[luau] Open Office Malahini

[Hawaii Linux Institute]

I never thought I would say this, but the progress of OOo has begun to 
completely shock me.  As I mentioned in my previous posts, I had very 
low opinions about OpenOffice.org, and those opinions were valid as late 
as version 1.0.3 (the version that came with RH9).  In many aspects, at 
version 1.1, OOo is better than Microsoft Office.  Feature-wise, I would 
rank OOo 1.1 about the same as MSO 97.  But as we all know, Microsoft 
Office is best known as a product whose quality goes down with each 
newer version (since MSO 97, anyway).

OOo is an excellent desktop publishing program.  If you want to have a 
taste of how far it can do (as far as DTP is concerned), go to the 
"OpenOffice.org Starters' Guide" (a project maintained by a PhD student 
at University of Maryland):

http://www.math.umd.edu/~dcarrera/openoffice/intro/

then click on the pdf file to dl it.  I read a review which compares OOo 
1.1 with FrameMaker (a wellknown DTP program) and Microsoft Word, and 
OOo appears to have best of both worlds.  This is truly amazing.

Now about using "OpenOffice to do coding".  Of course, nobody will do 
that.  But nothing will prevent you from doing that, either.  The only 
thing you need to do is, save it as a .txt (text) file.  This will 
eliminate all the unnecessary formatting coding.  OTOH, OpenOffice has 
an "auto complete" feature, which non-programmers like myself may find 
neat when using OOo to do some "coding".



Warren Togami wrote:

>On Sat, 2003-11-01 at 21:04, Ben Timmerman wrote:
>  
>
>>I've been real silent on this list since being very stupid a while back 
>>concerning list etiquette but in the last couple days have gotten my 
>>first exposure to Open Office and need someone's imput.
>>
>>Two questions:
>>First, which of the Open Office utilites is the one to code in?  I'm 
>>coding some Java and my first stab has me using the *.sxw file format 
>>which apparently includes some unnecessary formatting that the compiler 
>>wrinkles it's nose at.
>>
>>    
>>
>
>Absolutely nobody uses OpenOffice to do coding.  OpenOffice is suited
>only for office-type documents... typing papers, page layout,
>spreadsheets, etc.
>  
>