Hath anyone experience with OpenOffice?

Post #38,114 by acagle 5/9/02 4:12:04 PM Reply	Hath anyone experience with OpenOffice? Is there a thread somewhere I should know about? I just downloaded 1.0 and I'm kinda likin' it so far.
Post #38,124 by tseliot 5/9/02 4:45:12 PM Reply	Talked about a couple times General consensus: we like it on Unix and Winders. It's geeting lots of good reviews, better than StarOffice --------------------------------- Many fears are born of stupidity and ignorance - Which you should be feeding with rumour and generalisation. BOfH, 2002 "Episode" 10
Post #38,166 by bepatient 5/9/02 8:28:54 PM Reply	Re: Hath anyone experience with OpenOffice? Well so far I like more that SO 5.2. I have SO 6 beta on the laptop though...and it could very well just be that I'm somewhat used to StarOffice...but I like SO 6 a little more...but for all intents and purposes...SO6 and OO1 are damn near the same...except OO continues to be O and also free. You were born...and so you're free...so Happy Birthday! _{Laurie Anderson} [link\|mailto:bepatient@aol.com\|BePatient]
Post #38,208 by tjsinclair 5/10/02 10:19:32 AM Reply	Can't wait for it to be ported to OS X... Tom Sinclair "Subverting Young Minds Since 03/13/2000"
Post #38,221 by Yendor 5/10/02 11:44:13 AM Reply	Aye I have SO5.2 at home, used to use SO6.0 at work, and now have OO 641beta at work. Haven't bothered to upgrade to OO1.0 at work. Prefer OO as it's smaller and faster than SO, which is just a bear. Can't really tell a difference in features between OO and SO, really, though. -YendorMike Real programmers use "vi a.out".
Post #38,230 by pwhysall 5/10/02 12:36:54 PM Reply	OpenOffice 1.0 Killa Feecha (On Linux, anyhow) File->Print Tick "To file", click OK. In the file save dialogue box, choose "PDF" as file type. Peter [link\|http://www.debian.org\|Shill For Hire] [link\|http://www.kuro5hin.org\|There is no K5 Cabal]
Post #38,233 by acagle 5/10/02 12:57:12 PM Reply	Re: OpenOffice 1.0 Killa Feecha (On Linux, anyhow) Oh man. . . .that would be way cool. I like it so far. The toolbars are a little more cluttered than I usually like, and I haven't figured out how to modify them yet. WordPro/AmiPro is my fave design in that regard. So far, almost everything I've tried to do has been pretty straightforward to accomplish, or at least easy to find how to do in Help. This was one of the BEST things about AmiPro and one of the almost-worst things about WordPro. It might have had one lil' bug so far. I kept getting multiple cursor lines yesterday at work, but it never happened at home and hasn't been doing it today either. I think I'm going to try using it to modify my dissertation to book form. Columns, and lots of figures and tables. That should give it a good workout.
Post #38,286 by Ashton 5/10/02 6:34:08 PM Reply	If you do that - I have a friend who'd be dying to know if it's feasible, so any report will be welcomed! Ashton who hopes that the Linux-version ain't too superior to the toy-OS one (?)
Post #44,384 by wharris2 7/3/02 3:11:37 PM Reply	Quit feeding me nostalgia I loved Ami Pro. Famous last RPG quotes: "I'll just shoot this fireball down the dungeon passageway..."
Post #38,298 by kmself 5/11/02 12:05:10 AM Reply	Not happenin' on Windows I've got XP running under VMWare here. It's nice to be able to swat the damned thing. OO offers no print to file as PDF option here. I wung it and tried giving it a ".pdf" extension to see if it had brains but no guts or glory, no dice. Pity, as that would be an awesome feature here. Otherwise, it seems pretty nice. I've minimized the Footprint of the Evil One by forgoing the Brand X office suite. Got me OO, AbiWord, Mozilla, and K-Meleon (latter's a disappointment -- even Mozilla's better, and K-Meleon's way, way behind Galeon's charms). Natch, also Cygwin, TightVNC (though I haven't tunneled in to my virutual system from Linux yet, just wait though ;-), and RAdmin (not having to walk to another system to provide remote support is really nice). Also GSView and AFPL Ghostscript, natch. They don't do as nice a job on PDFs though as xpdf does under Debian. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] [link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|[link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/]] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand? Keep software free. Oppose the CBDTPA. Kill S.2048 dead. [link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|[link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|http://www.eff.org/...a_alert.html]]`
Post #38,397 by tonytib 5/12/02 8:37:10 PM Reply	I'll have to check out TightVNC and the VNC/TightVNC settings since although performance is acceptable (over 100BaseT), I'd still like more speed. Tony
