Excellent Tutorial for OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X 51
Blano writes "Marc Liyanage recently posted a great article on getting up and running and optimizing OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X. He includes some tweaks and helpful configuration tips." Another option is getting the software on CD.
Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:3, Informative)
I hope they plan on coming out with a "native" version sometime soon. I own a Mac because I love the interface, it's very hard to take 12 steps back and use this.
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:5, Informative)
much of the point of this article is to guide on how to make it less of a joke and more of an usable tool.
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:5, Insightful)
Fair enough, even if the comment was trollish. The article aims to help make it less of a joke, but you really have to ask yourself this-
There are a lot of talented mac progammers working on all sorts of cute but worthless apps, like 5 billion "download songs off your iPod" programs. The OpenOffice team has repeatedly asked for volunteers to help with the port to Aqua. There are a lot of people who really don't like Microsoft.
So why is it that OpenOffice for Aqua is so far off? Come on people- stop bitching, step up to the plate!
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:3, Interesting)
Why the hell would I want to help Sun anyway?
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:2)
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
With the former developers of Gobe Productive now working for Apple [osnews.com] we might see something happen soon.
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:4, Informative)
being in a scientific field I find that Excel is worth the MS-infection on my machine. It really is a superior spreadsheet program (anyone ever tried appleworks? what a joke! its a wordprocessor with boxes). I use MS word occasionally for typing up letters (and opening email attachments!) but for reports I use latex (via TeXshop) so appleworks word probably would do for me if I only bought excel (but its cheaper to get the lot)
as far as keynote goes, I think it was such a great improvement over powerpoint at the time, but the non-existent development since then is going to leave it way behind - I know a lot of people use it and love it, but if they dont fix the printing/pdf options and add some extra stuff it will die - powerpoint already has copied all the great stuff keynote offers (well, i assume it has, except maybe "cube" transistions) and noone who hasnt yet switched ever will. its sad. (i also love the drag and drop pdf capability but i think this is more an aqua thing than a keynote thing..?)
open office has never appealed to me (i installed it once... ) because i already paid for the excel package. like i said, i hardly use word processing and I have keynote, open office seems too clunky for the effort
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:3, Interesting)
Keynote 2 needs to happen no later than MacWorld in January. I haven't heard a whisper. It's a damn sham., it's so much cleaner than Powerpoint ever dreamed of being. A lot of it comes from a mas
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:2)
to top all the posts
I bought Keynote when it apeared without testing it first, big mistake. I simpyl can not get how people can work with Keynote. Its incredible complicated to use and lacks nearly all graphical features. Seems you are expected to draw diagrams etc. in third party programs and import or cut/paste them nto Keynote.
I bought MS Office for Mac OS X to be able to make presentations
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:5, Informative)
The OpenOffice team is redoing their internal APIs for version 2.0 - the Mac porting team would be wasting their time porting a deprecated version. You can find more at the OOo Mac port site [openoffice.org].
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:1)
What is needed are people who know JAVA to get NeoOfficeJ running under OOo 1.2.
Most Mac users have machines that canhandle the extra resources NeooficeJ requires to run well.
Re:Open Office is a joke on the Mac (Score:5, Interesting)
The biggest drawback is the missing ability to assign keyboard shortcuts to style sheets. This is an absolute must-have for me. The nonstandard keyboard shortcuts really suck and hamper the workflow.
That said, there is just no way to get structured PDFs using real OS X software, and that's why I'm using OpenOffice even though I would prefer a native OS X program that is tightly integrated.
That's why I wrote the article. After working with OpenOffice for a while I have to say that not that much is missing in there to make it into the premier tool for long, structured technical documents. The PDFs that come out in the end are of excellent quality, including fonts and vector graphics and of course the structure information/bookmarks.
It is actually quite impressive that you can get such a program for free. What's really interesting are the XML-based foundations, like the XSLT-based import/export filters. There are some *great* possibilities for shuttling structured content into and out of OpenOffice into other systems in the future.
If there's ever a real Aqua version, it will be a killer.
So I agree, it is hard to "downgrade" to the X11 level, but there is no alternative for what I use it for, and it is an impressive program, especially at this price.
