Opening the Potential of OpenOffice.org

[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."

Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes

[eosp]

If something's in beta, people won't want to use it because it just doesn't sound reliable. If it sounds like a stable, final release, people will be more willing to use it, thereby finding the bugs, thereby resulting in bugfixers, which leads to more reliable software.

Re:Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes

[TinyManCan]

90% of people don't know what Beta means. Sure corporate support IT folks might know, but your average household probably has no clue. Plus, the distinction between Beta and General Availability software isn't always clear. I've used GA software that should be beta, and vice versa. I don't think this point is valid in todays computer world.

Re:Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes

[nacturation]

If it sounds like a stable, final release, people will be more willing to use it, thereby finding the bugs, thereby resulting in bugfixers, which leads to more reliable software.

Sounds like what a lot of people around here criticize Microsoft for.
 

Nope, it sounds worse

[Moraelin]

"Sounds like what a lot of people around here criticize Microsoft for."

Well, no. Actually MS does have a policy of not shipping with known deffects. (I.e., literally, they won't release until there's no bug report left.)

Now I won't argue whether their software is higher or lower quality than OOo (that's another flame for another time), but just saying that the "hey, let's mis-label betas as releases so unsuspecting people will beta-test them for us" idea is really sinking even lower than MS ever did. MS's Q

Re:Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes

[rolfwind]

Hi,

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.

How about not BEING a beta?

[Moraelin]

I'll have to side with rolfwind on this one. "Let's mis-label it a release, so people will beta-test it for us" is the kind of idea that really disgusts me.

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.

Re:Shorter Dev = Quicker Error Fixes

[TinyManCan]

Google tags things as beta for many reasons. I think the term should be banned now (see post below). Really, every google app is subject to frequent and major change.

Beta means that the code is feature complete, but not tested. I am pretty sure that all of googles apps have seen enough use to identify most of their flaws by now.

Google hosts these apps and makes improvements all of the time. The beta tag might be there for legal reasons (google news), and that has some validity to it. I really think that the

Mmm

[Saiyine]

Strange, the submitter and the article writer share names.

--
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Re:Mmm

[NanoGator]

"Strange, the submitter and the article writer share names."

So?

Re:Mmm

[Anonymous Coward]

A little tacky, but not as much as your _two_ trashy adverts in you sig. Suck it up.

Change the default

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the reason I am stuck with Microsoft office is because others will send me office documents and I have to use Micrsoft Office suite to open/change/modify them. As many others have noticed, openoffice doesn't work well with all the documents (Especially complex tables, etc).

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

[Anonymous Coward]

...keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

man diff, bitch.

Re:Change the default

[jshaped]

Thank you for bringing up LaTeX.
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.

Re:Change the default

[Coryoth]

So, were your margins a bit too big? Or do you mean you sent him the latex source and he printed that out? Just because it's Latex doesn't mean you can't make shitty looking documents with it.

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.

Re:Change the default

[Old Wolf]

How does a larger margin equate to fitting more text on the page? It sounds more like a trade-off between speed-of-readability, and amount of text on the page. I suppose you could argue that smaller margins save trees...

Re:Change the default

[Coryoth]

That's what I meant. The more text you cram on the page, the less readable, so you're trying to maximise the function of "readable + amount of text on page".

Jedidiah.

Re:Change the default

[Old Wolf]

I'm surprised that 2 or 3-column layout isn't more popular than it is; then you can have minuscule margins and still have good readability.

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

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

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. :-(

I have mixed feelings about LaTeX

[jesterzog]

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.

I really like the idea behind LaTeX -- I've used it for about 5 years now (mostly academically), but I've always had problems when it's come to writing my own classes and packages.

I've found LaTeX is fine to a certain point, but I've also found that as

Re:Change the default

[angle_slam]

So what are the default LaTex margins? (Word's defaults are 1" or 1.25" (depending on your version) on the left and right.)

As for professionally typeset books, books on 8.5" paper are rare.

Re:Change the default

[qbwiz]

But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

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 .doc files.

LaTeX Change Tracking

[Noksagt]

. But if we have to work and interact, keeping track of changes is not the easiest thing to do in LaTeX.

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

[timeOday]

Others have pointed out that you can easily put LaTeX documents in a version control system, such as subversion.

Sure, until some editor moves the linebreaks (which are not significant to TeX). Then diff'ing is screwed.

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.

