Office Archive

"Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Who's the prettiest suite of them all?" Suddenly it seems, the fierce contests to find the most popular computer `Office suite' ? a combo-pack of softwares to perform common tasks like word processing, spread sheeting, presentation and e-mailing ? are to be replayed all over again, a decade after the first shakeout. Read the article at The Hindu. In other office news, Gobe now sells GobeProductive for a low price, while it seems that the new AppleWorks 6.2.7 is available for purchasing. Update: Native Abiword port for Mac OS X abandoned.

ActiveWin features a preview article of the upcoming MS Office 2003.

Recently, some sharp criticism has been displayed against the OS reviews posted on OSNews by third parties. In an effort to make the reviews more substantial, I have put together some guidelines in addition to the generic guidelines OSNews already provides for the readers who want to have their voices heard on this site.

With the recent beta release of Microsoft Office 2003 out the door earlier this week, many customers got their first look at what Microsoft hopes will re-write the office productivity landscape with a new ecosystem of collaborative functionality based on XML (define). But will organizations have to buy into an entirely Microsoft architecture to tap it? That's the contention of Gary Edwards, a Web app. design consultant and OpenOffice.org's representative on the OASIS OpenOffice XML Format Committee.

As the Microsoft Windows monopoly becomes ever more entrenched, the world seems to be becoming an increasingly more difficult place for a new operating system, or even some that have been around for a long time but have a limited share of the desktop PC market. Proponents of alternative operating systems seem to spend their time alternately griping about Windows' grip on the desktop and asserting that it doesn't matter all that much because they can get their work done with their OS of choice.

LIUtilities's WinBackup is a backup program for Windows 98/NT/ME/2000 and XP. Despite it's low cost ($50 boxed, $30 for a downloadable version) and small size (under 2 Mb) WinBackup has a ton of features including built in CD/DVD burning support and 256-bit encryption.

We were the first to inform you about the buyout of gobeProductive 3.x by starter FreeRadicalSoftware (headed also by the Gobe CEO) back in August. One of the ideas was to make gobeProductive GPL (a beta Linux version already exists). Unfortunately, it seems that FreeRadicalSoftware might not succeed in this. Read more for Gobe's and FreeRadical's Scott Lindsey's email in the Gobe user mailing list regarding the status, as it was sent by OSNews readers and GP3 users Chris Rupnik and Greg. Update: Gobe's Tom Hoke comments here and Scott Lindsey comments here.

I would like to thank everyone for your support this 1,5 years after the OSNews relaunch on August 2001. I worked really hard all that time, designed and coded OSNews, writting a huge number of articles etc. I brought OSNews from 700 impressions per day to 92,000 per day, for last month. But this is exactly what will also make me leave my baby (OSNews :). Too much work.

Here's the latest about what the OpenOffice Project is up to for language support, new platforms and development partnerships.

Microsoft Corp. has told beta testers of Office 11, its next-version Office desktop productivity suite, that the product will only work with the Windows 2000 operating system with Service Pack 3 installed, Windows XP and later desktop releases. While Office 11 is slated for release next year, today Win9x/ME/NT OSes still hold about 52% of the overall OS market, and by next year's Office release, this is still expected to be around 40%. This is a tremendous amount of sales getting wasted (Office is the main income for Microsoft), but Microsoft said that this decision was mostly taken in order to incorporate new technologies on Office that are only available on the 2k/XP OSes, and also for security reasons ("Windows 9x is inherently insecure" Sloan Crayton of Microsoft said).

From ActiveWin: "Microsoft Corp. has released the second service pack for Office XP, which will combine previously released and new updates into a single, integrated package that will be available as a Web download or on CD. Office XP Service Pack 2 (SP-2) provides the latest updates to Microsoft Office XP. SP-2 contains significant security enhancements as well as stability and performance improvements. SP-2 updates the following Office applications: Word 2002, Excel 2002, Outlook 2002, PowerPoint 2002, Access 2002, FrontPage 2002, Publisher 2002, and Office XP Web Components."

You can call Jeff Raikes, Microsoft's group vice president of Productivity and Business Services, just about anything you want, just don't call him a desktop guy. Raikes is charged with the responsibility of guiding Microsoft's enormously successful desktop business -- the jewel of which is Office XP -- into the new era of computing where desktop, server, and peer-to-peer technologies are beginning to all swirl together as a seamless whole. Read the interview at InfoWorld.

You may have heard of Sun Microsystems' StarOffice which is being offered as a viable and cheaper alternative to Microsoft Office. Openoffice.org is the open source (or, free indefinitely) cousin of StarOffice. Staroffice used to be free as in you can freely download and install in as many computers as you like but Sun Microsystems has recently decided to charge for Staroffice. However, please do not fret as Openoffice.org will always be free and we are going to show you in this article how and why Openoffice.org instead of MS Office and StarOffice is for you.

Giving off an impression as the Swiss Army knife of Linux books, "MultiTool Linux" by Schwarz, Anderson, Curtis, Murphy and published by Addison-Wesley, this book tries to solve very specific problems with Linux. Let's see whether it succeeds to do so or not.