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Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun Sep 18, 2005 06:04 PM
from the coming-a-long-way dept.
from the coming-a-long-way dept.
[vmlinuz] writes "O'Reillynet is running an article about 'Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org' which explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects. The article also discusses the importance of a shorter release cycle."
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Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't like that idea and here's why.
If something is announced as stable, I want *it* to be stable.
I do use a lot of beta software (writing this in Firefox 1.5b now) but at home where I choose to. When I'm at my office computer, I expect no crashes, especially from my Office Software.
I use Open Office and am very happy with it and as I'm happy to get the updates whenever they come out - partly because it's free (much more to pay that than $500), partly because I've been disillusioned by the MS upgrade glitz with the greatest latest new features I can't live without yet never use (normal users call this bloat) but mostly because I'm happy with the current package.
People who want the greatest/latest will use beta anyway - and they are the ones who can/will make bug reports if anyone. The rest of us will grumble quietly and move onto something else - so I don't see why this will result in quicker bug fixes.
What you are suggesting is essentially false advertising (misleading labelling) and OO.org doesn't need that hit to its reputation. That's the sort of thing that will drive people back to MS complaining while that "buggy office package."
Linux or FreeBSD didn't get their good reputations this way. This is their most valuable asset now because Linux is spread by the most valuable advertising medium - word of mouth - regardless of essentially meaningless version numbers.
Please let's not emulate Microsoft.
Parent
How about not BEING a beta? (Score:5, Insightful)
Now I'm not opposed to smaller incremental releases, meaning less features added, and easier to thoroughly test before release. But nevertheless, I expect "stable" to be just that: stable.
You have to understand that while maybe for you "yay, I contributed a bug report to OOo" or "yay, I dug for a week through kernel sources and made my old ISA SCSI board work" may count as fun, for most people it doesn't. In the real world it's more like "fuck, why doesn't this POS print my document right?" Or I can tell you first hand that at work we're not like "yay, it's so cool that we contributed a bug report", but rather "fuck, I'm opening yet another PMR for this POS software. Someone remind me... why are we using this crap anyway?"
What's attractive about OSS to most people is the "because lots of other people have inspected the code and made it better for you" part. It's not the "because you too can spend weeks debugging our code and fixing our bugs, or just beta-testing our unstable stuff and waiting for months for a fix" part. Forcing people to be beta-testers against their will, isn't really going to make your software popular.
Parent
Mmm (Score:4, Interesting)
Strange, the submitter and the article writer share names.
--
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Change the default (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I prefer LaTeX and send pdf files. That works ok till I am working alone. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.
Re:Change the default (Score:3, Funny)
man diff, bitch.
Re:Change the default (Score:5, Funny)
As a grad student in CS, the benefits of LaTeX are obvious.
But it's surprising how many educated people still do not understand what LaTeX is or how beneficial it is.
Example, last semester I turned in a project proposal (written with LaTeX) to a professor.
His response: "Aren't your margins a bit too big?"
I was speechless.
Parent
Re:Change the default (Score:5, Informative)
I suspect the OP was referring to the fact that MS Word has what are, by typesetting standards, very narrow margins that make for long lines of text. In practice narrow text actually proves to easier to read, requiring less left-right scanning with the eyes and making the end-of-line to start-of-next-line shift much easier and less prone to error. Professional typesetters are not idiots and have been studying and refining such things for a very long time. LaTeX defaults to the same margins you'll find in professionally typeset books and other publications - the same margins professional typesetters have come to use after years and years of experience and refinement. They look large if you're used to MS Word documents, but are by most other measures, the margin size that maximise readability and amount of text on the page.
Jedidiah.
Parent
Re:Change the default (Score:4, Interesting)
I like LaTeX, but you know the default presentation in the standard document classes was only meant to be a quick demo, right? It was assumed that serious writers/publications would all create their own classes using sensible typesetting preferences. In reality, the demo proved to be "good enough" for a lot of people, hence the large number of obviously LaTeX'd articles in circulation among some scientific communities. The layout in the standard classes isn't bad in terms of typography, but it's nothing special, and some aspects are truly awful.
