Office Archive

2001 is almost over (and already over for a lot of our readers), and there are plenty of ways to look at the past twelve months. LinuxPlanet has put together a list of their Linux best and worst of 2001: Favorite distro, desktop environment, browser, mail client and more. Oh, and Happy New Year everyone!

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.

A new version, beta 3, of the gobeProductive 3 office suite (6 MB) was released yesterday containing a number of bug fixes. In related news, Ability Office 2002 (13 MB) was recently released and it features table support for Write, PDF creation, MS Access 2000/XP mdb compatible, merge cells for Spreadsheet and more.

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).

ConsultingTimes features an article regarding StarOffice 6, which is currently in beta, describing what's new in the new version and also what's missing. "The old StarOffice 5.2 provided integration with a vengeance, taking over your entire desktop in the process. StarOffice 6 follows the more conventional model with excellent cross-application integration. For example, it's quite special that you can start a new spreadsheet or presentation while working on a text document. No other office suite offers such smooth, unobtrusively integration." In related news, the company behind Hancom Office 2.0 released their final beta (107 MB) just a few days ago.

The first Windows beta for gobeProductive 3 Office Suite is now released. The download weighs only 5 MB, and it expires on January 15th. gobeProductive 3 includes a word processor, a spreadsheet, vector and raster graphics editors and a presentation tool. A special upgrade price ($40) will be offered to BeOS users, while the full price will be around $125 USD under the Family License (you can freely install the suite to all your home PCs, plus one PC at your workplace). The Linux version is scheduled for the second quarter of 2002. If you encounter bugs in this beta version, let Gobe know about them, by emailing them and make sure you mention the version of Windows, printer driver and your hardware specs (CPU, graphics card etc). OSNews featured a world's first preview of the office suite just two weeks ago.

Gobe Productive is a well known and the most important third party application in the BeOS world. It is a powerful Office Suite. Gobe (the same developers who wrote ClarisWorks for Macintosh in the past - now called AppleWorks) is now looking for a larger market than BeOS has to offer, and version 3.0 of Productive will be first published for the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems. A Linux version is scheduled for development and release shortly after the Windows one. This is the world's first preview of Gobe Productive 3 (GP3), with lots of screenshots and a good portion of information about the upcoming product (a public beta version should be released in the near future too).

"If these OS's were cars, XP would be the Warner Brothers Special Edition minivan, and 7.2 would be a Yugo well on its way to becoming a KIA. Damn." This is a... pretty funny article regarding the experience of a TheRegister journalist, trying to compare both RedHat and WindowsXP. Our take: AFAIK, all he had to do was to decrease the PIO mode value of his CD-ROM in his computer's BIOS. After doing that, the Linux installation should have worked just fine.

For a good weekend reading, amateur and pro programmers can go to Joel On Software where Joel Spolsky gives a big number of extremely valuable hints about the process of engineering software. Joel Spolsky is one of the initiators of VBA, and led its implementation in Excel. He has recently founded his own company, Fog Creek Software. Anyone who wants to become a really good software engineer should pay a lot of attention to his essays, probably starting with The Joel Test.