NeoOffice/J ~= OpenOffice.org for OSX (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look. It works beautifully here. Takes a little longer than MS Office to load, but once it's loaded, it's wonderful.
NeoOffice/J development status (Score:2, Informative)
I got scared off a bit by the website's warnings like "it's really only a prototype" and "As this is a development project, NeoOffice/J is intended for software engineers and is not yet complete enough for regular users." (emphasis theirs).
Personally, I don't mind working around some bugs and crashes here and there in exchange for cool new features, but my wife doesn't work that way.
Re:NeoOffice/J development status (Score:3, Informative)
1. Said non-technical user understands how a windows/x-windows style UI operates. Despite being 'native', instead of the menu being overlayed in the menubar, each window has it's own menu.
2. User isn't scared off by the said application loading a bit slowly.
Re:NeoOffice/J development status (Score:3, Interesting)
Neo Office J is being used to prepare for the eventual native OS X release of OpenOffice, so I want to do what I can to encourage the project.
Re:NeoOffice/J development status (Score:2)
There are some other little things too, from the perspective of a non-technical user. For example, you start, switch to and open files with a single icon in the dock for NeoOffice/J. With OpenOffice.org, you start it with the "Start OpenOffice.org" icon
Nice work (Score:5, Interesting)
I think I'm going to give it another shot -- this guy really walks through all of the nitty gritty details clearly, and comes up with something that looks pretty usable. He might be using Panther, though... I remember reading somewhere that Apple's X-11 wasn't going to be available for earlier versions of OSX; I installed XonX (XFree86 for Darwin), not Apple's version.
Anyway, he's going specifically for the goal of creating PDFs with bookmarks (which we don't really need), but you get all the details of setting up a workable install of OOo along the way.
Other stuff by Marc Liyanage (Score:5, Informative)
Marc Liyanage is a great asset to the Mac OS X community. Check out some of the Mac OS X packages [entropy.ch] he provides for several important Unix applications. Though not linked to from that page yet, he also has a PHP 5.0.1 package [entropy.ch] ready for Mac OS X. (Caution: link points directly to the .dmg file).
JP
OOo (Score:3, Informative)
It still does not really look like a mac app, but it does behave like one. In comparison to the X11 version it has:
- quartz text rendering
- native key commands (like cmd-s and so on)
- one application package
- double clicking files works normally
- no seperate launchers
- no extra software required
- native printer and font support
neooffice/j makes a lot of Marc's suggestions obsolete. The only drawback of
Re:OOo (Score:3, Informative)
However, the point is that it is based on an obsolete version of OpenOffice that will not run the ExtendedPDF macro. If you don't need that, then I would indeed suggest to use NeoOffice instead of X11-OpenOffice.
Once, NeoOffice/J comes out based on the current OpenOffice, I will immediately switch to that myself...
It works, but.. (Score:3, Informative)
Could not get value of CFPref AppleLanguages! Please reset your locale in the International control panel..
Does anyone here know if there are other relases that work on OSX (perhaps a *BSD/PPC release?).
Re:It works, but.. (Score:1)
Because it doesn't conform to your geeky ideals, doesn't mean there is something wrong with it. Personally, I think it is crap. But not because I can't use it from the command line.
Easy.. unless you're not using Panther... (Score:4, Informative)
caveat - i'm playing with an iBook as a possible work-PC replacement, so though unix is my day job darwin/osX is new to me.. damn if it isn't cool as shizznitz though.
-'fester
Re:Easy.. unless you're not using Panther... (Score:3, Informative)
unless they have broken it recently, I had apple's X11 working fine under jaguar, and it was a very simple install
most of the issues with fink were pre-"apple X11" where you had a few choices for X, but I assume most people now just use the apple x11 as it is the easiest to install and deal wtih
Re:Easy.. unless you're not using Panther... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Easy.. unless you're not using Panther... (Score:1)
thats so rude, BAD APPLE!
but then, panther is lovely so you should think about upgrading anyway...
Nice Article, but... (Score:2, Informative)
Why not just use LaTeX? Since PDF is native to Mac, PDFLaTeX seems (to me) to be the best solution. I've been using TeXShop for a few years now and have really enjoyed it. Sure, you don't get the GUI of an Office "suite", but I think the results speak for themselves.
