OpenOffice.org

Dec 28, 2008

Measuring the true success of OpenOffice.org

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What is success ?
Is success measured in downloads, or up-loads ? are bugs filed as good as bugs fixed ? are volunteer marketers as valuable as volunteer developers ? If we have lots of bugs filed and lots of volunteer management material is that success ? is the pace of change important ? Does successful [...]


Dec 17, 2008

Discovering the New Features of OpenOffice.org 3.0

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Just after our how-to series on OpenOffice.org (OOo) wrapped up, OOo 3.0 was officially released–more specifically, on Oct 13, 2008. Most of the tips and tricks covered in the series, based on version 2.4, will still apply. Though there’s a big jump in the version number, there’s not a huge difference in the office suite. [...]


Dec 8, 2008

A Better Office .docx Converter

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There’s plenty of ways to convert Microsoft Office 2007 file formats (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) to OpenOffice.org. Now OpenOffice.org 3.0 imports these Office OpenXML files natively, but natively doesn’t mean a fluent translation.
Any translation is subject to imperfections. For OpenOffice.org 3.0, it is the first public release of the Office 2007 converters. Overall, it is very [...]


Dec 5, 2008

Go-OO: The best office suite you never knew you used

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If you run Ubuntu, openSUSE, Debian, or Mandriva, among other distributions, then whenever you run OpenOffice.org you don’t run the “official” version, but rather Go-OO, an office suite based on the OpenOffice.org source code. Go-OO includes enhancements and functions that haven’t been accepted by Sun, and that may never be, because of licensing, business, or [...]


Dec 4, 2008

OpenOffice’s UI will be getting a refurb

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In a long-term project, the OpenOffice team wants to thoroughly rework the free office software’s user interface. This was already widely expected to happen with version 3.0, which no longer looks contemporary in many users’ eyes. In addition, the office suite’s menus have become so cluttered and badly structured that users find it impossible to [...]


Dec 2, 2008

OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 05 - Issue 17 - 11/2008

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OPENOFFICE.ORG NEWSLETTER
Volume 05 - Issue 17 - 11/2008
Please send news clippings to:
dev@marketing.openoffice.org
Contents
1. Announcements
================
* OpenOffice.org Achieves Ten Million Downloads at the End of its Beijing Conference.
2. Success Stories
==================
* A breakthrough in curriculum change for 201 m students
3. Featured News
================
* The Register: Sun pimps out OpenOffice as Microsoft ‘clarifies’ Office for web
* FACIL: 2008 Elections [...]


Nov 27, 2008

Announcing Spanish User Forum

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OpenOffice.org Users’ Community Forum celebrates first anniversary with launch of its newest site, “Foro oficial de la comunidad”
The Spanish language web forum opened to the public on November 21, 2008 with Alexandro Colorado and Richard Holt as the forum administrators. Alexandro states that: “The OpenOffice.org Spanish project is proud to announce [...]


Nov 24, 2008

DataForm adds efficient input to OpenOffice.org Calc

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Spreadsheets might be called databases for the timid, since they’re more user-friendly than databases and do a good job working with limited amounts of data. Some tools for databases can work well with spreadsheets too. Take for instance DataForm, a new OpenOffice.org Calc extension that provides a form-like interface designed to make entering and finding [...]


Nov 11, 2008

Go-oo: A Lighter, Faster OpenOffice, With Extras

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One of the main complaints about the open source OpenOffice.org suite of productivity applications is that the applications are slow compared to the sleeker standalone alternatives, and even slower than the comparable Microsoft Office apps. If you’ve run into this problem, and if you use OpenOffice but occasionally run into compatibility problems in sharing files [...]


Nov 11, 2008

OpenOffice 3.0 Downloads Reach 10 Million

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At the 6th Annual OpenOffice.org Convention in Peking November 5-7, the project could celebrate a new milestone in their 3.0 release: downloads of their office package have reached 10 million.
The OpenOffice team released their product less than a month ago on October 13 and the download count just two days later was already at three [...]


