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I've done some fairly advanced stuff with OpenOffice.org now, including taking XLS and DOC files back and forth between OOo at home and Microsoft Office 2003 at the local public library.
Take my word for it as a former Excel support tech: Calc in OOo 2.x is a full-service modern spreadsheet program. I had created a spreadsheet file with complex lookup and indirect addressing which caused Calc 1.1.5 to choke; Calc 2.x handles it flawlessly. OOo 2.x also supports a type of array formula that 1.x didn't; see the conditional consolidation topic on my advanced Excel tips page.
The Writer word processor seems to work great. I've been able to do everything I set out to do in it so far, including things like editing highly formatted files for Avery label products, originally created in Word. Writer even has support for regular expression text searches; most people won't know how to use those, but they can be very useful. I haven't had the chance to tackle a big documentation project in Writer yet; that would be interesting.
There are some detail differences, of course. For example Calc uses semicolons to separate arguments in functions, where Excel uses commas. See my Desktop publishing and Excel pages in this same About PCs section for other comparisons. In general, if you can do it in Word and Excel you can probably find a way to do it in Writer and Calc, or something close enough for the job. Of course, neither spreadsheet program will do everything the other one does, and the same is true of the two word processors.
I've done some experimenting with the Base database manager. OOo always had database functionality, but in OOo 1.x it was sort of a hidden insider thing. In OOo 2.x it has a new, almost Access-like user-friendly interface: try File, New, Database. There's a spiffy wizard that will lead you through building single-table databases for various common applications, from subject categories, with your choice of predefined typical fields. The wizard lets you modify field lengths and other attributes along the way. Or you can create your own tables from scratch, specifying all your field names and data types. You can also use OOo Base as a "front end" to connect to existing databases created by other systems, including Microsoft Access.
The main problem with Base 2.0 is not enough user-friendly documentation. About the best I've found so far is Getting Started with Base [PDF] which is Chapter 10 from the OOoAuthors User Guides for 2.x. If you're already a database programmer you won't have any problem, but those were the folks that didn't have any problems with databases in OOo 1.x. In 2006 I was trying to do a fairly simple database with two tables linked one-to-many, and struggling a bit. Base was slow enough on that system that I didn't make much headway with it. Eventually I may end up writing some Base-for-Dummies-style content myself, if I can figure it out.
Governments and corporations are getting more concerned about the proprietary Microsoft Office document formats, and the resulting situation with respect to future changes in Microsoft licensing terms, access to the information, and provision for needed free public access. People have been realizing that the really important value on their networks is not the hardware and software, but the organizational data, stored in word processing and spreadsheet documents and other formats.
In May 2005 the industry consortium OASIS approved a completely open, published, XML-based standard for document formats called OpenDocument. OpenDocument includes document and template file formats for a full range of document types, such as word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and so forth. The US state of Massachusetts declared it would store new documents in OpenDocument formats starting 1 January 2007. The US National Archives have also endorsed OpenDocument.
OpenOffice.org 2.0+ uses OpenDocument as its default document-file formats. (OOo 2.0.0 was released in October 2005.)
In May 2006 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) defined OpenDocument as ISO 26300.
| Document type | Microsoft Office | OpenOffice.org | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| module | format | module | 1.x format | OpenDocument | ||
| Word processing | Document | Word | DOC | Writer | SXW | ODT |
| Template | DOT | STW | OTT | |||
| Spreadsheet | Document | Excel | XLS | Calc | SXC | ODS |
| Template | XLT | STC | OTS | |||
| Presentation | Document | PowerPoint | PPT | Impress | SXI | ODP |
| Template | POT | STI | OTP | |||
| Drawing | Document | (third party) | --- | Draw | SXD | ODG |
| Template | --- | STD | OTG | |||
| Web | Document | FrontPage | HTML | Writer Web | HTML | HTML |
| Template | TEM | STW | OTH | |||
| Database | Access | MDB | Base | SXB? | ODB | |
| Formula (math) | (third party) | --- | Math | SXM | ODF | |
| Master document | Word | DOC | Writer | SXG | ODM | |
OOo 2.x includes a document converter wizard (File, Wizards, Document Converter) that can do batch conversion to OpenDocument by directory, from the OOo 1.x and Microsoft Office formats. You can choose to convert documents, templates, or both, separately for each document type, and you can also have it recurse subdirectories or not. You can batch-convert word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation documents (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint in Microsoft Office) and for OOo 1.x also master documents, but not databases.
