“I would go so far as to say that a feature complete, high performing and integrated OpenOffice.org is key to the success of the Linux desktop. This importance is key, and I get concerned when I hear that there is a lack of hands. So, what can we all do? How can we help? How can we make OpenOffice.org into the office suite that is not only capable, but has a strong vitality?”
How about rather than attempting to create an open-source clone (or as good as) Microsoft Office, we actually stop and think about what people really want from a piece of office software?
Personally I avoid using Microsoft Office wherever possible since I find it to be bloated and unpredictable, and often irritatingly designed. Unfortunately, I am yet to find anything better for spreadsheets than Excel, so I have to stick with it for that.
As a good example, I feel people should take more notice of things like iWork. Take, for example, Keynote. Apple basically looked at what people actually want from a presentation program and tried to create it. They didn’t just decide to build a replacement for Powerpoint. As a result, I feel that Keynote is much more natural to work with than Powerpoint.
Indeed, one business in my home town runs a large internal Windows network. However, they felt that Keynote offered such a productivity boost over Powerpoint that they actually purchased a few Macs just for running Keynote on.
Now, I am not saying that we should be rushing to recreate the way Keynote and Pages do things (although I am dying for a spreadsheet app that uses iWork’s “Inspector” approach). Instead I am saying we should be looking at better ways of improving the usability of such applications from the start. Don’t try and re-create Word and then improve it. Start afresh.
For those people who need the really advanced functions and features that Microsoft Word is capable of providing, Word is probably what they want, and you’ll have a hard time changing that.
However, there are plenty of people who only use a fraction of the capabilities of Word and would be much better suited to a simpler approach that a fresh, new program could provide.
Yes. Listen to MikeGA.
I’ve never understood why distro vendors prefer OOo to Abiword and Gnumeric that are faster, more usable, and also cross-platform. GNOME Office should be the focus, not OOo.
Distro’s see OpenOffice.org as the jack of all trades; the swiss army knife of document creation.
For me, when I was using FreeBSD with KDE, I always went with KOffice – sure, it wasn’t as featureful as say OpenOffice.org or Microsoft Office, but it did a damn good job none the less – what it did do, it did well.
The interface is bright, colourful and friendly, the menus are logically layed out and the whole suite is a modular; the good part, development is taking its time – only adding the features that people want rather than the developers trying to second guess what the end user wants and then completely miss fires in its execution of the idea.
What about KOffice? It’s a very good office suite too and offers a lot of applications.
And sadly. The idea for the next Office looks a lot more attractive to me: Splitting up the writing, page layout, design, art of the document into totally seperate tasks. It almost looks like it could be a GUI equivalent of what I do in latex; which would be wonderful!
I’d like to see the Word processor transform into something non-WYSIWYG.
You could argue the same for KDE. Except, think about this. Gnome tried new things, XFCE tries new things, Enlightenment is probably the most innovative desktop I’ve seen ever, yet what is used the most? KDE…simply because it is familiar. Users don’t give jack shit about innovation, they want a familiar product. The second you start changing stuff Joe User will not switch. Simple as that. And this is OpenOffice.org’s target market, not people like you.
To be fair, KDE has innovation, but it’s layered on top of a basic interface that many find Windowsy (even there it’s not a copy of Windows but it does borrow ideas from it and doesn’t *actively* try to be different). The innovation is in the things you can do with it rather than the default interface setup.
(disclaimer: not that other desktops don’t have innovation in non-GUI elements too)
You are right. Famillarity is king. After seing the screen shots of Microsoft Office 12, I have very high hopes for OpenOffice.org.
You are right. Famillarity is king. After seing the screen shots of Microsoft Office 12, I have very high hopes for OpenOffice.org.
Yeah, now that everything is out about how Office 12 will look and work, the OpenOffice.org guys can start cloning it.
As I mentioned more than once to OO.o develoeprs, they should have looked at the Lotus Smartsuite interface, not that of Office. Now, guess what MS Office 12 is going to clone…
I’m not normally one to say “I told you so” but OO.o could have been ahead of the game by now.
Fix bugs and code new features. Write documentation and ensure that the Help and API is acessible, discoverable and complete.
