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That read more like an advertising brochure than a review.

He doesn't make it clear whether the "Draw" program is a drawing
program or a bitmap image editor. Obviously the film poster shown was
not done in it. Nor does he say what formats it loads and saves, just
vaguely that it doesn't handle the usual ones.

It does look as though Open Office works. It's a pity it has to look
so like a Windows product. It would be nice to see a good new office
suite that was rethought from the ground up, rather than being an
attempt to imitate a MS product.

He does mention one major gap - it doesn't load or save Word Perfect
files. Anyone know if this is being addressed?

Does it export PDF files?

> Obviously the film poster shown was not done in it.

Obviously. This picture was taken from starwars.com and then manipulated on Draw. Draw is a vector app rather than a raster one. It is useful for creating shapes and flow charts. But it can load images too as you can see.

The Draw and HTML editor shots are mine. The rest are William's.

"That read more like an advertising brochure than a review."

Exactly. It looks like this can fill the needs of most average Office users, but what about the power users? Does it support macros, customizable menus/toolbars, etc? Does it have anything resembling VBA, where you can create visual forms in documents/spreadsheets/etc?

What I woudl love to see is a side-by-side feature comparison between this and MSOffice, along with the other office suites such as StarOffice, KOffice, and the one that comes with Gnome (AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc .. is this all one suite or just seperate apps?)

I gotta say that Math program looks pretty snazzy and better than MS Word's Equation Editor, but I wonder if it can go toe-to-toe with MathType (the commercial version of Equation Editor).

I tried to install it on my XP pro box at work but it wouldn't install properly. I filed a bug requested and they closed it saying they couldn't reproduce.

They were very unhelpful ... so I wouldn't bother with them.

Well, i downloaded OpenOffice and installed it under linux. Everything works better than what I expect. However, the font is extremely ugly, when I use it under window, it looks good. Is there any work-around to get the anti-alias font displaying nicely under openoffice?

Currently I am using Redhat 7.3

thanks

Here is the bug report.

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4366

And here is a troubleshooting guide for font-related issues in OpenOffice:

http://www.openoffice.org/FAQs/fontguide.html

Darius:

I think it is an advertising brochure!

OOo does have macros, customisable toolbars & (I think!) menus and all that kind of stuff.

It also has an interpreter for Basic built in: see http://udk.openoffice.org/basic/index.html for more info (not sure if that is the "proper" guide, but the OOo website seem determined to hide it as much as they can!

Sikosis:

The problem with your bug is that if they cannot replicate it (in other words, they don't have any problems), then it is going to be difficult for them to do anything to help you - a bit like asking a doctor to help a patient that they know nothing about - which is why they might seem unhelpful, but I understand that most commercial support for home users is no better (and in some cases worse when they tell you helpful things like "re-install your operating system")!

Best of luck, but don't let a small setback turn you off a product for ever. If we all did that, MS would have no market!

Does it export PDF files?

Yes. Also, its native file formats are completely open (XML-based), so there's nothing stopping other apps from adding reliable support for them. Even MS Office can have reliable OpenOffice.org filters.

I've been using Open Office exclusively at University and at Home for the past month. It has been a pleasure to use and integrating equations, screenshots, flowcharts has been a breeze

"It's a pity it has to look so like a Windows product. It would be nice to see a good new office suite that was rethought from the ground up, rather than being an
attempt to imitate a MS product"

StarOffice 5.2 which attempted to do something new and integrated an explorer interface the result was clumsy, I hated it. From the second the application loaded it felt claustophobic stealing large chunks of screen real estate.

It is ludicrous to suggest that imitating a microsoft product is a pity. Sun weren't trying to change your life by releasing StarOffice and it's source. They are trying to gain market share, or more to the point take market share from microsoft. Familiarity breeds content. This is the best move Sun could possibly have made. How many people out there with computers have never used Office? Then why would you possibly want to learn an all new interface? What woul be the benefit of having a new way to make text bold, or a new way to enter equations in a spreadsheet?

If anything I think staroffice doesn't go far enough in it's emulation, if you're going to emulate go the whole hog. One of my major annoyances is subscript, superscript and font size shortcuts are different, what is the point in that?

"I gotta say that Math program looks pretty snazzy and better than MS Word's Equation Editor"

And you based that on the picture?
The good thing about the math editor is that you can type in the equation in an XML form, as well as having the ability to select characters and symbols from menus. But to date I have found several things I cannot do with it, a problem I have not had with microsoft equation editor basic though it may be.

