Office Archive

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.

We were the first to feature the world preview of gobeProductive 3 for Windows, the popular office suite, and now we have for you five brand new screenshots of the upcoming, GTK+ based, Linux version. Dig in for the goodies!

"Microsoft's operating-system monopoly has gotten plenty of ink in this paper, but Microsoft Office exerts an even tighter stranglehold on the market. The productivity suite dominates not just on Windows PCs but on Macs as well, and its file formats have become a default language in offices, homes and schools around the world." Rob Pegoraro reviews OpenOffice for WatshingtonPost. In the meantime, Sun puts a price at Star Office, while Microsoft is finalizing its next-gen Office.

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.

The good people over at Addison-Wesley sent us this book, "Understanding Open Source Software Development" written by Joseph Feller & Brian Fitzgerald. It is an analysis of the history of the open source, its goals, where it is now and where it is expected to be in the near future. The ultimate goal and target of the book, apart from the knowledge feed about open source in general, seems to be the effort to convince project managers why they should adopt Open Source. Does the book succeed? Read on.

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."

There has been a number of MacOSX books released since the MacOSX public release by Apple a year ago. However, none is either as... thick or as rich in content as "Mac OS X Unleashed" by SAMS Publishing. It took me some time to go through its 1400+ pages, but the review is finally here. Update: Current readers can find the errata of the book over at the author's web site.