Re:LaTeX Change Tracking

[Noksagt]

Others have pointed out that you can easily put LaTeX documents in a version control system, such as subversion.

Sure, until some editor moves the linebreaks (which are not significant to TeX). Then diff'ing is screwed.

Subversion & other revision control systems would still handle this fine. latexdiff (as opposed to GNU diff) would also handle it fine.

The real problem is that using LaTeX in practice requires a highly customized environment with lots of little scripts, tools, and packages, which is high

Re:Change the default

[Coryoth]

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.

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.

Re:Change the default

[TheRaven64]

Do you know of an easy way of getting PDF annotations back into LaTeX source? It would be really nice if there were some way that, in conjunction with something like pdfsync, the PDF annotations could be translated back into \annotation{this is a note} style sections in the LaTeX source.

Re:Change the default

[Spoing]

Complex table issues have been addressed quite a bit in OOo v.2.

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.

Re:Change the default

[Old Wolf]

You must be on a different planet to me. When I open a Word document with my course assignment instructions, OOO displays it without all the numbering, ie:

FOO
Bar
Baz

instead of

1 FOO
1.1 Bar
1.1.1 Baz

Even Word 97 displays it correctly and that's 8 years old, and numbering is a fairly basic issue. (This only happens with some documents -- others display correctly).

Powerpoint? In MS's version you c

Re:Change the default

[GileadGreene]

When I open a Word document with my course assignment instructions, OOO displays it without all the numbering, ie:

Numbered lists are read fine in both OO.o Writer and abiword.

Are you saying that the parent post is lying? Because otherwise your assertion is contradicted by the very statement you are replying to. Personally, I don't think the parent post is a lie, since I've experienced the same problem myself on occasion. So I guess numbered lists are not "read fine" after all...

Re:Change the default

[rco3]

*I* would expect people to use LyX [lyx.org]. All the power of LaTeX, lots of easier to use.

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.

All the more important...

[Anonymous Coward]

...now that Office 12 has been demoed. That means the specs for OpenOffice.org 4.0 are almost complete!!

Developers Needed

[C-Diddy]

I didn't realize that the OpenOffice project had only 100 developers. Many more will be needed to establish the kind of release schedule mentioned in the article. Interesting stuff. Is this a potential weekness of open source - an inability to attract more developers who will donate their time?

Re:Developers Needed

[johansalk]

Most of those 100 developers (80!) are pain Sun employees - the article states that there are "less than 10 active external coders involved in the project".

Re:Developers Needed

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

IIRC, this was discussed around these parts a few weeks back, and the number of active external coders at the time was four. One of those four developers posted (sorry, can't find the link now) about how basically it's a Sun show, and almost impossible for anyone who's not in the Sun management team to have any influence over the direction of the project at all.

Re:Developers Needed

[QuantumG]

Only 100 developers? Are you crazy? That's more developers than most software houses. How the hell can Sun justify that expense?

Re:Developers Needed

[Mustang Matt]

I'm guessing Sun can justify it because the developers are working on StarOffice and the codebase is shared between the two projects.

Re:Developers Needed

[QuantumG]

Yep, and people are lining up to buy StarOffice right? Enough to justify 80 fulltime programmers? That's a LOT of customers.

Re:Developers Needed

[Mustang Matt]

I don't have any facts, but I would guess that they are buying it. Otherwise, like you, I can't see how they could afford it for too long. Maybe businesses or governments are buying it.

Re:Developers Needed

[QuantumG]

I think it's a "one day" thing. They're trying to make Star Office better than Microsoft Office so they can compete in the market, and they're trying to drag open source along with the ride (which is the Sun way).

Re:Developers Needed

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this a potential weekness of open source - an inability to attract more developers who will donate their time?

Not at all. I think it's particular to OpenOffice.

I *wanted* to contribute to OpenOffice. I even downloaded it and compiled it myself. Here's what I saw:
- it's huge: it takes forever to download
- it doesn't use a standard build system; in fact, typing one of the typical build commands ("make all", perhaps) would actually *delete your changes*
- there was a wiki page describing how to get it all

As long as they don't get release-happy

[menorikey]

I would agree with more frequent release cycles up to a point; they would have to ensure, however, that they don't begin to mimic M$ by releasing new builds simply for the sake of releasing them just to keep the name fresh in people's minds. Release schedules should only be to either implement beneficial features or to resolve any outstanding issues that benefit the user base as a whole.