P.S. Customising toolbars does not make you a "power-user" as you call it.

"You might be wondering that if that is the case, StarOffice will always be the better product. However, this may not exactly so since Openoffice.org is constantly being improved by expert programmers, users through their bugs reports and feature requests, technical writers with their excellent documentation all around the world"

As was recently explained by Sun, Sun take everything and anything they want from the OpenOffice and the only thing they return are bug fixes. Thus Staroffice will always be a superset of OpenOffice. It remains to be seen whether the extra features will warrant the extra cost but I have no doubt in my mind that the Sun product will be of higher quality.

Also I find that "being constantly updated" is not a good thing in the real world. Almost all changes produce a number of unforseen bugs. It take time for these to both appear and be resolved. Constant updating means constant bugs in my experience. I would rather a product that was updated infrequently but stable.

In summary just download the damn thing if you don't like it that's fine but I have yet to find anything I can't satifactorally do with it or get around with it.

Notice how OpenOffice.org does not include a database. This is because Sun have licensed code from Adabas for the database in StarOffice, and this code couldn't be used for OpenOffice.org. There is a solution: you can link OpenOffice.org to any ODBC compliant database (e.g. MySQL), and it will be used as the back-end for an MS Access-like database GUI. Instructions for the GNU/Linux version of OpenOffice can be found at http://www.pclinuxonline.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article... .

Larger enterprises that need global support can pay the small fee for StarOffice.

OpenOffice.org is good enough from me as an individual user.

ciao
yc

"It would be nice to see a good new office
suite that was rethought from the ground up, rather than being an attempt to imitate a MS product."

The easy response to this is Gobe Productive ( http://www.gobe.com ).

Can somebody please tell me how to change the titlebar colour in the GNU/Linux version of OpenOffice.org? I've noticed in the pictures of this review that the author has changed it to blue, but I seem stuck with the default yellow. Yellow isn't a bad colour, but it doesn't fit in with my GTK+ and Sawfish themes

Trivia

Always refer to the Openoffice.org Office Suite as Openoffice.org; Openoffice or Open Office are not acceptable for legal reasons.

Now we know what OpenBeOS should be called... ;D

Hello,

I would like to correct (myself) that Draw allows saving in popular graphics format such as BMP, JPG, GIF and PNG. You would need to do a File -> Export -> (Select a) File Type. Opening GIF and PNG files seems to be OK although I have yet to try others such as JPG. It seems that Openoffice.org components uniformly supports a range of graphics formats that is defined in the list obtainable by doing a drop-down on the File Type combo box in Insert -> Graphics. I apologise for this mistake.

In addition, I would like to comment that my review is done in the stance of an average user, and is meant more for average users and as such, might not be able to fully address the needs of power users. Again, I apologise for this. Also, I am not neither affiliated with Openoffice.org nor any of the other entities mentioned in my review.



William Ku

Used to Microsoft Word? Its universal loved look-and-feel has been adopted and adapted by most of its successful alternatives such as StarWriter (from StarOffice(R)), KWord (from KDE's KOffice) and Abiword. In this "attack of the clones", Openoffice.org's Writer is no different and its look-and-feel will immediately set you in ease; you can start using it immediately!

Actually, KWord imitates Frame Maker. StarOffice's Writer is based on OpenOffice.org Writer. And Writer doesn't actually clone Word's UI, and if it is, they are terrible cloners. How I know? I run both MS Office XP, Office 2000 on a older machine and OpenOffice.org, and recently migrated from Office to OpenOffice.org 641 (and later 641B, 641C and 641D and 1.0). It seems that OpenOffice.org instead decides to use Microsoft's Windows-like UI, which is consitent accross platforms. That is not neccesarily a good thing.

Users move around between apps in a platform more often then they switch platform. And having a UI (and look, for OS other than Windows 9x) is annoyingly inconsitent with the rest of the OS (or desktop enviroment). For example, the save dialog, the position of the buttons "Yes", "Discard" and "Cancel" is inconsitent with Windows' "Yes" "No" and "Cancel".

The usual features are all there: popular fonts, style formatting, tables, spellcheck and others-you-nam-it-they-should-have-it.

Actually, OpenOffice.org hardly comes with any "popular fonts". Maybe ugly fonts, but certainly not popular. It's sister, StarOffice, does contains quality third party fonts. And as for the spell checker... well, it sucks. It sucked that badly, in SO 6.0 they included a third party spell checker that is way ahead of the one in OOo.

