June 23rd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Erwin Tenhumberg is (sadly) leaving Sun and this may be his last blog post there. It looks like he’s following a good opportunity at another company, and he hopes to continue blogging about open source in some form.
Today, he points out a number of ODF and OpenOffice.org successes, such as a download average in 2008 of 1.2 million copies of OOo per week (with recent weeks averaging closer to 2 million). He also writes:
“In addition, Asus, Acer and HP are now shipping laptops with OpenOffice.org pre-installed, and more and more organizations deploy OpenOffice.org in a large scale. Finally, according to Google file type searches like this one and this one, ODF is still clearly the market leading editable XML document file format. Thus, I’m sure ODF and OpenOffice.org have a bright future!”
All this he reports in the context of an “ODF Workshop” Microsoft will hold at its headquarters in the near future. Skepticism is healthy with Microsoft, but if they implement ODF honestly and completely (with none of their “embrace, extend, extinguish” behavior), this really is the victory bell for the ODF format.
Posted in GNU/Linux, ODF, OLPC, Open Source, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on ODF Victory News Roundup
June 19th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Free Software Magazine collects several years of experience into an article detailing how to Mail Merge in OpenOffice.org.
“In OOo there are lots of different ways to do mail merge. It took some trial-and-error to find the best methods for us, and that is what I will be describing here. The first choice to make is database format… I ran across a suggestion to use dBASE files, which have been the perfect solution.”
While writing the letter, you’ll enter variables that are custom-filled for each recipient.
“You may either type your entire letter first and then add the fields to be merged, or you may add the fields as you go. There are (at least) two ways to add fields. Using View→Data Sources, you may click on a column header (field name) and drag it to the letter in the spot where you want the field… The other method is to place your cursor where you want the field, and go to Insert→Fields→Other…, which opens the Fields dialog box (see figure 2). Go to the Database tab, and click on “Mail merge fields” on the left, then open up your table on the right and select the desired field.”
The second page in the article covers using mail merge to print envelopes, a particularly tricky but important task.
The third page covers printing labels from a mail merge, which is what I use mail merge for most frequently.
Posted in Free Culture, How-to, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
June 18th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Lotus Symphony is getting great reviews, including CRN’s “Symphony Sings as Office Clone.”
They found it preferable, in their review, to OpenOffice.org:
“The Test Center found Symphony a snap to use, and switching to Symphony after years of using Microsoft Office was painless. While OpenOffice was a nice alternative, Symphony looks and works much more elegantly while keeping the free price tag.”
A Mac version is not yet available, but is promised later this summer, and Symphony 2.0 (unclear when it is planned for release) will “update the base code engine and also include more OpenOffice.org features, such as an equation editor, database software, and a drawing program.”
Symphony’s arrival on the scene makes a good complement (and friendly competitor) to OpenOffice. It helps legitimize the idea of using ODF as a format for interoperability, and it helps sell ODF to enterprises. It’s also been imaginative in testing new user interface ideas, which will help move the industry forward much more than MS Office 2007’s dubious new choices.
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Lotus Symphony: A Rave Review
June 17th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
In response to Steve Ballmer’s prognostication that newspapers will be dead in less than 10 years, Bill Virgin of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer counters with a prediction that Microsoft will be dead in 10 years.
Ballmer’s original statement was: “There will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network,” Steve Ballmer told The Washington Post. “There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form.”
Bill Virgin finds such sweeping statements tiresome, and strikes back, writing “A far more compelling and convincing business case can be built to support the view that Microsoft will be kaput in 10 years than to expect the extinction of the American newspaper in a decade.”
He elaborates: “Even the core business could wind up being a bit shaky. Windows still dominates in personal-computer operating systems, but even Microsoft isn’t thrilled with Vista; Apple is slowly moving from a few niches to greater acceptance in the corporate world and Linux or something similar could grab more market share.” And their forays into other businesses have been mostly unsuccessful, requiring significant subsidies to continue operating.
In short, it seems more and more likely that Microsoft’s influence will wane and perhaps even disappear, so Bill Virgin’s prediction isn’t all that crazy at all. And he doesn’t even mention OpenOffice or OpenDocument Format, and their emancipating effects on the industry!
Posted in ODF, OpenOffice.org, Uncategorized | Comments Off on Seattle P-I vs Microsoft
June 13th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Neelie Kroes is an EU bureaucrat well-known to the open source and tech communities, because she is the relentless force bringing Microsoft’s monopolistic abuses to justice:
“Ms. Kroes has fought bitterly with Microsoft over the last four years, accusing the company of defying her orders and fining it nearly 1.7 billion euros, or $2.7 billion, on the grounds of violating European competition rules.”
The New York Times reports on Kroes’ recent suggestion that businesses and governments use open standards and avoid being tied to a single software supplier:
“Her comments were the strongest recommendation yet by Ms. Kroes to jettison Microsoft products, which are based on proprietary standards, and to use rival operating systems to run computers.
“I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels. “No citizen or company should be forced or encouraged to choose a closed technology over an open one.”
She also encouraged the Netherlands (her home country) to continue moving toward open standards, and praised government agencies in Germany and France that have already done so (by migrating to Linux and/or OpenOffice.org).
The EU is fast escaping Microsoft’s orbit, and they may leapfrog the USA in this round of global techno-competition. Their large-scale adoption of open source will strengthen many software projects, and that will benefit software users around the world.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Neelie Kroes on Open Standards
June 12th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
The famous OpenOffice PDF Importer Extension is now available in beta form for OpenOffice.org 3.0, announces Erwin Tenhumberg (among others).
