[ILUG] Star Office

[Kevin Philp]

You can set the options in OpenOffice to use any format as the default. So you 
can default to MS Office if you wish. Once again its depends on your usage, 
in our office context we default to OpenOffice Format which in itself is 
being superceded by the new Open Document Format. 

Obsolete formats is one nightmare we hope to avoid by using OpenOffice...I 
remember the transition from Harvard Graphics (The standard of its day) to 
Powerpoint being a disaster and every presentation needed to be checked and 
edited for formatting errors. I also remember there being no choice, the 
company just rolled out the new software and everyone had to get on with the 
job with the new software (such are multinationals). Lotus spreadsheet and 
Wordperfect all died a similar death.

I downloaded the newest beta last night and tried it this morning on some of 
our most troublesome powerpoint presentations and I was impressed with the 
import quality, it seems to be greatly improved.

Kevin.


On Thursday 2 June 2005 01:18, Ciaran Costelloe wrote:
"Paul Jakma" <paul at clubi.ie> wrote:
> > I think it was build 1.9.79.  I should also have mentioned that I
> > was talking about it on Windows rather than Linux.
>
> Ok - AFAIK there's no difference. (The OO I was talking about was
> without much doubt on Solaris ;) ).

At least some of the problems looked Windows-specific, particularly some
of the text getting pushed off the slide: this only happened when
running the presentation, not when displaying all the slides when
editing.  That's why I wanted to build OO2 on Windows rather than Linux.

> To be honest, a lot of this is simply due to cruddiness of powerpoint
> format. Not even MS seem to have much clue about their own file
> formats.

The problem from the point of view of user acceptance is that different
versions of Powerpoint seem to have no problem preserving compatibility
of settings like timings.  MS may not publish much, but having had to
hack their Excel spreadsheets to programmatically extract data that I
needed for an application I wrote (in Kylix, to get this back on-topic!),
they seem to be reasonably consistent across versions - I don't think
this is an impossible obstacle for OO.

> From a long term POV, it'd be good if users could be weaned off
> their crack. The OO format for example is supported quite well by at
> least one 3rd party tool (OO presentation viewer - cant remember the
> name). Difficult task though.

I agree, sort of.  OO2 is very impressive compared to previous versions:
it looks really good, and I don't believe there is any issue with user
acceptance from that point of view (when everyone was using Office 97,
which I consider to be the point that Office took off, users had no
problems because everyone was on the same version - with all the
releases since then, the MS users have been fragmented into different
versions, causing version incompatibilities and different UIs, and the
good-looking OO2 fits fine into that mix).  OO2 is nearly there, the
number of incompatibilities are relatively few.

The reason I say "sort of" is that at this stage, I think OO may be
better off biting the bullet and using the MS file formats as their
native formats, and treating the OO formats as an import/export file
format.  OO2 is that close.

As for me & Flogas, I don't want to annoy the remaining MS users by
pushing OO versions that are nearly, but not quite, there.  I will wait
till OO gets there, which I don't think has to be that long away.

Ciaran