Impress your peers with a non-Microsoft PowerPoint presentation. The usual transition animation and effects are included along with a host of other unique ones. An integrated drawing tool (Draw) complements Impress, Openoffice.org's presentation component, well and allows the creative user to draw specific clip arts for the presentation. Functions for some fancy (or cranky) font design and 3D effects & animations are also available.

Hehe, my experience with Impress isn't as impressive (nice pun) than your ad. There is way less features for animation. As for integrated tool, I normally use Photoshop, and PowerPoint together (that is the one reason I still have Office actually, on Windows). I don't find Draw particularly useful. At least it is more useful than GIMP... but on Linux, I open GIMP more often - it is way faster.

Draw cannot compete with digital graphics applications such as Adobe Photoshop and GIMP but it would suffice for simple drawing. For those who wanted to dabble in digital art, Draw might be the initil stepping stone that you are looking for.

Actually, for what I normally do with anything graphical, I find Draw more useful than GIMP. GIMP was obviously made only for retouching photos, and minimal support is given to other stuff.

Anyone who needs to prepare documents containing mathematical equations would know that it is not easy to find an application that combines the required pretty printing of word processing and the representation of mathematical equations to look like as if they are hand-written, rather than some muck-up subsitutes using characters from your keyboard. Even Microsoft Word and its companion Maths Equation Editor do not fully satisfy this requirement. As such, many have turned to typesetting software such as LaTex but at a tradeoff of complexity and the power of word processor software.

It is very useful for a maths teacher setting a maths paper. However, my teachers still uses WordPerfect, and therefore annoying papers :-)

Openoffice.org is cuurently available for the Microsoft Windows, SPARC and GNU/Linux platforms. A Macintonish version is on the way. As for hardware requirements, Openoffice.org is not quite as resource-hungry as Microsoft Office or Staroffice(R) but it will still require at least a decent Pentium PC with 64 MB RAM and some 250MB of hard disk space. I would encourage that for a smooth Openoffice.org performance, install it in a PC with lots of RAM; you would certainly feel the blazing difference in speed than if you have installed it a lesser PC.

I don't know about resource hungry. I find OpenOffice.org 1.0 loads much more slower than Office XP, and overall a little slower than Office XP. Also, I find OpenOffice.org on Windows XP takes up much more CPU power and memory than any of Office XP apps. OpenOffice.org on Linux takes up more resources than the Windows version, you can't say that Microsoft have the advantage of getting better access in Windows' API.

As for the Mac version, unless they throw out their "cross platform consitent" ideology, it would never succeed. The Mac version is essentially the Linux version with BSD APIs, running atop XDarwin. If they decide to stop using XDarwin and use Cocoa or Carbon, it wouldn't be fair to Linux and Windows users who have to live with an inconsitent app in their platform of choice. Also, it would ultimately defeat the "cross-platform consitency" idea.

William Ku is a Singaporean...

Cool. You're from kiasu-land (hehe, being kiasu doesn't neccesarily mean bad), which explains the advertisement... err... article. I'm from Malaysia.

I find OO great. Featurefull and stable. Which is more
I can say about KOffice and Gnome-Office(Abiword/Gnumeric).
Thanks to all the OpenOffice.org folks.

I use openoffice.org in both windoze and Linux. the interchangeability is nothing short of amazing. Totally platform independent. Exchanging docs between windoze and Linux is seamless as is using and modifying docs created in Word or Excel and saving and sending them on in MS format.
Just one minor complaint and that is the spell check is not as sophisticated as MS Word. Not having used Word for some time now I don't really miss the spellchecker as i have learned to compensate.
The parts of the suite that i use (spreadsheet and wordprocesser) don't have all the functionality of their MS counterparts and some of the options listed are not working. For the most part though i find that i have my needs met. sort of the difference between driving a 1980's pickup truck and a 2002 model.... they both get you where your going. of course i can drive my OO.org on the OS of my choice and that is important to me. As is ownership and free use of the software on my system.

I find OO great. Featurefull and stable. Which is more
I can say about KOffice and Gnome-Office(Abiword/Gnumeric).
Thanks to all the OpenOffice.org folks.