Provide Wiki, IRC and web support for users who need help.
Provide beautiful artwork and UI components so OOo looks great to the uninitiated.
If you can’t do any of that, and just having a pseudo-discussion/flamewar on a blog is all youre prepared to contribute, then i’d say just wait until someone else does it and use MS Word in the meantime.
I think people see office software as boring. Mostly because OO.org seems bent on reimplementing Office. It’s not sexy because it’s not innovative and so it doesn’t attract developers.
Of course, innovation wouldn’t attract Joe user to Linux. We’ve already proved that with environments, and other programs. It’s “familiar” that brings them over.
The codebase is huge; perhaps development should be shifted to a more modular or componentized development paradigm? Such an approach might make OO.org’s components more accessible to new developers…which could breath new life and perspective into the project.
Aside from that, I don’t see how OO.org can become more “innovative” per say. OO.org seems, by design, more of an attempt to give Windows users a familiar environment to facilitate a “jump ship” from Microsoft products… or allow them to save a couple hundred dollars on an Office suite at least. It’s doing a decent job on both fronts.
Unrealistic as it may be, I would like to see OO.org be ported to GTK or Qt entirely. My only pet-peeve in the linux/free*nix world are the 30 bazillion toolkit libraries that I need to have installed/running in memory to have a comparable desktop system. Ideally, I’d like to keep it to only 1 heavy-hitter toolkit… but I realize a port of OO.org to any toolkit would take forever and is largely unrealistic. (Yes, i am aware of the Qt/GTK tie-in projects that try to make it look as native as possible…but it doesn’t change what’s going on *behind the curtains*…)
I think that OO.o needs more exposure. Right now, it is a niche market. Not because of the features (which are decent), but because most people haven’t heard of it!
People go to the store and buy MS Office, or click the MS Office upgrade option when ordering from Dell.com. They have used it before, they know it, and everyone sends attachments with files with the .doc and .xls extensions.
I have mentioned OO.o to several colleagues, none of which have everh heard of it. Zero.
With a bigger user base, there will be more usage. More demand, possibly on the likes of Dell to include it as an option (maybe their base option). This will increase the community size and make the product a bit more “mainstream”, though quite likely still the “alternative” office suite.
For most all home users, the features are more than adequate. Get the userbase increased, like Firefox did, and remarkable things will happen. Some may even prefer to upgrade to StarOffice (which would make Sun happy)
Why does Sun have to bear the brunt of the development – why don’t IBM and Red Hat pitch in? It’s all GPL code, right?
Why does Sun have to bear the brunt of the development – why don’t IBM and Red Hat pitch in? It’s all GPL code, right?
Most likely because they have issues with Sun requiring you to assign your copyrights to Sun to commit code to their dev branch, and then Sun turning around and using the code they now own the copyright to in their proprietary Star Office. Remember, Red Hat and IBM compete with Sun. Why give them free code so Sun can do what they want with it, while Sun doesn’t give them the same courtesy?
Novell is heavily involved in OOo development…they just simply have their own development branch seperate from Sun’s and as far as I know Novell doesn’t assign their copyrights to Sun.
FYI, OOo is now under LGPL license since Sun retired SISSL retired license.
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,,1855892,00.asp
For example, OpenOffice.org 2 has a fantastic support for authoring XForms. How isn’t that innovative?
Before they worry about Office 12, maybe they should tackle making the font rendering not look like ass? MAYBE make it so that every word is consistantly rendered instead of the ‘dancing i’ syndrome.
OpenOffice is a huge, monolithic beast with poor performance. It is not good open source software. Nobody wants to hack on it because it’s even more daunting to potential contributors than XFree86 ever was. Worse, it won’t scale well with the advancement of the rest of the open source desktop. It can’t take advantage of the latest UI toolkits and library backends coming down the pipe.
When a developer attempts to solve a problem (poor font rendering for example), he has to reimplement work that is available through other projects. The community overcomes its relative shortage of developers in part through effective use of modularity and code reuse. It’s a shame that the productivity suite of choice for open source desktops doesn’t do the same.
Remove the java dependency.
