OpenOffice

OpenOffice 3.1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux introduces several new improvements that should make the programs within the open-source suite function a bit better.

The biggest change is that graphics viewed in OpenOffice are now anti-aliased, meaning graphics will appear smoother, especially when you place one shape over another. It's kind of surprising that OpenOffice hasn't supported this until now. File-locking has been improved, so if you're using the suite for cross-platform document sharing you should notice fewer glitches.

Writer, the OpenOffice MS Word analog and the one I use the most, is notably changed in … Read more

Over 90 percent off its original asking price, Microsoft's sale of its productivity suite, Office Ultimate, for $59.95 to bona fide students seems nothing short of a stellar deal.

That is, until you consider that the tools to download an entire office suite to your Windows computer for free has long been available to everyone, not just registered college kids with an e-mail address ending in '.edu'. Sun Microsystem's popular but still undersung productivity suite OpenOffice.org is freeware with all the office essentials that students--and most everyone else--use in daily computing, including word processing, spreadsheets, presentation … Read more

While Microsoft Office is actively used by roughly 50 percent of U.S. Internet users, according to a 2,400-strong survey administered by ClickStream Technologies, 5 percent of U.S. Web users also actively use the open-source productivity suite OpenOffice.org.

Importantly, ClickStream wasn't measuring installations. It was measuring use. The company actually installed client-side software that tracked which applications the users were running. To have OpenOffice in use across 5 percent of U.S. Internet users is pretty amazing.

How many people does this translate into? According to recent data, there are 303 million people living in the … Read more

Far from a project that is fading into oblivion, OpenOffice.org is still thriving under the support of a vibrant developer community and plans for further performance improvements, says its primary sponsor and owner Sun Microsystems.

Bruce Souza, director of worldwide open source initiative at Sun, said there are currently more than 1,000 OpenOffice contributors supporting 100 different localizations. "It's a great international effort and one that shows no sign of decreasing," he maintained, in an e-mail interview with ZDNet Asia.

Souza said some 100 active developers have moved to the software's new repository and … Read more

As the chief open-source officer at Sun Microsystems, Simon Phipps spoke to ZDNet Australia about the MySQL acquisition and community engagement on OpenOffice.org and OpenSolaris.

Q: In the beginning of 2008, Sun spent $1 billion on the acquisition of MySQL. Given Sun's huge reduction in Australian revenue, and the global shedding of jobs, was this a prudent acquisition? Phipps: It's a bit soon to be making that sort of judgment. Asking that question now is a bit like asking a company to change its product strategy on the basis of the share price.

MySQL is a long-term … Read more

OpenOffice.org developer and Novell employee Michael Meeks calls OpenOffice "profoundly sick" and chides Sun for retaining too much control over the project for its own good. He's right, and here's why.

First, though Meeks thinks it's critical that the raw numbers of OpenOffice volunteer developers be high, this isn't necessarily true. He writes:

In a healthy project we would expect to see a large number of volunteer developers involved, in addition - we would expect to see a large number of peer companies contributing to the common code pool; we do not see … Read more

I read OStatic's review of a stripped-down, speedy version of OpenOffice on Tuesday - Go-oo - with considerable interest.

Go-oo is a fork of OpenOffice version 2.4, for Windows and Linux. It doesn't include some of the features found in OpenOffice 3.0 but it is much faster, and includes some compatibility features that can be handy to have around even if you primarily use the OpenOffice suite...[T]here are several ways to run both, which makes a lot of sense.

I was just about to download and try it out, as it sounds like a … Read more

ThinkFree, a company that specializes in "next-gen" office productivity solutions, announced Tuesday that it has launched its ThinkFree Netbook solution, which will deliver word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications for Netbooks running Intel's Atom chipsets, like the Asus Eee PC or the Acer Aspire One.

According to ThinkFree, its Netbook Edition offers a simplified user interface and compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 files. Most importantly, the software is optimized for a small screen and features integration with ThinkFree's online service that allows users to collaborate with each other and synchronize documents on-the-go.

"In today's … Read more

Demand for OpenOffice.org 3 has been so high on its first day of out of beta that the official Web site crashed.

In the meantime, users can also download it for Windows and Mac from Download.com, and there are a couple of torrents being shared as well on the usual big-name trackers.

After using OpenOffice's MS Word analog, Writer, all day, I can confirm that this update is worth it for the improvement in response and load times, if nothing else. The installation is still enormous, with an installer about 130MB for Windows users and 160MB for … Read more