Plan-B for Software Documentation

Sun Microsystems released a plug-in that allows MS Office to work with ODF (or ISO 26300) files. The plug-in supports text-documents, spreadsheets and presentations, corresponding to MS Word, MS Excel, and MS Powerpoint. The plug-in works with MS Office versions 2000, XP and 2003. It can be downloaded from Sun for free.

Why does it not support MS Office 2007? Malte Timmermann gives the answer and many more around the new ODF plug-in for MS Office.

As an increasing number of companies and institutions migrate to Linux and OpenOffice.org, interoperability becomes more and more important. The world is still geared towards Microsoft’s document formats and that poses barriers to migration, one of which is fonts and their influence on how documents print and break into pages.

The leading Linux distributions in the enterprise space, Red Hat and SuSE delivered some new fonts that are metrically identical to the widely used Microsoft fonts. What does this mean for you? You can receive an MS Office document and use the equivalent font and print it w/o fear of it breaking into a different number of pages. It also means you do not need to update the table of content because of re-pagination. Off course the same is true in the opposite direction ODF –> MS Office document.

Use Plan-B for OpenOffice.org to learn more about how to configure Writer for optimal MS document compatibility.

Klaus Manhart has published an article about converting documents from and to MS Office, using OpenOffice.org. He tells it as it is, that simple documents are easier to convert than more complex ones.

In his article he gives two sets of cut and dry advice for text-documents used in OOo Writer/MS Word:

Basic rules for successful data exchange

• If you know that a Microsoft Office document will be opened in Openoffice.org later, don’t use complicated formatting and functions.
• Agree on the exact Microsoft Office file format to be used. If someone generates a document that’s going to be exchanged and uses a newer version of Microsoft Office, then RTF or another format up to and including Office 97 should be used, rather than anything more recent.
• Try to avoid round-trip conversion, where documents are edited alternately with Openoffice.org and Office. It’s not realistic to have a file that’s sometimes edited with Microsoft Word and sometimes with Open Office.
• If you’re going to send an Openoffice.org document to someone who just needs to read and print it, it’s probably simpler to export it to a PDF file.

and
Maximize Word compatibility in Openoffice.org Writer

• Enable Use printer settings for document formatting
• Enable Add spacing between paragraphs and tables
• Enable Do not add leading (extra space) between lines of text
• Enable Consider wrapping style when placing objects

Learn at Plan-B for OpenOffice.org, how to enable/disable OOo Writer compatibility options for compatibility with MS Word or OpenOffice.org Release 1.1

The Office Letter, publishes in its May 7th issue a readers tip, how to use OpenOffice.org the free open source office suite to read and rescue corrupt Microsoft Office documents.

Paul Denize, the author of the tip writes “It appears that Word was saving files that it would later not be able to open or recover. When I closed the document, Word would not reopen them, saying they were corrupt.”

He recommends “Open Office did not complain when opening the so-called corrupt document, and managed to saved it back out. Then I could return to MS Word and open it successfully again. All I had lost was a few formatting items — some images were a different size and some grey lines were now black. I could live with that.”

Not that Paul argues to change to OpenOffice.org outright. But he seems to finds it a useful tool to rescue his corrupted Word document.

The OpenOffice.org community has released their latest version today.

The new release 2.2 has better integration of Microsoft Vista UI elements, as well as improved Apple OS X support, such as smaller installed size and many stability improvements.

On the functional side there are new features in Pivot tables and trigonometric functions for Calc spreadsheets. Spreadsheets also improve interoperability with MS Excel. For the database fan, Base got new “Query in Query” features and improved SQL editing in general. In addition, support for various ODBC drivers has been improved. Impress, the presentation application has improved handling of hidden slides.

All users might see improved character rendering, because the kerning feature, to boost readability of proportional fonts, is now on by default. Making documents look good also touches PDF with improved font handling and added bookmarks. You can now even add form-fields to your PDF.

With the latest update OpenOffice.org has also plugged some vulnerabilities to boost security from hackers.

Ted Haeger lets us know that Novell just released its own edition of OpenOffice.org.

