May 21st, 2006 Benjamin Horst
On his blog PlexNex, Sam Hiser asks What Does the Plugin Accomplish for Organizations?
He writes:
“Among the sappers of office-worker productivity is MS Office Version Madness, which describes the document incompatibilities arising from Microsoft’s customary changes to its document file format recipes in Word 6.0, Office 95, 97, 2000 and XP which make documents inaccessible with various permutations of office suite versions and make everybody enormously frustrated and which also harm productivity in just about every office setting. (I needn’t go into it because the experience is universal among this white-collar PC-using audience; however, I might add that the end of Version Madness is also a very attractive prospect to individual PC users at home, school or SoHo.)
The Plugin ends Version Madness because it provides a single, unified file format in which all modern versions of MS Office can work — file conversions going both ways — as well as handles repeated round tripping smoothly.
For state governments, like The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which was the very first organization to put out a call to hear if any such Plugin might exist, the move to the open standard OpenDocument Format is intelligent and wise. The strong case for ODF in the document-centric business processes of regional, state & municipal government will eventually be universally obvious.”
Posted in ODF | Comments Off on Sam Hiser: “What Does the [ODF] Plugin Accomplish for Organizations?”
May 18th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Rene Agredano of the Times-Standard writes “Goodbye, Microsoft Office, Hello OpenOffice.”
Solveig Haugland answers a series of questions on using various OpenOffice features in “Bridging the Gap Between Office and OpenOffice.”
Finally, CNET reports “ISO approval ‘unlikely for Microsoft Open XML’.”
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Three OpenOffice Links du Jour
May 17th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
InfoWorld announces that 125 million new users will gain ODF compatibility in “IBM to adopt ODF for Lotus Notes.”
The author, Ephraim Schwartz, writes that Lotus Notes’ next release “will include an ODF-compatible version of OpenOffice embedded in the Notes e-mail application. It will include word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications, giving users the ability to create, edit, and save documents natively in ODF.”
“Code-named Hannover, the new Notes version will be available with the productivity editors included to all Notes users who are current on software maintenance contacts. IBM estimates that number at 125 million users.”
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on 125 Million New ODF Users with Lotus Notes
May 15th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
On the Standards Blog, Andy Updegrove writes “The Evolving ODF Environment Part II: Spotlight on OpenOffice.”
I think the concept behind this article, and the series it’s part of, is really clever and very important:
“Just over a week ago, I posted the first of what I hope will be a complete set of interviews with the developers of the major open source and proprietary software suites that implement ODF. That Interview was with KDE’s Inge Wallin, and addressed the KOffice suite – one of the two best known open source implementations of ODF. Today, it’s the turn of OpenOffice – the other well-known open source implementation of ODF, and the most implemented of all software packages that support ODF. The interview that follows is with Louis Suarez-Potts, OpenOffice’s Community Manager, and John McCreesh, Marketing Co-Lead.”
“The purpose of this series of interviews is to provide a comparative picture of the evolving ODF landscape, highlighting the strengths (and weaknesses) of each current implementation, so that potential users can judge which alternative is right for them. At the same time, it will illustrate the fact that a standard such as ODF, far from limiting innovation, can instead enable a rich set of products that distinguish themselves with additional features to attract users to their particular flavor of the same software tool.”
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Andy Updegrove Interviews OpenOffice Team Members
May 9th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
The Linux Box has created a handful of Open Source Presentation Templates that Will Make Proprietary Office Suites Jealous.
They are distributed as ODFs (specifically, “.otp” files), and some of them also have freely-shareable fonts that you can download to go with them. I particularly like “Chalkboard” and “Letterpress.”
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
May 8th, 2006 Benjamin Horst
Linux-Watch reports on the new ODF Plugin for MS Office, allowing MSO to read and write ODF files as if it were native. Widespread distribution as a part of the Google Pack is being explored.
The original news comes from Groklaw, where PJ writes “OpenDocument Foundation to MA: We Have a Plugin.”
Gary Edwards of the OpenDocument Foundation tells Groklaw: “The OpenDocument Foundation has notified the Massachusetts ITD that we have completed testing on an ODF Plugin for all versions of MS Office dating back to MS Office 97. The ODF Plugin installs on the file menu as a natural and transparent part of the open, save, and save as sequences. As far as end users and other application add-ons are concerned, ODF plugin renders ODF documents as if it were native to MS Office.”
“The testing has been extensive and thorough. As far as we can tell there isn’t a problem, even with Accessibility add ons, which as you know is a major concern for Massachusetts.”
Elsewhere on the web, we’ve got some more reports and discussions on the subject:
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on ODF Plugin for MS Office