I believe the batch converter wizard only converts to OpenDocument. However free OpenOffice.org 2.x can be used to convert back and forth at will, one file at a time, between Microsoft Office formats, the new OpenDocument formats, OOo 1.x formats such as SXW and SXC, and all the other document formats OOo supports, a long list. So if you create a file in OpenDocument format, you can later on convert it to Microsoft Office format.
In some contexts OOo 2.x even gets described as the canonical implementation of OpenDocument. This is no big surprise, because the OOo 1.x formats were also open and XML-based, and were used as the convenient starting point for consortium development of the OpenDocument standard.
If the world standardizes on open document formats, it should not only resolve the access issues but I suspect will also give us all more robust documents.
Microsoft has responded to all this with Microsoft Office Open XML, a set of document formats they represent as addressing access concerns. The short version of the consensus, after wide study of the licensing, seems to be that in practice it amounts to lip service, while in fact attempting to preserve the current situation of Microsoft control. The Wikipedia OpenDocument article also linked above goes into considerable detail on this controversy, with references.
It seems likely that if the pressure for OpenDocument builds enough, eventually Microsoft will stop dragging their feet and comply, but there are relatively painless approaches to use in the interim.
Either way, a memo or intranet page identifying the few MS Office widgets not supported would be in order. This information is readily available already in the OpenOffice.org documentation.
OpenOffice.org 2.x as installed uses OpenDocument/ISO 26300 default document formats (covered above) and lets you override with Save As and save to Microsoft Office and many other formats. Unlike other office suites, OOo gives you total control over its default formats, and whether you see warnings when you save to another format.
In OOo 2.x as installed, every time you save a document to a format other than OpenDocument, such as DOC or XLS, it will pop up an "Are you sure?" dialog with a "Don't show this again" check box.
You can turn this formats "sanity check" warning on and off at will: go to Tools, Options, Load/Save, General, check box: "Warn when not saving in OpenDocument or default format."
On the same General pane you can also specify a different default format for saving new documents, separately for each document type. The initial defaults for all document types are the standard OpenDocument formats, but you also can specify the Microsoft Office document formats, OpenOffice 1.x formats, and many others, including a bunch of document formats I'd never heard of.
When the sanity check warning is turned off, unless you override, OOo saves existing documents to whatever format the document was in when you opened it, without pestering you about it, and saves new documents to the OpenDocument formats, or whatever you specify if you change the defaults.
Here are examples of the combined effect of the two choices:
| Default: OpenDocument* | Default: Microsoft Office | |
|---|---|---|
| Warning ON* |
New files: OpenDocument Existing files: Warn when saving to anything but OpenDocument |
New files: Microsoft Office Existing files: Warn when saving to anything but Microsoft Office |
| Warning OFF |
New files: OpenDocument Existing files: Save in existing format unless you override with Save As |
New files: Microsoft Office Existing files: Save in existing format unless you override with Save As |
* OOo settings as installed
OpenOffice.org uses a simpler interface style than what you may be used to from Microsoft Office.
Windows applications that open document files conventionally use one of two interface styles:
Through Microsoft Office XP, the Office modules such as Word/Excel 2002 used MDI; Windows WordPad, Notepad, and Internet Explorer through version 6 use SDI.
In Office XP Word MDI, there's an application window for Word, which can be maximized or windowed on the Windows Desktop, and inside the Word application window there can be one or more document windows, which can be maximized or windowed inside the display area of Word's application window.
It's possible to move part of a Word application window, or any application window, partially off the Windows desktop (try it). It's also possible, when you have a document windowed inside Word 2002, to move part of the document window out of the display area of the Word application window.
WordPad SDI is simpler: there's still an application window, but it can only open one document at a time, which always uses the whole display area of the window. If you open another document with File, Open, it replaces the current one; if you double-click another document associated with WordPad in the Windows shell, it will open in a second completely separate WordPad application window.
OOo behaves like a single application which functions in different modes depending on which document type is open, and it opens each document in its own separate application window. The menus and toolbars you see change appropriate to the open document type. This removes one level of nesting from the user interface (document window inside application window).
This is essentially standard Windows SDI, except that you can open any document type from any OOo window. Probably the simplest way to use OpenOffice.org is to focus on your documents and folders via Windows Explorer and folder windows, rather than the application, and leave it to OOo to sort out the document types based on the file extensions.
Microsoft Office 2003 modules use a more or less SDI-style interface in which each document opens in a separate application window, but you still get an error if you try to open an Excel document from a Word window or vice versa. I'd guess Microsoft Office 2007 is probably similar in this respect.
