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OpenOffice.org 3.0 Promises New Life for Office Software

Posted by sakgarg on · 11 comments
OStatic; By Kristin Shoemaker 		Mail this story
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OpenOffice.org is in an unenviable place. Office suites -- word processors, spreadsheets, presentations and the ilk -- are utilitarian, complex bundles of software. They are a necessity of modern life, used daily by individuals and businesses all over the world. It isn't that people take them for granted. People don't consider them much at all. It has been a long time since I've had any feelings whatsoever about an office suite. There have been developments in office software that have been innovative, such as online document creation. And though useful, I still can't honestly say that I've been enthusiastic about (or, since Clippy was retired, repulsed by) any office application.

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Comments (11)

tracyanne ·
My boss doesn't realise this yet, but I saved him a bunch of money, by installing OO.o 3.x on my machine at work. He doesn't have to buy a license for another copy of MS Word 2007, I can read, and write docx, xlsx etc files, that are being sent to us now.
herzeleid ·
He doesn't deserve employees like you...
tracyanne ·
Who knows what the future will bring.
hkwint ·
Quoting: docx, xlsx etc files, that are being sent to us now.


Wow, that's already happening? That's (O)OXML, not? I haven't received those yet, everyone where I work sends PDF's (and engineering stuff like DXF/STEP etc.)

And does it work? Haven't had any comments yet?
tracyanne ·
Yeah it works fine. I haven't received any complicated files yet, and probably never will, I can imagine there may be some big formatting differences, but the worst I've had is that OO.o displayed a docx document wider than it should have been, I just adjusted the width of the text area to fit the page margins and everything else fell into place. the Spreadsheets are not a problem at all, although I suppose any VB macros may not work.
theboomboomcars ·
It's good to hear docx is working well with OO.o 3, I have received some from various professors at school and while I can open them in 2.4 most of the formatting is lost.
tracyanne ·
Just send your professors documents in ODT format, and see how well Word handles the formatting on those. One interesting aspect of getting OpenOffice.org out to lots of technology ignorant people is that they will use the native Open Document formatting, which forces some recipients, other technology ignorant to have to install OO.o, I've seen this happen with our local small town newspaper.
techiem2 ·
lol I almost did that in my current class TA. But I opted to be kind to the prof and send him my homework as PDFs (exported from OO.o of course) instead.
theboomboomcars ·
I always send my stuff as a PDF. Most of my teachers ask for a MS file format or a PDF, so I send a PDF. I have introduced some of my teachers to OO.o though.
Sander_Marechal ·
At our company all reports are generated in ODF so that they can be easily converted to PDF (for printing and sending to clients) and DOC (for manual editing). Funny thing: we upgraded to OOo 2.4 (ODF 1.1) because of some new features we needed, but a bug in 2.2/2.4 caused some of the formatting to be lost when exporting the ODF to DOC.

Our PHB's solution: Everyone must use OOo and we drop MS-Office all together for the reports :-)
gus3 ·
@Sander:

By definition, he isn't a PHB. A true PHB would never say that.

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