Of course, a lot of professionally typeset books have truly awful typography as well these days, either through using poor technique, or through trying to be a bit too clever. :-(
Parent
Re:Change the default (Score:3, Interesting)
As for professionally typeset books, books on 8.5" paper are rare.
Re:Change the default (Score:3, Interesting)
One factor to take into account is that the smaller the width available for text, the more space is lost to word-wrapping.
Re:Change the default (Score:3, Informative)
This sounds like a job for cvs or arch or monotone some other version management system. LaTeX files are plain text, so a proper versioning system would work with them much better than it would with ugle
LaTeX Change Tracking (Score:3, Informative)
Others have pointed out that you can easily put LaTeX documents in a version control system, such as subversion [tigris.org]. In addition to this, latexdiff [tug.org] is quite handy. Running this perl script on 2 tex files can produce a 3rd file with appropriate color coding/strikeouts/etc.
Re:LaTeX Change Tracking (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyways, that isn't the real problem. The real problem is that using LaTeX in practice requires a highly customized environment with lots of little scripts, tools, and packages, which is highly non-portable. Everybody uses TeX in a different way, an since Tex isn't very self-contained that leads to problems.
The fact is that LaTeX isn't an analogue to MS Office, or even MS Word. For instance, how do you make a figure? The answer is some external program. And what format should the figure be in? That depends a lot on what output you're working towards - a .png works great for .pdf output with pdflatex, but not for .ps files. And for that matter, "compiling" a text document (some indeterminate number of times) is a completely obsolete idea.
LaTeX is perfect for one or a small number of highly technical people to compose a document, and that is about it.
Parent
Re:Change the default (Score:5, Informative)
Keeping track of changes is as easy as RCS/Subversion/version control system of choice (I've even used Visual SourceSafe when I was in an MS shop). Sharing changes can be done easily enough via PDF annotations [adobe.com], or LaTeXdiff [tug.org] depending on what tools you have available.
LaTeX also offers possiblities that simply aren't available in word processors like MS Word and OO.o Writer. Using packages like xcomment it is possible to write a single document that is both a paper report and slide presentation - just change the document class and recompile. I've written document classes such that I have a couple of extra environments available: \begin{summary} and \begin{shared}. Anything in a summary environment is included in the presentation, but not in the report, and anything in shared is in both report and presentation. Anything not in either environment is left out of the presentation. With that done it is easy enough to start writing your report, adding a little set of bullet points summarising each paragraph in a summary environment as you go (and sharing any equations and diagrams as needed) and once you're done you've got your presentation complete as well as your report. You've also go the whole package encapsulated in a single file: any changes are easy to propogate from report to presentation of vice-versa, and maintenance is far easier. Try that with your standard office suite.
Jedidiah.
Parent
Re:Change the default (Score:4, Informative)
Some oddities will remain, though.
For example, if you highlight something (say, mark a word yellow) in OpenOffice, you can't change it with the same tool under Word. You have to use the formatting paintbrush. Why? Word has 2 seperate levels of highlighting while OpenOffice has one. Got me why Word benifits from 2 different types of highlighting...but it has them. This difference is an artifact of Word.
Parent
Re:Change the default (Score:5, Informative)
It's not wysiwyg, it's wysiwym (what you see is what you mean). You type, with no latex code (unless you want to), doing all the latex stuff with pulldowns and key combinations - kinda like any other WP. You insert citations, references, etc. with dialogs. Your content simply gets typed and viewed in a format chosen for readability. When you want to see what it REALLY looks like, you preview in DVI or pdf with a simple keystroke.
The point is, this separates the content from the formatting. Especially in an office with standardized formats and relatively untrained typists/secretaries, this is great. One person can design the templates for LyX, and the typists simply type in and go. They actually don't need to know LaTeX at all, as LyX pretty much takes care of all of that. It's also got the best math equation editor I've ever used, bar none.
I've used LyX to write my master's thesis and several journal papers, and I don't know SHIT for LaTeX. I've got a reference that I can use if I need to... but I usually don't. It looks the way it's supposed to, it's easy to use, and the citations and cross-referencing mechanisms are superlative, both in terms of the underlying LaTeX functionality and in terms of LyX's user interface to those functions.