Wow, thanks a lot for comparing a product that was developed for a loong time (albeit under wraps at Star Division) and have a lot of full time workers on it, with a project with 5-7 active developers, and no full time workers (the last I checked). KOffice have come a long way considering the amount of developers behind it, and when I'm just writing something, and don't need things like hypenation and footnotes, which is rare anyway, and don't need to save in readable Office formats, I use KOffice. I would rate it's overall UI much more easier to use than OOo, 1.2 beta 1 as stable as OOo 1.0.

In addition, I would like to comment that my review is done in the stance of an average user, and is meant more for average users and as such, might not be able to fully address the needs of power users. Again, I apologise for this. Also, I am not neither affiliated with Openoffice.org nor any of the other entities mentioned in my review.

You have not done any proper comparisons, never actually shared your installations experience, using experience and so on. So it couldn't be considered as a review, but just a listing of features. An average Joe would much prefer a thorough review, but of course, not something power user kind like benchmarking, architecture comparisons and so on.

Two points that aren't in OpenOffice.org's favour, for anyone who's used to the installation of MSOffice, or suchlike, is that in OpenOffice.org, you are left with the whole process yourself. And unfortunately most people just do what is simplest for them.

So your average joe will install OpenOffice.org in Linux in the home/{$HOME}/OpenOffice.org* directory, being ignorant of the benefits of installing it in /opt/OpenOffice.org* as superuser - for example, with only the config files and user file directories in /home/{$HOME}.OpenOffice.org* directory as self; the average joe will never think of going into the likes of kde's control center to improve the kde system menu so joe average can get into OpenOffice.org*; and last but hardly least, joe average will look at the ease of installation of MSOffice and the installation lacks of OpenOffice.org* and will say, "So what? Why change? Even if MSOffice costs more, at least I know how to get it up and running."

All of this is based on my personal experience in sorting out OpenOffice.org641d on Linux and Win2K and OpenOffice.org1.0 on Linux. On Win2k I found I had difficulty with OpenOffice641d as a multiuser office suite - I could install it as one user, but couldn't access it as the other, unless I installed it as the other, in which case, I couldn't access it as the original user. Very frustrating. Compare that with MSOffice's flawless multiuser setup right out of the box.

It was only after visiting the OpenOffice.org website recently that I found out that they had been working on it, and none too soon, either. I'm in favour of Open Source/Free Software - imagine how severe those who aren't are going to slam OpenOffice.org*.

>Wow, thanks a lot for comparing a product that was developed >for a loong time (albeit under wraps at Star Division) and >have a lot of full time workers on it, with a project with >->7 active developers, and no full time workers (the last I >checked).
Koffice is an office package. So is OpenOffice. I'm comparing those two.

I dont need MS compability(fileformats) but I need database access and a working scripting language.

What are people thinking?! This thing *should* look as much like MS Office as possible. If MS Office is "good enough" for most people, and it is, then why would they migrate? The reasons for migration are cost and file format freedom. If the interface has a learning curve they'll be less prone to migrate.

If you want something new use Abiword, KDE Office, etc., etc. There's plenty of other also-ran's. The world wants to stick with what they know.

Mr. Parish,

How can you seriously compare the installation of MS Office to anything to do with linux. OpenOffice.org's installation under windows is without fault, it is simple and transparent, simpler even than MS Office. The 'problems' that the 'average joe' will experience in linux are inherent in almost all installations in linux that aren't part of the original distribution.

Anyway the 'average joe' installing anything on linux is a minute subset of 'average joe' or 'joe bloggs' if you like.

"joe average will look at the ease of installation of MSOffice and the installation lacks of OpenOffice.org* and will say, "So what? Why change?"

I would imagine that anyone comparing the ease of installation of MS Office to the installation of OpenOffice.org on Linux is in fact an imbecile and thinion is inconsequential.

I have OfficeXP and I find it to have an excessive amount of bugs and do things in an undesired mannor more often than I like.

So I tried OO.org and find it to mimic and(or) build on the above software in enough ways that I now have OfficeXP uninstalled, it's also a nice ability to run the same office applications in linux and windows.

Installation isn't really the important thing here, if someone can't properly install OO.org then there is little possibility that they should be using such a powerful sweet of office applications.