Re:As long as they don't get release-happy

[Thing 1]

Release schedules should only be to either implement beneficial features or to resolve any outstanding issues that benefit the user base as a whole.

So, assume the scenario: every release fixes exactly one bug (or adds exactly one feature). (And: no release adds a new bug or removes an existing feature.)

Is this an acceptable release schedule? If so, why, and if not, why not? (It sounds like it fits your definition, literally, but not exactly spiritually.)

OpenOffice.org is great, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Opening the potential of OpenOffice.org takes like 10 minutes on my computer. It's not going to win any awards for speed.

bigger #s dont always mean better

[a_greer2005]

Sure, a shorter releaese cycle may seem better, but is it really? Correct me if I am wrong, but it is the short release cycle and shareholders constant demands for "more more more" that got MS office to be the bloatware that it is today; honestly, what can anyone do in todays MS office that couldnt be done in Office 2000?

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?

Re:bigger #s dont always mean better

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

honestly, what can anyone do in todays MS office that couldnt be done in Office 2000?

Switch off Clippy effectively? :o)

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?

Install the Yahoo! toolbar?

Chip away, not sea change

[banglogic]

I agree that Open Office is one of the most important open source projects. This is because it won't be a Linux derivitive that makes its way onto the desktops of the masses first. It will be open, free applications that can reliably provide the benifit of expensive commercial applications on the *Windows* desktop. A company I work for is interested in an open source "Save to PDF" tool because, well, have you priced Adobe's Acrobat lately? Not cheap. So, they are willing to consider this open source replacement to distribute to the general population. It provides most of the functionality that most of their user base needs and saves them money. The users don't even need to learn anything new. But ask them to swap out their enterprise desktop? Forget about it. If Open Office can get there (and it will *long* before Linux deriviti do), the Corporate World(TM) will open its loving arms.

Suggestion: copy mozilla and break up suite

[solferino]

My suggestion is just to follow the mozilla phoenix/firebird/firefox approach and break the suite up and develop the components separately.

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.

Re:Suggestion: copy mozilla and break up suite

[theguyfromsaturn]

The only way I could justify a monolithic suite, is if somehow you could have a master-document setup in which you could seamlessly integrate different documents into a single document. For instance I have this thesis work, and a few pages of the appendix are composed from a OOdraw slides, a few others from spreadsheet directly, and some more word processor files. It would take work to make this all show up into a seamless compound document, but if someone came up with a neat way to do it, then yes a mono

Re:Suggestion: copy mozilla and break up suite

[theguyfromsaturn]

I tend to agree that object linking/embedding isn't really the holy grail of desktop application convergence. I really don't get why this is so hard to do... every word processor has a table editor... why not drop in a full spreadsheet there? And presentations are mostly word processor docs with some large fonts and pretty animations. Not much going on there but some macros.

I didn't mean so much dropping things into another document, as much as having a kind of MasterDocument, for which the linked docume

Re:Suggestion: copy mozilla and break up suite

[enmane]

How does this get modded as interesting? I continue to argue, while being ignored, that this was a mistake for everyone except those that ONLY use a WebBrowser or Email client and neither at the same time. For everyone else, it was better to slim down the Mozilla Suite.

Anyone ever look at the memory footprint of having FF and TB open at the same time and compare that to the footprint used by the Mozilla Suite? I didn't think so. The former combination is huge when compared to the latter. Why have 2

Re:Suggestion: copy mozilla and break up suite

[solferino]

Sorry, I remember the transition from stand-alone MS apps to the all-inclusive office suite and my opinion remains that it was marketing driven. Microsoft still didn't have complete market dominance in every app and it was a way of snaring customers into using the other included apps. Users were sucked in by the idea of getting more for less. I doubt few were sold on the fact that they could embed a spreadsheet into a word doc.

Let's face it - how many users make use of this functionality? My guess would be

Sorry OO just doesn't compare

[enmane]

Disclaimer: I'm no MS fanboi. In fact, I dislike a lot of what they do. I'm no OO fanboi. In fact, I'm quite disgusted with what they've done with the product.

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=1147 20 [msdn.com] and you'll see that OO is 5-6 yrs behind MSO. I've done my best to use OO and even to try and help. I am so disgusted by the developers and their responses to my pleas for improvement in key areas that I've stopped promoting OO to people that need a cheap office suite. If they need a free one then I still show it off. If they have some $$ then I show them where to get MSO dirt cheap. The new MSO 12 looks to blow the socks off of anything out there. If it all works like it is supposed to (huge IF) it will be a remarkable product.