Basically, it's what I think a word processor oughta be. I think I would have torn out what little hair I have left if I'd tried to do that thesis in Word - it certainly wouldn't have been done as quickly. Did I mention that you can get LyX to spit out pdfs with the TOC, Lists of Figures, Index, etc. already hotlinked to their targets? Took me 10 minutes to figure out the line in the preamble to make that happen, which is a LOT quicker than having to try to manually create all those links. Yes, that's LaTeX functionality, not LyX - but LyX lets you have the best of both worlds.
I don't think anyone expects you to write all that LaTeX code and keep rendering to see if what you've typed works. Good news is, you don't need to.
Parent
All the more important... (Score:5, Funny)
Developers Needed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Developers Needed (Score:3, Informative)
As long as they don't get release-happy (Score:3, Interesting)
OpenOffice.org is great, but... (Score:5, Funny)
bigger #s dont always mean better (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree that the OOo guys need to draw a line in the sand soon with 2.0, go gold, if for no othere reason than the current 1.1 is so insainly lacking compared to MS office or OOo2 beta. But just because the number is higher doesnt make it better, want proof, look at Adobe Reader, what can 7 do that 5 can not?
Chip away, not sea change (Score:5, Insightful)
Suggestion: copy mozilla and break up suite (Score:5, Interesting)
Break off the wordprocessor and strip it back to essential functionality as was done with phoenix 0.1. Go for a rapid release cycle again as happened with phoenix with new updates at least every month. This will reinject vitality into the project. The full office suite will still be available as Mozilla is to this day.
The essential thing that Mozilla had was the gecko rendering engine and XUL. None of this was lost in moving to single app development. The essential thing that OpenOffice has is its well-developed ability to read/write MS office file formats and its own OpenDoc format. This also would not be lost by splitting off the wordprocessor.
The Office suite as a monolithic application was really a marketing innovation, not something that was user driven. Let's free ourselves of the unwieldy bloat it has given us.
Sorry OO just doesn't compare (Score:5, Informative)
The delta between Excel and Calc is too large to ignore.
The delta between Powerpoint and Impress is small at the moment and can be tolerated.
The delta between Word and Writer is negligible for _most_ users. For a basic word processor Writer is better but _a lot_ of people I know love the collaboration features of Word. I hate how Word keeps "thinking" for me and screwing with my documents.
The delta between MSO and OO in terms of speed is just a tad smaller than the distance from one end to the other of the Grand Canyon.
Now considering all that, OO is trailing, hugely. Now look at... http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114
In that case, I thank the OO development team for putting pressure on MS. Like everyone, competition causes one to raise their performance and I think MSO 12 will be a killer app. I just wish OO could have moved quicker.
Re:Sorry OO just doesn't compare (Score:3, Informative)
Trick 1: It's relatively easy to qualify for an OEM version.
Trick 2: A lot of people have access to Office cheaply, and just don't realise it. For example, my employer (that is, the reasonably large US corp that owns the small subsid I work for) has a bulk deal with Microsoft to use Office on all its machines. As part of that deal, I would qualify to install a full version of Office on my home PC as well, in exchange for some nominal fee. Similarly, a lot
A web service converter (Score:3, Informative)
If anyone's trying to write open source software that uses MS Word, here's a web service that uses OpenOffice.org [holloway.co.nz] to convert to Oasis OpenDocument 1.0 format, and then optionally runs the XML through an XSLT pipeline to make any XML/HTML.
I had about 100 test documents and I tried using Abiword, WVWare, but OpenOffice.org had the best reverse engineering of msword. Is there any other open source conversion software I should have used?
I tried... (Score:5, Interesting)
I tried to contribute to the OOo project on the marketing team. It was incredibly difficult to be taken seriously when your "product" moniker could not be distinguished from a web site.
I tried to contribute to the OOo project by submitting valid and repeatable bug reports but I was told that getting label and envelope printing working CORRECTLY was a feature request, not a bug, and would not be addressed in the upcoming release.
I tried to contribute to the OOo project but could not because the software build system REQUIRES PAM so I could not build the current tree (Slackware user). I WAS going to work on a stand alone viewer for Impress.
I would love to contribute to OOo, but the OOo team seems to want to make things as difficult as possible for outsiders to come in. Why on Earth would an Office Suite need PAM???
