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?

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Well, it has not been long since writing my previous article (ODF Superceded by OOXML?)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.

Many people seem to ask if the commercial product Endnote works with OpenOffice.org to manage their bibliographies and citations. However, in the past I have usually referred them to other open source tools available for use in parallel with OpenOffice.org as we wait for bibliographic project to provide a suitable alternative. Now don't get me wrong, the bibliographic features of OpenOffice.org are quite good, but lack some of the more refined touches that some people expect in their work.

I have finally had a chance to download the latest beta version of the new OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Mac OS X Aqua. First thing to address is that some people believe that it is only available for the newer Intel based machines, but that is not so as I am running it on my iBook G4 with Mac OS X 10.4 system. I obtained the beta version from the good site that supports PowerPC compilations at: http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/3.0.0beta/ This site has many different locales available, but I am looking at the en_GB based version at the moment.