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

[calidoscope]

Now look at... http://channel9.msdn.com/showpost.aspx?postid=114 7 [msdn.com] 20 and you'll see that OO is 5-6 yrs behind MSO.

And many are are content to keep on using Office 97 - just witness the ads MS is running comparing Office 97 users to dinosaurs.

MS seems to be just slightly aware of customers needs in data retention - especially for governments (So what's the exact wording of the law I'm supposed to be violating and what do you mean that the law is in a now unreadable version of MS-Word??). Small case in po

My pointless rant on Office 12/OO.org

[ilyaaohell]

Thank you for pointing out the obvious, I've been waiting for someone in the Slashdot community to notice this fact: The next MS Office is at LEAST half a decade more advanced than OpenOffice.

I'm not a Microsoft fanboy by any stretch of the word, and I REALLY cringe when some PR bozo starts spouting words like "innovation" to describe their company's products. Having said that, MS Office 12 is the DEFINITION of innovation. Yes, I just cringed at myself, but it's true. If you watch that video, you simply can

Re:Sorry OO just doesn't compare

[Pecisk]

Sorry, It WON'T be killer app. For that cause that MOST features of collabration is not needed by common crowd. Yeah, managers and busness people would love that (and I DON'T downplay it's importance), and they are significant, but just a part of market.

This app won't go on Win98, Win2000, etc. So forget it. These people WON'T change their computers for that cause.

Therefore to say that, OO.o could have more commercial sollutions for collabration, AFAIK, there are lot of free ones.

Re:Sorry OO just doesn't compare

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

where does one get MSO for dirt cheap legally?

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

[holloway]

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...

[rongage]

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???

Interface update?

[mnemonic_]

Maybe someone can create a new GUI for OOo that doesn't like that of Office 97. Sad but true, much open source software clings to GUIs of old closed source designs (Nautilus : MacOS 9, Epiphany : Netscape 4, AbiWord : Word 97 etc.). I wonder when open source developers will make GUIs that are innovatively good, rather than creatively bad (Blender, Grip anyone?).

OOo Web Innovation?

[PineHall]

Jon Udell has an interesting [infoworld.com] idea [infoworld.com] of reinventing the office suite for a networked world. He says it should include "service orientation, peer-to-peer capability, workflow, federated identity, and new ways to query and visualize data." With the source code, someone could develop a system that could improve inter-company communication and collaboration using Open Office. We need to think 21st century.

What about AbiWord and Gnumeric?

[massysett]

OpenOffice gets all the press attention. I'm not sure why. It seems sluggish and takes an extremely long time to load, in Linux and Windows. The download is massive. My impression of Gnumeric and Abiword has been much more favorable in both Linux and Windows: they're sleek, quick to download, and quick to load up. Also, OO screws up even basic Excel imports, which Gnumeric handles without a hiccup.

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.

Gnumeric on large spreadsheets

[Noksagt]

I can't speak to the legacy version of Gnumeric, but I can say that Gnumeric lets you set the number of rows and columns at compile-time. I have used spreadsheets with more cells than are possible in Excel with no problem.

Importance of shipping only YOUR software

[mi]

Can anyone point OOo at that? The OOo tarballs are so huge, because they include everything -- expat, jpeg, BerkeleyDB, dmake, you name it.

I'm glad, Sun's license is restrictive, or else they would've bundled their own Java too.

Such bundling is wasteful of not only the memory/storage/bandwidth resources, but also the development efforts of people, who maintain all of those "3rd-party" software packages.

Linux/*BSD are not typically desktops because...

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Lack of Microsoft Office

   Sorry all you OpenOffice guys, you have to face facts though, Microsoft Office is THE BUSINESS STANDARD. Just about every major business under the sun uses the Microsoft Office suite, it is installed on all desktop workstations from the Janitor to the CEO.

   Once OpenOffice provides all the same functionality as Microsoft Office in a consistant way, offers technical support (excluding forums, because mom & dad want to be able to call someone), and can be purchased, even at a nominal price in places like Costco, then it will become more popular and has a chance on the desktops of corporate America, provided of course that it is 100% compatible with whatever the current version of Microsoft Office is.

   Oh and OOo or OpenOffice.org is a stupid name to call the suite, drop the .org and just call it OpenOffice.