OOo Web Innovation? (Score:3, Insightful)
What about AbiWord and Gnumeric? (Score:4, Insightful)
I understand Abiword and Gnumeric can't replace the entire MS suite, but surely word processing and spreadsheet are the most common office suite applications (except maybe email, which OO doesn't have either.) I certainly don't understand why an integrated bloated "Office Suite" like OO is needed to replace MS Office, when Abiword and Gnumeric seem to me to be doing a much better job right now than OO.
We don't necessarily need a single office suite like OO to replace MS Office. Right now I would support Gnumeric and Abiword.
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Indeed (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure, but I'll explain it to you.
1. Draft your document in vi, add some preamble and the requisite \begin{slide} and \end{slide}, etc. where necessary.
2. Compile.
3. Display on screen during the board meeting.
You can make things as simple or as complex as you'd like.
I have fond memories of seeing a few thousand of secretaries using a similar approach. Gr
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:5, Informative)
YES!
The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows! My brother is a lawyer and would love to move his entire staff over to an open source suite (just for financial reasons) but he has to be 100% compatible.
When the office suite becomes a commodity, you'll see more defections.
Parent
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:3, Insightful)
YES!
The office suite is the one application that keeps people on Windows!
The others were authored by *cough* Google *cough*...
(Weird that, huh?)
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:3, Informative)
I use Ubuntu, and put up with the various annoying things. Like installing a new app via synaptic and then having no way to launch it except by running it from the command line. That's a new kind of insanity.. the first time it happened to me I actually went and grabbed the source package, extracted it and
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:5, Informative)
Let's take these FUD-esque statements one at a time. I've just booted my laptop to Kubuntu so I can walk through this.
Changing the screen resolution.
Right click on the background, select "Configure Desktop", click "Display", select your screen resolution from the drop-down.
Configuring display/mouse/keyboard drivers.
Configuring the display drivers we may have just covered. If you're thinking about editing your xconfig files, I've never had to Kubuntu. It's not like The Old Days anymore.
My keyboard and mouse worked out of the box. I can plugin in a USB mouse at any time and the system picks it up uses it. However, if you want to tweak the keyboard or mouse, click your "System" icon in the task bar, select the "Settings" entry. Select "Peripherals". You'll see both "keyboard" and "mouse" in the dialog. Tweak away.
Configuring a network
From the System/Settings dialog we were just in... clck "Internet and Networking". You can add network interfaces, configure the proxy, set up your wireless networks, configure Samba, etc and so forth.
Installing a printer
Back to the "Peripherals" screen. Click the "Printers" button.
I think you're comment about the menu items is related to the people who wrote the package you've installed, not the people who wrote the operating system.
Kubuntu is drop dead easy to use. You can still open a shell and go crazy (if you know how), but you don't have to anymore.
btw, they just released a new preview of their next version. They claim to have improved the Control Panel (kcontrol). I'm downloading it now to see what they've done.
Parent
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:3, Informative)
Sigh. I also write a lot of Free Software.
Let's take these FUD-esque statements one at a time.
That's offensive. Just because I'm pointing out some obvious deficiencies does not mean I have some evil agenda.
Configuring the display drivers we may have just covered. If you're thinking about editing your xconfig files, I've never had to Kubuntu. It's not like The Old Days anymore.
I'm talking about changing your X display driver from "nv"
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:3, Informative)
Then he shouldn't be using Microsoft Office. Different versions of Microsoft Office often render the same file differently. For compatibility, use PDF or OpenDocument. *Everyone* can view and edit his OpenDocument files since *everyone* has a license to install and use the same version of OpenOffice.org while there are far fewer people with a license
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:3, Interesting)
For most companies the majority of computer use is editing documents. Composing proposals, making presentations, writing memos. All you need to do these things is a good word processor. If Linux had a better one companies would ditch MS and use it for the cost savings alone
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:3, Interesting)
I found it interesting in TFA when OpenOffice was compared to Firefox. Its not Firefox, it Mozilla. What OpenOffice needs to succeed is a decrufting just as Mozilla needed a few visionary programmers to come along and throw it all out.
