Office Archive

Although Microsoft's Office 2004 won't be on store shelves until the middle of this year, MacWorld got a sneak peek at its new features. And these additions -- from a command center for related correspondence, calendars, and files, to an audio recorder that gives your typing fingers a rest -- made quite an impression.

OpenOffice.org 1.1.1b was released not too long ago, so FlexBeta decided to take it for a spin and see how well it competed against MS Office 2003.

If all goes well, this summer I'll be building a new house. I've owned a few houses before, some of them built in the 1920s and 30s, and full of all the charm and quirks of an old house, and a couple that were pretty new, with the lack of craftsmanship and imagination that's typical in most new construction in the USA today. But this time I'm building a custom home, just to my specifications, so I can have whatever features I want, limited only by my imagination (and budget). I'd like to integrate some home automation features into the house, and include wiring for future expansion.

As I have recently discovered, with the right applications, ditching the GUI and using the console exclusively can be a pleasure. By knowing which console applications will suit your needs the best you can achieve efficiency in a console environment that rivals that of a GUI. With well designed ncurses interfaces many console applications are extremely usable and working in a console environment can not only free up precious resources it can also provide several other benefits that will be discussed later in this article.

When you can write nearly perfect versions of PacMan and Space Invaders in your favorite productivity application, you know it's crossed the boundary. Of course, treating cells like pixels and implementing the game by changing the background colors probably wasn't what the Excel developers had in mind, but frankly, that's not much different than what the guys writing the original games had to deal with.

"Code Reading: An Open Source Perspective", by Diomidis Spinellis, is a new kind of book. It's a foray into a domain normally left untouched by Computer Science texts and exemplifies yet another positive contribution from the Open Source movement. Simply put, Code Reading is a detailed discussion of the techniques required to read and maintain both good and bad code. As an interesting twist, the author draws on projects from the Open Source world to provide examples, both good and bad.

This version supports all known versions of glibc, including the new Native Posix Thread Library (NPTL) interface. This represents a major technical advance for Wine, as glibc instability has been a problem throughout 2003. Support for the Dreamweaver MX Studio was added. Dynamic loading of OpenGL is provided, which allows a much greater range of unsupported applications to run, especially games such as Half-Life. Miscellaneous bugfixes were made for Microsoft Office, Quicken, Visio, and Lotus Notes.

But is anyone ready to move in? Migration to Office System--the latest version of Microsoft's widely used Office package--is expected to be slow, given the software's complexity. Still, backers from SAP to the U.S. Postal Service are ready for the housewarming.

In the spark of the upcoming MS Office, OO.o, KOffice and the recent release of Gnome Office 1.0, Gobe has released a new demo version to their office suite, Gobe Productive, version 3.0.4. However purchasers of the full version haven't seen the actual free upgrade to 3.0.4 from 3.0.3, which fixes a number of bugs (this update has apparently stack in testing for more than a year).

On July 15, 2003 the Scribus project had a milestone release. They released Scribus 1.0. I have used Scribus both personally and professionally since the early development times. 8.0 was when I first used it. 1.0 came with so many bug fixes and has become so refined I decided to do a review of it.

After two years of work, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) is ready for download by all Mac OS X users. With anti-aliased fonts, to name but one feature, this Golden Master satisfies the needs of professionals and individuals wanting a free, complete, and open-source office suite able to operate in an office environment alongside Windows, Linux, and Solaris machines. Elsewhere, AbiWord 2.0 Beta 1 was released.

Microsoft has made the Office System Beta 2 Technical Refresh available to its 15,000 technical beta testers. The final product is still on track to be completed this summer and will be available to customers later this year.

"Mirror, mirror on the wall/ Who's the prettiest suite of them all?" Suddenly it seems, the fierce contests to find the most popular computer `Office suite' ? a combo-pack of softwares to perform common tasks like word processing, spread sheeting, presentation and e-mailing ? are to be replayed all over again, a decade after the first shakeout. Read the article at The Hindu. In other office news, Gobe now sells GobeProductive for a low price, while it seems that the new AppleWorks 6.2.7 is available for purchasing. Update: Native Abiword port for Mac OS X abandoned.

ActiveWin features a preview article of the upcoming MS Office 2003.