From its home on the extensions website: “The PDF Import Extension allows modifying existing PDF files for which the original source files do not exist anymore. PDF documents are imported in Draw and Impress to preserve the layout and to allow basic editing. It is the perfect solution for changing dates, numbers or small portions of text.”
Not all features are complete yet, but this is a major step forward in providing very useful capabilities to OOo users.
Erwin also highlights the cool Hybrid PDF capability it provides, and which I’ve written about recently:
“Once the extension is installed, the PDF export feature shows a new option at the bottom as well. With the Sun PDF Import Extension, OpenOffice.org allows creating so-called “hybrid files”. These are PDF files that also include the ODF content, i.e. the original source document. As a consequence, everybody can view these hybrid files with a simple PDF viewer. However, OpenOffice.org users can also edit these PDF files without any information loss, since OpenOffice.org will simple recognize and open the ODF content instead of trying to import the PDF information.”
Posted in Free Culture, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | 1 Comment »
June 9th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
IBM Lotus Symphony is IBM’s office suite derived from OpenOffice.org and the Eclipse Rich Client Platform. The same tools are also available as a part of Lotus Notes 8.0+, but Symphony is the standalone version of the word processor, spreadsheet and presentation applications that use ODF as their native file format.
The first betas of Symphony were released in September 2007, and have been downloaded over one million times. With the release of version 1.0, IBM’s business strategy has also been revealed: the software is free, but support options are available for companies who’d like to pay.
LinuxWorld interprets this move as a direct challenge to Microsoft’s ‘heartland’ in its article “IBM Releases ODF-Based Office Killer.”
Ebizq sees it as an indicator that ODF has reached maturity, with its already widespread implementation in OpenOffice now augmented by an enterprise product from one of the world’s largest IT companies: “Open Document Format (ODF) comes of age today as IBM announces the commercial-grade, general availability of Lotus Symphony, a suite of free, ODF-based software tools for creating and sharing documents, spreadsheets and presentations.”
IBM is also using Symphony as a core part of a new stack of Lotus software aimed at small businesses called IBM Lotus Foundations, which looks very interesting itself.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on IBM Lotus Symphony 1.0 Released
June 5th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Asustek, creator of the innovative and highly-popular ultra mobile Linux-based “Eee PC,” expects to double its sales next year (2009) to 10 million units. (Some models now use Windows XP instead of Linux, unfortunately.)
The Linux versions all include OpenOffice, which means millions of copies being distributed to new users around the world.
The new market it has defined, “ultra mobile PCs” is also set to explode: “The company, which had previously estimated that it would sell 5 million Eee PCs this year, forecasts low-cost PC sales are set to hit 20-30 million units globally in 2009, Asustek’s Chief Executive Jerry Shen told reporters.”
Many other companies have introduced Eee competitors, collecting marketshare on the margins, but the good news is that most of them also offer Linux as the default (or at least an optional) OS.
Posted in Free Culture, GNU/Linux, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Eee Could Sell 10 Million Units Next Year
June 4th, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Andrew Ziem, of OpenOffice.org Ninja, writes about OpenOffice’s upcoming PDF importing and hybrid PDF capabilities.
The capability will be delivered as an extension and will let you open and edit any PDF. It also supports a new format called a Hybrid PDF, which can be displayed by PDF viewers but edited by ODF editors.
Ziem gives credit where it’s due with regard to editing PDFs: “OpenOffice.org did not pioneer PDF import—not even in the open source market. Some of the work in OpenOffice.org is done by xpdf, a PDF viewer. To import PDFs, open source alternatives include pdftohtml, Abiword, KWord, and Inkscape. Adobe Acrobat Reader includes a text extractor and an image scraper, and there are a host of commercial applications. What makes OpenOffice.org stand out is hybrid PDFs.”
Hybrid PDFs provide the best of both worlds: consistent display anywhere via its PDF component, and editability via its ODF component.
“Most applications (such as Adobe Acrobat Reader) ignore the ODF bits and treat the whole hybrid file as a normal PDF. Presentation is pixel perfect. Wait. That’s not all. OpenOffice.org 3.0 with this extension treats the hybrid as a normal ODF, so the ODF document opens in Writer, Impress, Calc, or Draw according on the original. (You didn’t just expect Writer, did you?) Now you have lossless, editable, round-trip PDFs.”
The extension is still in development, but will be available on the OOo Extensions site when it’s ready for mass deployment.
Posted in ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on Import and Edit PDFs with OpenOffice.org
June 2nd, 2008 Benjamin Horst
Kazunari Hirano mentions this week’s OpenOffice Migration of the Week: the Aizuwakamatsu City Government in Fukushima Prefecture in Japan, which is moving 850 computers from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice.org.
The city expects direct savings of 15 million yen over the next five years, and anticipates the benefits will spill over into the private sector, as citizens will also be able to adopt open source instead of expensive applications at home:
“The Mayor said that they can not only cut the cost but also accommodate the long-term preservation of their documents: “We often met problems with the latest office software to open and read our documents created in the past. But now we can use the international standard file format, ODF, so that we will be able to use and preserve our documents over many years.”
“It happened that our citizens had to buy the office software when they received documents from the city government.”
“ODF, which can be used from the free software, OpenOffice.org, will help reduce the burden on our citizens,” he said.
Posted in Free Culture, ODF, Open Source, OpenOffice.org | Comments Off on OpenOffice Migration of the Week: Aizuwakamatsu City, Japan