2. Typically, people don't want to go to the command-line and 'apt-get' or 'make install' or 'emerge' et. al. their software. Most people want to be able to go to website XYZ and download something that shows an icon on their desktop. That icon when 2x clicked will launch an installer and do everything for them in a little user interaction way such as:
   • Launch Installer
   • Click "Next"
   • Click "I agree to the soul sucking license agreement"
   • Click "Next" a few more times
   • Click "Finished"

   and then have a nice little icon in their "Start" menu or on their desktop that they can lauch the application with.

3. The installer for the Operating System must be as easy as Windows or MacOS X
4. Linux/*BSD need to have the following:
   • Pre-Configured Systems at retail outlets such as:
     • Wal*Mart
     • Costco
     • BestBuy
     • Circuit City
     • Fry's
     • Sears
   • Support from Major software vendors such as:
     • Microsoft
     • Apple (Quicktime/iTunes)
     • Macromedia
     • Adobe (Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat)

       Sorry, The GIMP doesn't cut it

     • Alias/Wavefront (Maya)
     • Quark
     • Other Major vendors
   • A Call Center

     Without a place where users can call and speak to a live person for support, Linux/*BSD will never gain significant marketshare outside of the server room.

   • The user should have a standard command-line available, but should not ever really need to touch it if they don't want to

Between Linux and *BSD, I believe that the very nature of the GPL hinders Linux in becoming a serious desktop OS. By the very nature of the BSD License, BSD is more ideally suited to be supported by major software vendors than is Linux. (This thought is incomplete as I have to leave) I will explain why I believe this on my own website and post the URL here for anyone interested.

Re:Indeed

[DoubleRing]

And yet you found the need to bold AND italicize the first word of your comment :P

Re:Indeed

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you please explain to this nutjob how I can give my boardroom presentation in vi to maximize visual impact? I really need to get my message through.

Re:Indeed

[value_added]

Can you please explain to this nutjob how I can give my boardroom presentation in vi to maximize visual impact? I really need to get my message through.

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?

[jarich]

C'mon now. One of the most important open source projects in the world? I suppose that assumes that MS Office is one of the most important programs (suite...whatever) in the world? For real?

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.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[suitepotato]

C'mon now. One of the most important open source projects in the world? I suppose that assumes that MS Office is one of the most important programs (suite...whatever) in the world? For real?

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?

[QuantumG]

and? Are we supposed to see your brother as the most important person in the world or something? My brother won't switch to Linux because he doesn't know how to work a command line and we still don't have a decent control panel applet on any Linux distribution worth mentioning. So why isn't that the most important application? When you don't need to operate a shell to configure your computer, then we'll see more defections, not before.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[jarich]

Try Kubuntu. It doesn't need a command line to do much of anything.

My brother is typical of the people I know... he's not as important as ~your~ brother, naturally! ;)

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[QuantumG]

I guarentee it does. Last time I checked these were lacking:

• Changing the screen resolution.
• Configuring display/mouse/keyboard drivers.
• Setting up a sound card.
• Configuring a network.
• Installing a printer.

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?

[jarich]

You sound mighty sure of yourself for someone who writes XP software. ;)

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.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[QuantumG]

You sound mighty sure of yourself for someone who writes XP software. ;)

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?

[jarich]

That's offensive. Just because I'm pointing out some obvious deficiencies does not mean I have some evil agenda.

Your original posting ~was~ offensive. Go back and re-read it. Your first post talks about changing screen resolutions requiring a shell (which it doesn't). But you respond in the second post with a comment on changing drivers. That's a completely different topic. (btw, NVidia drivers can be installed with apt-get.)

You said you needed to use a shell to install a printer, a statement you obvio

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[fermion]

You forgot the difficulty of installing any hardware, the lack of compatibility, the reboot for any change, and the general lack of software. Which are all non-issues, including those you mention.

In reality, MS Windows is still difficult in all these areas. I setup a wireless card on XP and I could not use the downloaded update, I had to use the CD. I just helped a collegue install a USB printer on XP, and it took like three installs/unintalls to work. My reletively new XP machines at home will not wo

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[QuantumG]

This is the stupidest argument I've ever heard. Allow me to summarise: Linux isn't broken because Windows is broken. How freakin' braindead is that? Face reality, people use Windows. If you want people to use Linux you have to be better than Windows. You can't say "Windows is broken too" like a child, you have to fix the god damn problem.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[moonbender]

The most obvious reason that comes to mind why OO is more important than control panel applets is that OO is a tool, while control panel applets are meta-tools. People use computers so that they can use office. People use control panels so that they can more efficiently use computers so that they can use office.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[QuantumG]

People use computers so that they can use office.

