with OOo, as illustrated by the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] port using Cocoa widgets and Carbon-rendered widgets (screenshots [neooffice.org] of Neo vs. Office v.X). This approach, however, is still only available to GPL versions of OOo.
If you've got better ideas as to how to achieve cross-platform compatibility and skinning while maintaining the identical look and feel requirement Sun has, stop by the Graphics System Layer [openoffice.org] project and lend a hand!
And if you're an intrepid graphics designer (who knows a few other intrepid graphics designers...) and would like to make an alternative icon set for the approximately 1000 icons, please pipe up and help us out! Parts of our icon set are the direct result of the truism that programmers are definitely not graphics artists, and others are relics from when Star Division was busy mimicing Win95/Office97. Our community development can only provide the features the community wants if folks volunteer, else OpenOffice.org will continue to gain only the features Sun believes are needed for selling StarOffice, not necessarily those wanted by the user base of its free cousin.
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
An OpenOffice book - great! (Score:2)
OpenOffice is coming along, but it still has that "designed by programmers" look and feel. You know what I mean - inconsistent interfaces, unclear icons, unexpected limitations. It, like all too much open source software, needs heavy input from people like Tog Togganni and Susan Kare.
The way to test something like OpenOffice is well understood. You set up a quiet room with a computer and two video recorders, one to record the
Re:An OpenOffice book - great! (Score:2)
Any word on when MS are going to act on the results? If you think MSOffice is better in this respect then you need to spend more time with people that weren't taught how to use it at school; it's a riot!
TWW
using Openoffice as WYSIWIG Docbook editor (Score:2)
another book:StarOffice 6.0 Office Suite Companion (Score:2, Informative)
The problem with Open/StarOffice (Score:2)
So, until this problem is resolved I have no choice but to use Office.
OpenOffice Failed in a Real World Corporate Trial (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's what I found.
OO Spreadsheets often because corrupted being opened on Excel (VERY BIG DEAL), Autofilter's werent' up to speed on real world datacrunching, Speed SUCKED on every day tasks (launching saving and just general workability since the average user opens Word or Excel at least 10 times a day), and Our Sales Quotes to customers which needed to look their best, looked like shit when opened by their versions of Word (verified by nice pics sent back to us)
Yes I stress tested and used things which probably have no right being in OO, but I've been searching for a true MS co-Alternative, not a Office Suite Replacement based on "propriatery Open source" (as seen by MS-centric users)
In summary, OO is great and ready for the casual user, but no where near ready to be interchangable in the corporate office with MSoffice.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
education (Score:2)
Damn ignoramuses. You just cannot get proper education nowdays.
Excel Macros (Score:2, Interesting)
I would gladly use OO if Excel macros worked. I have a worksheet from work that I use that has macros. Until then, Crossover Office takes care of me.
PDF printer for windows. (Score:2)
Just so you know.
Yahtzee game in OOo Calc (Score:3, Funny)
I wrote a Yahtzee dice game macro using StarBasic in a Calc spreadsheet.
Get it here [yoderdev.com].
Re:Problem with Open office (Score:3, Insightful)
Proprietary doesn't mean "isn't readable by other programs", it means "cannot be read by other programs because the format is a secret".
OOo may not be portable (because other programs haven't implemented filters to read it, for various reasons not the least of which being OOo's market share), but it is not proprietary.
P.S. I hate how it does that too. If I wanted to save in OpenOffice format, I'd say so!
Re:Problem with Open office (Score:2)
Re:Problem with Open office (Score:2)
Re:Problem with Open office (Score:2, Informative)
Rename the file to
Unzip it
Hey look
Re:Silly author (Score:2)
Re:status of PDF (Score:5, Informative)
Open. The standard [planetpdf.com].
Cheers,
Ian
Re:What (Score:5, Funny)
What did they ever do to you to deserve that?
--Richard