Re:Nice Article, but... (Score:3, Informative)
I didn't want to. I wanted a GUI environment with WYSYWIG rendering. I really want to see what I'm working on, that's a matter of personal preference. I don't want to look at my document in markup source code, I want to work on it the way it looks on paper.
And some of the users who will use the inhouse templates I've created will not want or be able to learn LaTeX.
As for the results speaking for themselves, that's exactly why I created this setup. The results are astonishing and
Re:Nice Article, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
In LaTeX I type some code and then click "Typeset" in TexShop, which shows me what the document looks like with TRUE WYSIWYG (i.e., not Word's sudo-WYSIGWYG). What's so hard about tha? But then I learned word processing on WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS years ago, and was used to hitting "Print Preview" to see what the doc would lo
Re:Nice Article, but... (Score:1)
It needs to be OSX native... (Score:3, Informative)
However, those problems pale in comparison to the issues that these decidedly non-technical people will have in trying to use the horrendously awful X-based interface. I'm having enough trouble getting them able to operate OSX without having a fit of panic every 10 minutes because it doesn't work like OS9. I don't need them getting even more confused with all the X requirements of Open Office.
Yeah, Open Office is great. I use it on my Windows and Linux installs, and recommend it to my Windows-using customers. However until they get it native, unless someone makes a special request I'm not going to bother further confusing my Mac customers with it.
Re:It needs to be OSX native... (Score:3, Insightful)
In its current state on Mac OS X, the X11 version is usable for fairly technical people.
Re:It needs to be OSX native... (Score:2)
Definitely. Between home and office I have a couple Athlon desktops and a Pentium2 laptop running Linux, a Pentium3 running Win2K, a G5 PMac, and a G3 iBook. OOo works adequately for me on all of them, which has been an incredible convenience, because no matter which one I'm sitting in front of, I can (through the magic of Samba and/or FTP) pull up the same documents to work on. And as a matter of fact, the one I ru
Re:It needs to be OSX native... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:It needs to be OSX native... (Score:2)
With Microsoft Office, they only need to pay me to perform pretty well documented workarounds every so often.
doesn't pass the "wife test" (Score:4, Interesting)
OOo, at least on the Mac, doesn't yet pass my "wife test". I'm getting my wife to switch from her crusty old PC to our new Mac, and the change in interface is already enough. I don't need an app that works vastly differently than everything else. I need one that integrates well.
My solution, given AppleWorks well-known limitations, is to try to install old versions of Office to run in Classic. While still not native, it's closer than an X11 app is. So far the biggest problem is getting my new floppyless Mac to communicate to my very old System 7.1 Mac. It takes a bit of updating by sneakernet on the 7.1 side to get it to even see my network.
Never Understood Integrated Works Suites (Score:3, Insightful)
Having one Application for Word Processing, Spreadsheets, Drawing and Painting just doesn't make sense. They are three different creative tasks, which occasionally have overlap.
The Windows-OLE/GNOME-Bonobo concept makes much more sense to me. Write a Document in AbiWord/WordPerfect. If you want to add a pretty Picture, Embed a Sodipodi/CorelDRAW! Drawing. If you just want to write your Resumé, just use AbiWord/MSWord. It just seems a lot more Unixey than including everything in one Application. You can also utilise previous work using a Linked Object. I could create a technical Drawing in AutoCAD and link it into a Report in Word. Then, when I wish to update the Model with more information, I just update the original and the Illustration in my Word Document automatically updates. You can't do something like this with a Works Suite, and if I want to use something more powerful (like AutoCAD) than the built-in Offering, I can. Platform Portability can be a problem with OLE/Bonobo documents, but that's what PS/PDFs are for, aren't they?
Most *Works-style applications store all types of documents in the single File Format. Where's the sense in that. If I want to find the letter that my father wrote to Grandma, I have to search though a dozen photos of grandma, a spreadsheet on Superannuation, 20 different letters to do with the Family Tree, a Picture of the family tree, a drawing of a desk, until I find the letter that I'm after. All these documents appear as Gobe Productive Files in the File Manager. There is no way to determine that one is a Spreadsheet, Painting, Drawing or Document.