Office Archive

When I received the "Learning Red Hat Linux, 2nd Edition" book from O'Reilly, I thought that this would be an in-depth guide, a way to hack around the Red Hat Linux operating system. It was a bit of let down for me to see that the book was for beginners. But, reading through it, I realized that the beauty of the book is in teaching new users lessons that are solid and well constructed throughout its 350 pages.

The OpenOffice.org community today announced the availability of OpenOffice.org 1.0, the open source, multi-platform, multi-lingual office productivity suite available as a free download at the OpenOffice.org community website. OpenOffice.org 1.0 is the culmination of more than 18 months of collaborative effort by members of the OpenOffice.org community, which is comprised of Sun employees, volunteer developers, marketers, and end users working to create an international office suite that will run on all major platforms. Scroll down this page for mirrors.

"SOT Office 2002 is a free productivity suite for Windows and Linux. At SOT, we're committed to making sure that a free, commercial-quality office suite is available to all Windows and Linux users. Partly based on OpenOffice.org, SOT Office 2002 is the only office application you'll ever need. A full-featured, high-quality software suite, SOT Office is fully compatible with other major office applications. You can open and save .doc, .xls and all your usual file formats with SOT Office, so sharing documents with friends and colleagues is a breeze." SOT Office is an OpenOffice spin-off and it was released for both Windows & Linux recently. Update: On a similar note, Office NGO screenshots have been leaked.

Hancom Office 2.01 is the latest version from the Korean company Hancom Linux, released only a few days ago. The company used to offer a Windows version of their product, but they have since completely focused on the Linux platform, even though their product is pretty portable as it is based almost solely in the Qt 3 tooklkit. In latest news, Hancom has canned their Professional version of their office suite (contained more applications in assosiation with TheKompany), and they now going with the Standard version, which is the version we review today. Update: From the Hancom press release: "200 Million Arabic Speakers Finally Have an Affordable, High-Quality Alternative to Microsoft - And Save 90% in the Process."

While the information is still unconfirmed, the talk is that the leaked slides from a Microsoft presentation regarding the next Office version, are authentic. WindowsSuperSite features two articles, the first talks about the new Office version, codenamed NGO, but the second set of slides, is the truly interesting part, explaining how the subscription/renting .NET model will work with Microsoft's upcoming Web Services. In fact, it seems that Office will be the leading application in this new sales model, which will help promote the subscription model in general, however a "traditional" licensing method will also be available. Update: Some analysis of the NGO presentation can be found at ExtremeTech.

For those of us who still mourn the BeOS, watching gobe software expand is like watching a little brother grow up; we're all rooting for them. That's why it's that much more exciting to see reviews like the one at arstechnica.com that gives gobeProductive 3.03 a solid 8/10 score, with the author commenting "I encourage everyone to pick up a copy." Read the rest of the review at ArsTechnica.com. NewsForge reviews OpenOffice 6.0 while they also report on a new crossover plugin for Linux which allows Microsoft Office to run under Linux.

With the release of MacOSX, Apple has engineered and released two new APIs: Carbon & Cocoa. Carbon is similar to MacOS 9 API and it can be programmed in C & C++. Carbon was created in order to give Macintosh developers an easy-to-walk "bridge" to easily port their MacOS applications to OSX. Through the CarbonLib, developers can now develop both MacOSX and MacOS9 applications with a single effort. Cocoa is the fully native MacOSX API; it gives access to more MacOSX-specific features and it can be programmed with Objective-C or Java. Apple, through O'Reilly, last year released two books, "Learning Carbon" and "Learning Cocoa".

PostgreSQL is considered by many to be the most advanced open source database in the world (sorry mySQL), providing a wealth of features (sub-select, transactions, write-ahead logging etc) that are usually only found in commercial databases. PostgreSQL is an object-relational database management system (ORDBMS), originally developed in 1977 by the University of Berkeley and it is included by default as the main database on most *BSD systems, like FreeBSD. But in spite of its long history and extensive user base (however, it is still not as popular as the Linux-centric mySQL though), PostgreSQL suffered from a lack of comprehensive and easy-to-use documentation. "Practical PostgreSQL" (along with 2 more PostgreSQL books, all released the last 2-3 months) fills that information void with a fast-paced guide to installation, configuration, and usage.

So, you are a Windows user or a not so Unix-oriented person who wants to master the art of administration? Then "Linux System Administration - A User's Guide" book may be just right for you. And if you are already an admin working somewhere, we are sure you will find in this book something you did not know yet. Read more to see what is included in this comprehensive guide to Linux administration.

The well known reviewer Walter S. Mossberg (WSJ) reviews the gobeProductive 3 Office Suite (the world exclusive Preview was hosted at OSNews two months ago). WSJ's review seems to be a fair one overall, even if he missed a couple of good points like the PDF exporting and the all-in-one document format that is featured in GP3. In related news, there is a new GP3 demo coming out in 1-2 days from now (version 3.0.2) and you will be able to test run the suite yourselves. If you already have decided to buy the application and support Gobe, the price is now lowered at $75 USD, which is a steal, considering the fact that its Family License allows you to install it in all your home computers, plus one at your workplace.

The story of how a BeOS refugee (and not just everyone, but the author of the 'BeOS Bible' book) lost faith in the future of computing, resigned himself to Windows but found himself bored silly, tore out half his hair at the helm of a Linux box, then rediscovered the joy of computing in MacOSX. Scot Hacker will describe his personal adventures with today's operating systems after he was set out to find an alternative to his beloved (but with no apparent future) BeOS. Update: Make sure you read the second part of the article, a rebutal, found here.

The Office XP Update Service Pack 1 released yesterday. Service Pack 1 (SP-1) provides the latest updates to Microsoft Office XP. SP-1 contains significant security enhancements and stability and performance improvements. Some of the fixes included with SP-1 have been previously released as separate updates. This service pack combines them into one integrated package, and it includes a number of other changes designed to improve the reliability and performance of your Office XP programs. You can read an overview of the service pack on the Microsoft website.

The second beta of the promising office suite gobeProductive 3 has been released. The Windows download file only weighs 6.3 MB and it includes further bug fixes and some new features. Remember to send bug reports to Gobe by stating your software and hardware setup along with a explanatory description of the bug. In related news, OpenOffice 6 Build 641b has also been released for Windows (47 MB), SPARC Solaris (68 MB) and Linux (75 MB).

If English is your native language and you are a technology or an OS savvy person, maybe you would like to join the OSNews Crew. OSNews needs people who enjoy writting feature articles, reviews and/or editorials and can deliver at least two or three of these articles each month (guidelines available). If you are up to the task, please let us know. If you are a developer (in this case, we couldn't care less about your native language, let C/C++ talk), who would like to write articles about algorithms, OS-related coding, OS techniques etc, we are also very interesting to host your article.