Post #38,400 by kmself 5/12/02 9:18:56 PM Reply	Inflection points TightVNC offers the following enchancements over vanilla VNC: JPG compression -- you can specify levels of compression. Using RAdmin, it appears that it is setting this level automatically depending on the perceived network speed. Local connections tend to have pretty good graphics presentation, while remote sites clearly have a lot of simplification going on. Plain backgrounds/decorations render far better. Map mouse clicks, not movement. How precisely this works I'm not sure as the remote site sees mouse movements, but locally, the mouse is being echoed, er, locally. The feedback lag of having to display a remote tracking of the mouse under VNC is a killer. Makes for much better precision of movement. Otherwise, the products are pretty similar, but the enchancements are significant. `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] [link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|[link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/]] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand? Keep software free. Oppose the CBDTPA. Kill S.2048 dead. [link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|[link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|http://www.eff.org/...a_alert.html]]`
Post #38,399 by folkert 5/12/02 9:10:08 PM Reply	Re: OpenOffice 1.0 Killa Feecha (On Linux, anyhow) Well, it actually appears to be a KDE feature. As I can print to PDF from most apps that use the KDE envoirpnment. In KDE 3, The Configurator has options to define the default printing... well, "Print as PDF" is an option. Dunno, if we can in GNOME... haven't looked. Been to enthralled with KDE as of late. KDE 3 just feels... well umm... gosh... better. Can't quite put my finger on it, it just IS better, no quantitative reasoning. `greg, curley95@attbi.com -- REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!`
Post #38,464 by acagle 5/13/02 11:59:55 AM Reply	What about file sizes? Apparently, OO saves in XML format. I'm a mite concerned that a Word file takes up almost 700k, while the same document imported and then saved in OO format takes up only about 200k. I suppose I expect a certain amount of bloat and crap from an MS application, but it seems a rather radical difference.
Post #38,516 by kmself 5/13/02 7:03:40 PM Reply	That sounds about right Try the same file saved as: .DOC .RTF .TXT .HTML .SDW (StarOffice binary) .SDX (OpenOffice XML) My results on a one-page document: `22k foo.sdw 19k foo.doc 9.0k foo.rtf 8.0k foo.sxw 7.0k foo.html 4.0k foo.txt` `-- Karsten M. Self [link\|mailto:kmself@ix.netcom.com\|kmself@ix.netcom.com] [link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|[link\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/\|http://kmself.home.netcom.com/]] What part of "gestalt" don't you understand? Keep software free. Oppose the CBDTPA. Kill S.2048 dead. [link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|[link\|http://www.eff.org/alerts/20020322_eff_cbdtpa_alert.html\|http://www.eff.org/...a_alert.html]]`
Post #38,520 by folkert 5/13/02 7:52:32 PM Reply	Take a look here... [link\|http://home.attbi.com/~greg.folkert\|My Resume Page] You'll notice that same thing... These files all were from the same source, all saved from OO. `Format Bytes Filename OpenPDF 6,131 gfolkert.pdf HTML 9,368 gfolkert.html OpenOffice1 10,420 gfolkert.sxw AdobePDF 12,660 gfolkert.adb.pdf RichText 18,928 gfolkert.rtf MSWord 27,648 gfolkert.doc StarOffice5 36,864 gfolkert.sdw PostScript 45,781 gfolkert.ps` What surprises me most, is the PDF versions. `greg, curley95@attbi.com -- REMEMBER ED CURRY!!!`
Post #39,280 by acagle 5/20/02 12:36:11 PM Reply	'Nother bizarre happenstance. The original Word 97 document I'm working with has been about 680k. Yesterday, I worked on it for a bit, started to save it to a floppy so I could bring it in to work, and lo and behold, it is 1.18MB! WTF?-1.0. So I open it here at work, type in a space, and then save it. Back down to 680k. WTF?-2.1. This is not comforting to me. BTW, I think I need to bag using OpenOffice on this one. It's causing too many weird things to happen. Like a page ending about 2/3 of the way down and defying all attempts to make it do otherwise.
Post #39,366 by static 5/21/02 3:09:27 AM Reply	Fast Save? For a few versions of Word, Fast Save defaulted On in the options. This was a problem for several reasons. First, by adding changes to the end of the file, it made documents inordinately larger than necessary whilst not saving a great deal of time saving them. Secondly, it made the document format more fragile than necessary. Thirdly, it meant deleted text was still present in the file! This was fuel for a number of embarrassing episodes in the last decade. And lastly, the extra complexity to the format meant it took anti-virus vendors longer than they liked to be able to clean documents of macro virii.. In short, Fast Save was one of Microsoft's silent fiascos. Fortunately, more recent versions seem to default it to Off, but the option is still offered. Wade. "All around me are nothing but fakes Come with me on the biggest fake of all!"