Related to this. I’ve tried to open/ create macro in Python. This requires java! I do not understand. Why is java a necessary tool for using Python? I’m really confused. Other question: is there some kind of “Python binding”, module?, to generate OO.o documents?
Even though I agree with you that it is somewhat odd that java is required to run python scripts, I would say there is nothing wrong in using java in general. The problem is that there is no good free java implementation. It would be much better to solve that problem than to stop using java in various free software projects.
i think if ‘the community’ spends 3 manyears on Koffice, it would be much more effective than spending 30 manyears on Openoffice.
If KDE has learned one thing, it is that a good framework is important. Gnome recieves more money and paid developers compared to KDE, and has more developers in general – but still KDE not just keeps up, but is generally ahead of Gnome. how? ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’. they don’t accept hacks, things have to be GOOD.
Openoffice is a mess. they should KILL it, or rework it (and i think working on Koffice would be the most efficient way of getting a good Office to Linux).
You should try OOo 2 beta 2. Also read my post about license. It is now time for any developers to participate on OOo 2 beta as OOo staffs needs them.
Speaking about monolith design, I am glad to let you know that you can install Open Office Write alone.
Now that both KOffice and OpenOffice uses Odt file as standard, it is now premature to kill the latter.
Of course, there is place for improvement. Globally, I’m very happy with the OO.o beta2 version. That’s why I’m saying thank you to the OO.o developpers.
ma_d:
“I’d like to see the Word processor transform into something non-WYSIWYG.”
This is an interesting idea. Something, like a “LaTeX” generating OpenDocument (OASIS). But, please, do not blame OO.o developpers for not doing this.
Related to this question. Does anybody know if there is some work on a TEX to OpenDocument converter ? I would not be suprised, if this is already existing. I did not succeed to find infos.
Gnumeric and Kspread are too slow on big spreadsheets. Say 2000 rows by 40 columns. Unusable. For this you have to use Excel or OO.
Kexi is promising, but if you need a database package with scripts, which most people will, its a non-starter. The database part of OO 1.x is unusable for the non-programmer. Spend the money and get Filemaker.
KOffice as a word processor is far more oriented to page layout than almost any other WP package. If that’s what you need, great.
If writing books, neither OO nor MS Word is a sensible tool. Probably not KOffice either. For this, nothing will equal Lyx in terms of stopping the page layout aspects getting in the way of composition.
Fortunately most people don’t write books, so Abiword, OO or MSWord or OO will be almost equally fine. Here the choice is on import ability, and OO seems to lead on that in Open Source.
How to help OO? Start by explaining to people what it is and is not good for. And pray that V2 fixes the database issue.
The reality is, the primary market for an office suite is the business sector. One of the main problems that OpenOffice.org has is comaptibility with the huge numbers of existing files, especially Powerpoint presentations. I think that the importance of using Powerpoint in the business world is very much underestimated by OO.o and other advocates of OSS software for office suite-type tasks.
I would love to switch to Linux for my everyday work. I even set up a Gentoo system and used it for more than two years. Ultimately, it was MS Office compatibility that sent me back to the Windows world.
Just to let you know there are case when it is not possible to import format from old version of MS Office to the new version. Possible issues are causd by bad usage of macros.
statements like this:
“_x_ is key to the success of the Linux desktop.”?
I have found OOo, KOffice, and AbiWord (my favorite), FLwriter, Siag office, all to work exceedingly well. On top of those free ones there’s also: StarOffice (which provides more licenced fonts and other goodies, Hancom office, and thinkfree office.
A product that seems to have died for Linux was Gobe Productive sadly.
What needs work is more collaboration with hardware vendors from the major linux distros and put an end to hardware troubles once and for all. Particularly in the areas of printers, wifi, and getting 100% legal dvd compliance.
There seems to be more office suites for *nix than you can shake a stick at in reality. The trouble is people keep wanting *nix to be windows.
What’s an article about this doing on OSnews anyway? It’s operating system specific really. Slashdot maybe.
templates – yes: birthday cards etc, wizards, whatever to make the use of it simple and get results fast in a few easy steps.
with an API that doesn’t suck.