I would recommend to those who can't install OO.org to try using gnotepad+ for linux or wordpad for windows j/k

On my Windows desktop machine I have uninstalled StarOffice 5.2 and am using the OpenOffice.org software. I am equally happy with Mozilla 1.0 BTW and Netscape 6.2 is gone, so is Opera 6. Unfortunately, I have needed to retain my copy of WordPerfect Suite 2002 to maintain compatibility with company documents. Anyhow, I do not have a single complaint. I will probably go forth and install OpenOffice.org software on user's desktops to give them the ability to more easily work with many documents sent them and to ease the transition from Windows/WordPerfect to Linux/OpenOffice.org. I should be able to use WordPerfect Suite to do mass conversions to the .doc and .xls format, however I really wish .wpd and .wb3 were able to be opened by the OpenOffice.org software. Otherwise, I wish a WordPerfect Suite 2002 license could legally substitute for a WordPerfect Suite 9 for Linux license.

Koffice is an office package. So is OpenOffice. I'm comparing those two.

Well, in case you didn't know, OpenOffice.org is based on StarOffice codebase. And that makes it way older than KOffice. But there was so much more money going into OpenOffice.org and the pre-existing StarOffice. A very bad comparison, I might add.

I dont need MS compability(fileformats) but I need database access and a working scripting language.

Strangely, MS compatiblity is the only reason why I don't use KOffice. And OpenOffice.org doesn't have database access.

Two points that aren't in OpenOffice.org's favour, for anyone who's used to the installation of MSOffice, or suchlike, is that in OpenOffice.org, you are left with the whole process yourself. And unfortunately most people just do what is simplest for them.

Wow, comparing MS Office installation on Windows and OpenOffice.org installation of Linux. If MS Office was available on Linux, it would have the same problems as OpenOffice.org.

I have OfficeXP and I find it to have an excessive amount of bugs and do things in an undesired mannor more often than I like.

The only bug I have found was in Frontpage, that it would show a black image for PNG images outside Preview mode. Certainly a bug because this is one step worse compared to Frontpage 2000. Other than that, I haven't experience any bugs... Oh yeah, the voice dictating feature. It is terrible, for accents other than American (But then, I found OpenOffice.org Writer terrible for HTML, and there isn't any voice dictating feature for OpenOffice.org)

On my Windows desktop machine I have uninstalled StarOffice 5.2 and am using the OpenOffice.org software.

Good, comparing the old with the new!

I am equally happy with Mozilla 1.0 BTW and Netscape 6.2 is gone, so is Opera 6.

And again!

I have needed to retain my copy of WordPerfect Suite 2002 to maintain compatibility with company documents.

Maybe if you hae just spend that money on StarOffice 6.0, which is essentially OpenOffice.org with some extra features; including WP Office compatiblity.

Otherwise, I wish a WordPerfect Suite 2002 license could legally substitute for a WordPerfect Suite 9 for Linux license.

Corel had already stopped sales and production of the Linux version, and there would be any support if you get it anyway. There is a free download of WordPerfect 8 or 9, but it doesn't come with the applications and extra features WP Office comes with.

Try it ..
I actually use it home, instead of M$ Office XP, and the only thing I miss is a better spellC.
The drawer _can_ save to .jpg, but Gimp and PhotoShop is for images and should not be compared to draw. Also its slower than office most of the times, (starting up, that is) but office loads some stuff in mem. when starting windows, and the quick-start helps.

ØS

I actually use it home, instead of M$ Office XP, and the only thing I miss is a better spellC.
The drawer _can_ save to .jpg, but Gimp and PhotoShop is for images and should not be compared to draw. Also its slower than office most of the times, (starting up, that is) but office loads some stuff in mem. when starting windows, and the quick-start helps.

By default, MS Office doesn't load up in the memory. MS Office has the advantage over OpenOffice.org because it uses standard Windows components, instead of custom ones made by OpenOffice.org. That standard Windows components can be used by OpenOffice.org, but they didn't to ease porting. Also, another reason was to have a standard consitent UI across platforms (but anyway, just like Office not having a standard Windows UI, OpenOffice.org isn't forced to use the standard UI if it uses Win32 extensively for the Windows version; and still have a cross platform consitency). (BTW, it has been said that Office uses two secret APIs in which Code Weavers found out; but I doubt just because of two APIs performance is greatly increase. Also, the people making the claims failed to prove it)

OO like television. You can see nice TV free of charge, but you'll have an ad. But you can a spent a money, and you'll see just clear TV.
If you are a part of 1% (or near) power user - welcome to pay money to M$. But if just what you need - it's a word editor plus some simplest calculation at table editor - OO is good choice for you.
Of course, if you like to buy full-equipped G-Mercedes that will be used just for driving to next door, than very expensive and stupid Office - for you