IMHO, as it stands OO is a slow, crufty, bloated nightmare. For gods sakes, will someone drive a stake into the heart of this ten headed monster and kill it. Maybe a phoenix will rise from the ashes.
OO needs to take a long hard look at the success o
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:4, Insightful)
You will find variants of Office on almost every Windows PC used in the business and academic worlds, so it's pretty important.
For me, one of the best features of OpenOffice is its ability to export documents as PDFs. Lovely, lovely feature for creating interoperable documents. Yeah, yeah, I know not everyone likes PDFs, but there are PDF readers for most platforms...
EricJoin my mailing list and win a free book [makeeasymo...google.com]
Parent
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:5, Insightful)
After that, switching out the underlying OS becomes transparent (Ok, more transparent for more people).
I guess I subscribe to the idea that a key foothold MS has (at least in the corporate world) is that all of our data is stored in their propietary file formats. Or, in other words, the problem in switching people over isn't that they have to run a MS os, they have to run the MS apps, in particular their office suite. Excel and Word are defacto standards to run a business -- and by extension the MS OS.
It's in that sense that I do think OpenOffice is incredibly important to the OSS world at large. The threat of being a credible (or higher quality, more useful) replacement is higher than with what's happened (and happening) with Firefox vs IE, since IE is also free. MS Office is far from free -- and I think it'll be easier to justify abandoning it because of the cash saved.
If I were MS, I do think OpenOffice is the one OSS project I'd be most nervous about, as it's one of the major threats to the monopoly, and an attack on one of the biggest reasons companies are forced to pay for the MS OS.
BTW, the web browser is probably the other "very important app" for the same reasons, and it's cool that Mozilla Firefox has grown so much. At work it doesn't matter that I choose to run Linux, since I'm running the same web browser as many people who are running Windows (my company is already formally supporting, and recommending, Firefox for internal use). Again though, imagine that IE was an extra app that companies had to pay money for -- I wonder what the Firefox adoption rate would be.
One last thing, it's no surprise that MS has from the beginning to "subvert" the web and web standards. It's all about the formats. I guess they simply arrived way too late to the Web to completely take it over. But I'm sure they know that if they had managed to switch everyone over to ms-propietary-html to surf the web, we'd be paying through the nose for IE and their OS and Office monopoly would be further protected.
Parent
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Email
2) Wordprocessing/Self publication.
These are the drivers.
Personally, I see three killer apps from Microsoft (or currently owned by Microsoft) that yet to have equivalents in the open-source world:
- Excel:
The power of the Excel in power-user mode is phenominal. The scalability, programability and calculation abilities of this program are amazing. Open Office does not, as yet, scrape the surface. That OO calc is enough for 90% of all users means that it won't get into businesses where the other 10% need to share data.
- Project
- Visio
I'll bundle these two, as neither are particularly complicated, but the file formats have become defacto standard. Once open source tools can import and export these formats, we'll be able to start displacing them on the desktop.
Parent
Re:One of the most important open source projects? (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Agreed. Access is versatile. (Score:4, Insightful)
Have a list to mangle? Shove it in a table or two and run some queries on them.
Want to query to totally unrelated databases that use totally different database servers? Link the tables via ODBC and run queries.
Create a really basic data entry tool? Build a form that feeds a table in literally minutes.
Want to easily move that little form to another computer for someone else to fill in? Just copy that ONE
Plus, if you want to move into something with a real database, well, Access makes a great front end to your full featured database.
I'm not a huge MS fan, but they do have some excellent products. Access, and Exchange/Outlook and SQL Server come to mind.
Parent
Re:arguably indeed... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not the most important project, but one of them..
I think openoffice is just as important as linux anyway. (This is helped because i dont think of linux as *that* important anyway, being a big bsd fan - but thats a discussion for another time). I think if you want people to switch to an open source operating system you need to take it in steps, making programs like firefox and openoffice (which will run on windows inplace of IE and MS Office) a vital part of the plan. Once you have changed all their apps over to open source versions, you can switch the os and all they will notice is a new look.
Parent
Re:Why not just focus on OO2? (Score:3, Funny)
What you say? Don't you know that office formats are based on XML and are completely open? Anybody can read and write office formats.