Thanks to Ted I now know why Novell is cooking its own version. Novell feels that the open source model is a good one. They follow the intention of open source to solve one’s own problems and contribute back to the community. In Novell’s case they solve the issues of their Linux customers and benefit all others too. All Novell additions are factored into the main stream OpenOffice.org eventually. While the community does absorb the contributions, Novell does enjoy the benefits of an advanced version that makes their brand of Linux more competitive. That sounds like a fair deal to me.

Now the Novell developers even released a version of Novell Edition OpenOffice.org for Windows. Why? Because they learned from their own experience that it sometimes takes a few baby steps until you are ready to switch from Windows to Linux. Switching from MS Office to OpenOffice.org is such a baby step. Lets hope that the Mac version is not far behind. Although I’m not sure how many Mac users can’t wait to switch to Linux.

The OpenOffice.org community has written a letter to Michael Dell, CEO and founder of Dell Computers to offer help in making the wishes of their customers happen. Dell Computers recently opened DellIdeaStorm, a website to solicit customer ideas and wishes. One of the top items with over 24,000 votes in two days was OpenOffice.org pre-installed on Dell computers.

The OpenOffice.org community offers in the letter help to make this happen. They are proud that their product is desired by so many of Dell’s customers and want to work with Dell to offer the open source office suite pre-installed as standard or an option.

As of today “Pre-Installed OpenOffice | alternative to MS Works & MS Office” is the second most popular request on DellIdeaStorm with over 75,000 votes.

Jedox, the company behind the Palo Spreadsheet server has started to seek sponsors for supporting OpenOffice.org Calc. In an interesting marriage of open source and commercial project sponsorship, they have found pledges from an Australian Winery and some German engineering firms. However, at this point the tally stands at 6500 Euro, which is not much for a medium size software project.

The idea behind this effort is to store spread sheet data on a server and offer OLAP capability to create sophisticated reports, that can be aggregated among many dimensions, such as sales data by month, quarter, year, sales person, region, customer size, promotional costs, support costs or any combination of these. This kind of application gears towards enterprise customers who need analytical aggregation of data to support decision processes.

Palo server is an open source project and is currently only available for Microsoft Excel.

Dutch firm O3Spaces B.V. of a program that lets OpenOffice and StarOffice users collaborate on office documents. O3Spaces is fully integrated in OpenOffice.org, so users do not need to leave OpenOffice to perform most functions. This is equivalent to MS SharePoint for MS Office.

O3Spaces is a cross platform collaboration server with integration in the desktop, OpenOffice.org and a browser interface. In this environment a team stores their documents, if ODF or MS Office format, on a central server and creates versions with every change saved. users can receive notifications if any document they have in their workspace changes.

With O3spaces users can share documents on different OS platforms, such as Linux, Windows or Mac OS X. In addition the server provides shared calendars for scheduling meetings. A workflow engine can route documents to different users for review or approval.

All documents are secured by access rights so only authorized users can access them. The user management can be integrated with any LDAP server.

The version for self installation, the professional edition, costs 295 Euros (~ $375) , for five-users. A 100-user license costs 5,900 Euros (~ $7,600). O3Spaces is also available as an on-demand version or hosted application service.

Switching to OpenOffice.org could save the Danish government $21 million over an upgrade to Office 2007. This is the conclusion of a study conducted by Ramboll Management an IT consultancy. The report was commissioned by the Danish Open Source Business Association.

The Danish Parliament decided on June 2 that starting 2008 all documents exchanged with its citizens must be based on open standard file formats. The report compares the two options of upgrading to Microsoft Office 2007 with OpenXML and OpenOffice with the OpenDocument Format (also known as ISO 26300 standard).

The report looks at the cost over five years, including training and file conversion. The report concludes that on a strict cost basis, sticking with installed Offixe XP and Office 2003 and using a plug-in to load and save ODF documents would be the least expensive option. However, switching to OpenOffice, which uses ODF as its native file format, is little more costly. While upgrading to MS Office 2007 would cost additional $21 million.