Yeah, people like his brother. Unlike my brother. Can we make any more pointless sweeping statements? Open Office is also available for Windows. So why would you wanna switch to Linux? Because Linux is better for some reason right? What's gunna stop you switching? Because Linux is different/difficult in some regards. Therefore, which is more important for Linux? Developing Open Office or developing "meta-tools", as you put it, to make the platform de

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[moonbender]

Way to miss my point entirely. "People" doesn't necessarily mean "all people", by the way.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[QuantumG]

Yes I do. 99% of the people I talk to who try switching to Linux don't give up because of the apps.. they give up because they can't use their printer/camera/sound card/second monitor. They give up because they can't find where to change the screen resolution. They don't even get to the apps because they can't access their windows partition or their file server or their email to get at their documents.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Bloater]

> 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.

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

100%?

[nurb432]

Why does he have to be 100%?

If all internal users change over, then only sharing with external clients is needed, and 100% wont be necessary.

Re:100%?

[jarich]

I've tried to sell him on that but his stance is that none of his staff wants to look foolish in front of a client because they can't open a Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet. Everyone has to be able to exchange documents with clients seemlessly.

We're planning on putting in a Linux box with Subversion on it for document management... if I can't infect him one way, I'll get him another! ;) (kidding!)

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Meshach]

That is really one of the major blocks for most companies to use open source / linux software - lack of a good office suite.

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?

[paretooptimum]

If Linux had a better one...

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?

[Eric Giguere]

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...

Eric
Join my mailing list and win a free book [makeeasymo...google.com]

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Quino]

I think it can be argued that, for wide-scale adoption of Linux, the first step will be the wide-scale adoption of OpenOffice over the MS office suite.

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.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Mateito]

From the point of view of business, there are two fundamental applications:
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.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[civilizedINTENSITY]

On the other hand, Gnumeric kicks Excel's ass. I appreciate the Gnumeric/LaTeX connection, too.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Trogre]

Gnumeric is nice, but I still haven't figured how to get it to import tab-delimited text from a file that doesn't have a .CSV extension!

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[QuantumRiff]

As Much as I hate to admit it, Access should be on that list as well. Knowledgeable managers use Excell to connect to databases, and pull the data they want out for reports. Many, many other managers use Access, connect to the "real" backend database, and use QBE (Query By Example) to generate their reports. Also, many small businesses seem to think it is a real database.

Agreed. Access is versatile.

[WoTG]

I totally agree. To me, Access is like the swiss army knife of data processing.

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 .mdb file and you are done.

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.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Kjella]

- Excel:
The power of the Excel in power-user mode is phenominal.

I agree. I just don't think that more than a few percent are actually using them. I've met many people that were in positions and with educations where you'd *think* they knew how to use Excel. Yet I get questions about doing rather trivial things.

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.

I'm not so sure. Of the advanced Excel use I've seen, most have been limited

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Mateito]

I didn't say it was nice, I just said it was powerful :)

I agree with you. Excel is not easy to use, and to become a power-user really involves a lot of time with the product... more time that most people will ever need to use excel at an appropriate level.

If Openoffice can combine an "it just works" style with the power in Excel, they'll be on to a winner.

Re:One of the most important open source projects?

[Mateito]

Yes, more powerful than Gnumeric.
Not more powerful than Matlab. How does Matlab licensing work?
Different from Kalediagraph.

The others I haven't dealt with.

Gnumeric Excel

[Noksagt]

Gnumeric was the only spreadsheet in the list, so is the only direct competitor. HOW is Excel more powerful than Gnumeric? I know from personal experience that Gnumeric has more built-in functions & the functions are CORRECT. Excel does have some mistakes, which have persisted for many versions.

The others all allow you to manipulate and chart data, so they aren't ALL that different. They each intend to address specific (and different) limitations of standard spreadsheet software.

R/S/SPSS are for whe

Re:arguably indeed...

[lakin]

"explores how anyone can contribute to argubly one of the most important Open Source projects."

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.

Re:arguably indeed...

[flatface]

He didn't say in the right order, though.

Re:Why not just focus on OO2?

[killjoe]

" Why even have split development? Most ppl who don't use the current OO aren't not using it b/c of some small bugs, but b/c it lacks major abilites like being able to competantly convert MS formats"

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.