OpenOffice.org Down Under!

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Well, it has not been long since writing my previous article (ODF Superceded by OOXML?)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