OpenOffice.org Down Under!

One of the problems that many people have when first starting to use OpenOffice.org is that often it starts in Writer by default and people have trouble working out how to start with Calc or another module of OpenOffice.org. The reason for this is that OpenOffice.org is an application rather than a suite like other office applications which offer separate programs each able to run independently.

The XForm capability within OpenOffice.org is one of may special interests and I can still see a lot of potential for this feature. However, when first exploring the XForms feature I came across some limitations that all seemed to come down to the fact that only the XPath 1.0 standard was implemented within OpenOffice.org. So what updates are being made and what will it offer?

A background for those who want to go nuts!

Blue sky with shadowed tree template with both starting slide and standard slide designs

Follow the trail to, not a bad bear, but a cute teddy bear.

Leave a trail of hearts for somebody to follow you

A background you can use for your partner, valentine, or just to show somebody you love them.

Exploring Mac OS X Aqua version of the beta 3.0 OpenOffice.org, there are some interesting qwerks appearing. One issue that was supposed to be resolved in the upcoming version 3.0 is that of rotating charts. On reading through some of the forum items it showed that this was now possible in 3.0 and possibly even in some 2.4 editions of OpenOffice.org. Trying the three different methods they suggested resulted in very different results!

Method 1: Copy the chart and then paste it as a GDI Metafile.

Well, it has not been long since writing my previous article (ODF Superceded by OOXML?) where it looked like OOXML was supposedly taking over as the new standard from ODF, things have changed. There were a number of news articles coming out hinting that Microsoft were changing their view and direction for ODF and would start supporting it more natively in the near future (early 2009).

This is a short response to an article that was published in an Australian online news site about a talk from OpenCebit in Sydney this week. The link to the article is http://www.itnews.com.au/News/76442,red-hat-australia-missed-ooxml-oppor... and provides an interesting read.

The general overview of the article is good and talks about a presentation made by Frank Feldmann, Red Hat's Asia Pacific Senior Product Manager. The article mentions Frank talking about the approval of OOXML and how that could be detrimental to the innovation of new collaborative standards.