A quick look at what next major version of this popular open source office suite offers to end users.
A first look at OpenOffice.org 2.0
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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2) It’s supposed compatability with MS is horrible – Unusable almost.
You obviously haven’t tried the 2.0 beta.
As far as speed is concerned, it’s useless to comment on it until the release candidates are here.
Is that you can build a template document in OO and then open up the XML and check it out, modify it, and spit it back out. Sounds like something MS Office ought to be able to do, but the XML support is not as trivial a thing and formatting gets lost.
Why is this nice? Well, simply using PHP to fill in the XML template makes for a great way to produce catalogs and complex reports, generate on-the-fly presentations, etc.
It’s easy, it’s cross-platform, it gives great results, you can easily read/modify/update the document by using very simply tools, etc.
I’ve found OO’s Impress module generally produces nicer results than PowerPoint, and I can export them note only as HTML, but also as Shockwave files. The word processor does most everything like Word, but adds more advanced flow control than MS Word. The spreadsheet’s not so much different than Excel that I notice. Hell, even the OO VB-knock off is pretty straight-forward.
Is that you can build a template document in OO and then open up the XML and check it out, modify it, and spit it back out. Sounds like something MS Office ought to be able to do, but the XML support is not as trivial a thing and formatting gets lost.
This can also be done in Office 2003. Several of the Office XML formats have published schemas available from MS Downloads which can be used to create Office XML (WordProcessingML, SpreadsheetML, etc.) documents without even having Office. The XML formats mirror their binary counterparts in feature support.
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=fe118952-3…
I am a fairly naive user: I use MS Office 2000 at work, StarOffice 7 (under Windows XP)at home. StarOffice is more than adequate for my needs, and wonderful value for money. I’ve had no trouble converting (normal-size) documents in both directions between MS Word/MS-Excel and StarOffice 7. I find the PDF converter in StarOffice invaluable, but Mail Merge is horrible compared with MS Word.
To me OO2.0 and StarOffice 8 offer better Mail Merge and a decent database – great!
I am terribly sorry that “guardian of sanity” cannot make it run fast at it’s Pentium 166/ 8MB RAM box… I guess he can still use the last good MS Office build instead (that is MS Office 95, the last one that does not have issues with non-unicode documents and fonts).
For everyone else, it should run just fine.
Rather than take up tons of space here, I’ve blogged my thoughts here:
http://gwjmateo.blogspot.com/
I have read all comments and have something to say. I have been using OpenOffice since it first released and used StarOffice before that. I just downloaded OpenOffice 2.0. I like it great and expect the final version to be even better. I like it because it a great Office Suite that I do have to pay hundreds of dollars for. I have used MSO and yes it does really nice things, but how many people and companys really use it all. Everyone wants something for nothing. Quit saying bad things about it. Either use or do not. They build a great product and give it away. What more do you want?
I personally thank each person who took the time to put out a great alternative to MSO and not charge me a arm and leg for it. So it has some bugs or it does not have all the bells and whistles MSO has IT IS FREE.