[CLUE-Talk] OpenOffice as Molasses (was ... April CLUE DTC Meeting)

[Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier]

On Thu, 2003-04-17 at 00:21, Jed S. Baer wrote:

> Uh, isn't 1.0.3 out already? I've been meaning to remember to dl the
> latest, when I'm over at a friend's with a cable modem.

Skip 1.0.3 and go for the beta of 1.1. I haven't noticed any stability
issues and it is quite a bit faster than 1.0.X, at least that's my
perception -- I haven't run any kind of benchmarks on it or anything. 

AFAICT it (the beta) handles Microsoft Office docs pretty well - I've
had to use it to open some Word and PowerPoint stuff, it seems to do
that just fine. Even handled some PPT slides from Samsung that had, I
think, some Korean characters in the document as well. I doubt that it
will ever be perfect -- but that's hardly a failing of the OOo folks --
let's not forget that MS deliberately makes it difficult for competing
applications to import Office doc formats correctly. 

I spoke to a few OOo folks for some features that I worked on recently,
they seem really gung-ho about making OOo better than MS Office, but
could use some additional developer talent -- I think OOo is,
development-wise, about a year and a half behind where Mozilla is now. I
expect that there will be a point where OOo really crosses the
threshhold and surpasses MS Office in quality and features, if not in
document compatibility. 

Zonker
-- 
Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
jzb at dissociatedpress.net
Aim: zonkerjoe
http://www.dissociatedpress.net