Nov 11, 2008

Sun Presenter Console extension is useful but undocumented

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Currently in late beta, the Sun Presenter Console (SPC) is Sun Microsystems’ latest extension for OpenOffice.org and StarOffice. Other extensions from Sun in the last year, such as the Sun PDF Import Extension, Sun Presentation Minimizer, and Sun Weblog Publisher, have sometimes been lacking in design and sometimes buggy, but all of them are so [...]


Nov 10, 2008

OpenOffice.org Achieves Ten Million Downloads at the End of its Beijing

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OpenOffice.org Achieves Ten Million Downloads at the End of its Beijing Conference
Early on Sunday morning, the OpenOffice.org Community passed the ten million downloads mark for the latest version of its software, just four weeks after the launch on October 13th. The week also marked the first time the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference [...]


Nov 8, 2008

Where to find royalty-free cliparts for OpenOffice.org?

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Open source office suite needs some decent open and royalty-free cliparts. This tutorial presents valuable clipart repositories and an extension which enables direct downloading of graphics into the OpenOffice.org documents.
Direct downloading of cliparts is possible thanks to Clker.com Openoffice.org addon. You will find it here. The Clker.com addon provides integration with clker.com online clipart to [...]


Nov 6, 2008

Tables in OpenOffice.org Impress: New and Unstylish

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Impress Tables are one of the most welcome features in the recently-released OpenOffice.org 3.0. Using them is straightforward, but they have their limitations, and you may miss one or two useful features before you learn your way around their somewhat awkward interface. Many of these limitations and bits of awkwardness are the direct result of [...]


Nov 1, 2008

OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 05 - Issue 16 - 10/2008

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Contents
1. Announcements
================
* Registration opens for the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference
* OO.o 3.0 Final Release available
* Announcing OpenOffice.org 2.4.2
2. Success Stories
==================
* South Africa’s IT agency to migrate to open source in coming year
3. Featured News
================
* eWeek: OpenOffice.org Grows Up
* A Survey of Open Source Surveys
* Treat yourself to a suite alternative: OpenOffice.org 3.0
* OpenOffice Hits 3.0: Can [...]


Oct 29, 2008

OpenOffice 2.4.2 fixes critical vulnerabilities

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The OpenOffice development team has announced the release of version 2.4.2, which fixes two critical security vulnerabilities. According to the security advisories, the vulnerabilities are heap overflows when processing EMF and WMF files, which can be exploited using crafted documents to inject and execute malicious code. All versions prior to 2.4.2 are affected. According to [...]


Oct 26, 2008

OpenOffice 3.0 reviewed

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Nine years after Sun Microsystems bought StarOffice, the resulting OpenOffice.org project is has rolled out its 3.0 release. Enhanced format compatibility and features put it on par with Microsoft Office.
When Sun Microsystems bought the little-known StarOffice productivity suite in 1999, and soon thereafter released the product’s code base as open-source software, it was unclear how [...]


Oct 22, 2008

OpenOffice.org 3.0 scores strong first week

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OpenOffice.org 3.0 was downloaded 3 million times in its first week, with about 80 percent of the downloads by Windows users, an official with the group said in a blog post on Monday.
The successful introduction of the open source office suite came despite the group’s download servers being temporarily overwhelmed by demand for the new [...]


Oct 22, 2008

Why OpenOffice.org Failed - and What to Do About It (ComputerWorld UK)

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Glyn Moody has an article in ComputerWorld UK which is, in essence, a summary of a lengthy study in First Monday on why a Belgian agency chose not to switch to OpenOffice.org. “In other words, the principal reason OpenOffice.org was not adopted was Microsoft lock-in. The difficulty of converting macros, and the use of customised [...]


Oct 15, 2008

Review of final OpenOffice 3: Why buy Microsoft Office?

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The final version of OpenOffice 3 is out today, and if you’re looking to save yourself plenty of money, download it instead of buying Microsoft Office — you could save yourself hundreds of dollars, and not lose out on many features.
I put the Windows version through its paces, and am about to download the Linux [...]