Post #39,367 by Ashton 5/21/02 4:33:21 AM Reply	That suppurating POS still lives? Chris <<< \ufffdbersoft Alert I recall that in Word6, and the immediate tip to NEVER leave it on.. and you think it defaults to on, in some cases? Damn.. I rarely have to use it, and never 97 - so I also forgot about it. Have to add to reminders list then, for others. I've forgotten what mischief it caused initially before I asked around, but the deleted-text part is bad enough (along with the included personal spyware S/N). And those bastards never got around to either fixing or removing it ?! I can hear their tiny cast-nylon brain gears squeaking now: Gosh if we removed it, someone might think we made a mistake - better leave it in and let helpdesk handle it (or... the Other Help Desk\ufffd work it into a week's worth of acid barbs with Clippy ??) Somebody: Please Roast the #%&$ to about 8000\ufffd K <<< Ashton another pin in the Billy Doll - a rusty one from the stable.
Post #38,818 by acagle 5/15/02 3:08:35 PM Reply	Updates. Well, I had a couple of problems (seem like bugs) and started back with Word again, but then Word totally crashed a lost a lot of edits so I figured "Can't be any worse than this crap" so I'm back with OO. Loads slow on startup, and takes a while to load files. But: This seems to be due to it actually loading the entire file before displaying anything. Word would "load" a large file quickly, but then to flip to any particular page I'd have to go into Print Preview or something so it could paginate everything properly. I tried plopping a spreadsheet into an OO Writer doc this morning and it seemed to go off without a hitch. A JPG graphic also seemed to work as advertised, too. There is one thing that has defied explanation so far: setting the default font size. I can get the info for the actual font but the font size doesn't show up in that window. Changing the toolbar icons is also eluding me at the moment. Still, bloody good job. I could see places replacing Word with this easily.
Post #39,034 by acagle 5/17/02 1:37:21 PM 5/17/02 1:38:06 PM Reply	And why the F*$#. . . . . Does everything imported from Word 97 drop half the hyphens???? This has happened when I imported stuff from Word into WordPro and OO. Really gave me the heeby-jeebies once, too, as I had a range of numbers in the original ("4-5") and when I imported it, it became "45". Sheesh. I spent a couple of hours having fits because a "45" instead of "4-5" totally put the kabosh on a bunch of my arguments. Edited by acagle May 17, 2002, 01:38:06 PM EDT Expand All History
Post #39,077 by Ashton 5/17/02 4:57:37 PM Reply	Naive suggestion (?) Turn off 'soft hyphens' in Word? Or use whatever is that cockamamie command for "no break space" which signals that at end of a line, this expression may not be broken-up (?) HTH, Ashton Yabut.. what about all the other Wordbloat gotchas? and encrypted machine and User ID and.. 5400 bytes in Word6 for "the quick brown fox ..." (Maybe up to 10K in 97?)
Post #39,085 by acagle 5/17/02 5:53:07 PM Reply	I thought of that. But many of them (most? all? I wonder. . . .) are hard hyphens inserted directly by me. I know this because most of the offenders were irregular Egyptian names that wouldn't hyphenate. In other news, I discovered that OO stores stuff in Zip format, which can explain some of the size issues from earlier. BTW, are XML-formatted documents universally readable? This is confusing me.
Post #40,416 by inthane-chan 5/29/02 7:55:49 PM Reply	Depends. If your program knows how to read the XML format used by Open Office, then you're in the money. InThane - Now running Ashton rev 2.0
Post #40,531 by tseliot 5/30/02 11:44:17 AM Reply	Killa Feecha #2 Killer Feature #2 for you ESL folks... You can actually mix alignments within a paragraph! MS Word requires a carriage-return to change the section justification (i.e. - left, center, right) but OO allows you to do it with a tab (ASCII 9) character. This is a killa feecha for marginal notes, witness my Henry V, available in either OpenOffice [link\|http://www.semishake.org/Texts/HenryV/HenryV.sxw\|SXW] format (85 K), or a [link\|http://www.semishake.org/Texts/HenryV/HenryV.pdf\|PDF] (735 K) made from that document (if you don't already have OO). I can actually right-justify the marginal notes without a separate column! Amazing. --------------------------------- Many fears are born of stupidity and ignorance - Which you should be feeding with rumour and generalisation. BOfH, 2002 "Episode" 10
Post #40,539 by drewk 5/30/02 12:34:29 PM Reply	That's doable in Word You just have to set a right-aligned tab. Probably not as easy as changing alignment, but it can be done. === Microsoft offers them the one thing most business people will pay any price for - the ability to say "we had no choice - everyone's doing it that way." -- [link\|http://z.iwethey.org/forums/render/content/show?contentid=38978\|Andrew Grygus]
Post #40,727 by tseliot 5/31/02 1:04:34 PM Reply	Ah, thanks for the tip! --------------------------------- Many fears are born of stupidity and ignorance - Which you should be feeding with rumour and generalisation. BOfH, 2002 "Episode" 10

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