OpenOffice.org apparently uses the same style of Help interface as Sun Microsystems commercial applications; I found it a bit confusing at first.
Browsing the Contents tab (left-side navigation pane) works the same as in any typical Windows program's Help: double-click a book icon to open or close a Contents section, and double-click a topic icon to display that Help topic in the right-side pane. The main difference compared to MS Office is you always have the Help topics for all the OOo modules, such as Writer or Calc, in one subject tree.
The pull-down list at the top of the window (pictured) sets the OOo module you select as the current Help section for searches on the Index and Find tabs. I guess this only makes sense: if you're trying to find out how to do arithmetic in a Writer table, you wouldn't want to see a bunch of Find hits about Calc pivot tables. Index is all the selected module's Help topics alphabetically; Find is full text search.
Of course, most of the time the context-sensitive Help is the easiest access method to use; just click Help or press F1 while attempting to use a feature.
To find keyboard shortcuts for an OOo module: on the Contents tab, open the Help section for the document type—text, spreadsheets, presentations & drawings, formulas—and go to General Information and User Interface Usage, Shortcut Keys.
One little jargon quirk to keep in mind: Text in OpenOffice.org mostly means formatted word processing documents, in the program and Help interfaces and in documentation. Microsoft Office mostly uses the word text to refer to ASCII plain text as in Notepad.
A key resource for spreadsheet work is always the functions reference. This is especially true when transitioning from Excel to Calc, since one has to wonder if there might be specific syntax differences for particular functions. Fortunately the functions reference is easy to find in OOo Help: on the Contents tab, go to Spreadsheets, Function Types and Operators, and choose the appropriate function category.
You can also search for a specific Calc function name: set Calc as the search module in the pull-down list and type the function name into the Find tab. Help will find and display the correct function category, and then jump to the section for that function. Since Calc functions pretty much all have the same names as Excel functions, this may be easier if you're not sure what function category you should look in.
Relative to Microsoft Office Help, the OOo Help windows are probably most similar to those of Office 2000. I don't know about you, but I have a hard time finding Help topics in the Office XP and Office 2003 Help interfaces, which appear in the task pane introduced in XP.* In general I'm finding the organization of the subject tree on OOo Help's Contents tab more rational and faster to find topics in by browsing than the Help subject trees in Office 2000, in spite of the fact that OOo presents all the Help topics for the whole suite in one subject tree.
Both Microsoft Word and OOo Writer have features called something like "Check spelling as you type" which put little zig-zag red underlines, or squiggles as I call them, under words the program thinks may be misspelled.
People with good spelling don't really need this feature very much and tend to find it annoying. This feature will also flag as misspelled most proper names, filenames and program code, and any other technical jargon not found in the program's spellcheck dictionary. Besides, even with the squiggles turned off, the older on-demand spellcheck function is still available at any time.
To turn the squiggles off, in both Writer and Word, you have to find a somewhat buried Options setting. In Writer, go to Tools, Options, Language Settings, Writing Aids, Options section, uncheck the check box labeled Check spelling as you type, and click OK. Some squiggles in special regions like headings and frames may not go away until you close and reopen the document.
Any decent doorstop-size Word book should be able to tell you where to find the corresponding Word setting under Tools, Options. Microsoft moves that stuff around between versions sometimes anyway.
If you like the squiggles, as many do, in OOo Writer you can right-click a word with a squiggle and get a mouse menu (context menu) of suggested corrected spellings, plus some other tools. Of course, even when you use spellcheck, you still need to choose correctly between words with similar spellings and different meanings, such as pallet and palette, or cosmologist and cosmetologist. Otherwise your work may end up featured on Jay Leno's Monday-night "Headlines" comedy bit.
You can open the Calc spreadsheet program, and in any cell type the pseudo-formula:
=Game("StarWars")
... spelling and capitalization exactly as shown, and a functional version of the early 80's arcade game Space Invaders should appear. Respond to prompts with mouse clicks to start the game; then use arrow keys to move, and press the spacebar to fire. Have fun.
You'll notice all the prompts are auf Deutsch (in German). I imagine that code's been in there since before Sun bought the original StarOffice code base from its European developers.
There are some OpenOffice.org books available, but be careful. Some of them were written for OOo 1.x, which is now superseded by 2.x. It's common for publishers of software books about 1.x version series not to specify version number information in their book titles at all, for unscrupulous marketing reasons. You may also have to special-order OOo books, as opposed to finding them sitting on the shelf at the bookstore.
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