This is a collection of scraps for the Open Office project

The macros and help about them have been moved

Gub checking

Why this page?

The Open Office project is an attempt, largely financed by Sun Microsystems, to build an open-source retaliation or replacement to Microsoft Office. It runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac systems; Sun also sells a slicker, commercial version, Star Office, which contains numerous goodies (and a manual) omitted from the free one. I think competition is a fine thing, so here is my contribution to this project. This is a hobby; my profession is writer and journalist. I am not a linux bigot, nor even a believer: I run Windows 2000 quite happily.

Helmintholog has the usual bloggish things.

Word compatibility Notes

• Wild card search and replace only appeared in 1.1, which is now available as a "release candidate". It's much better than 1.0x.
• The macro recorder is also available only in 1.1. The code it produces is incomprehensible.
• The styles are confusing and hard to manage (there are a couple of macros that let you bind them to keystrokes now).
• There are three different ways to do outline numbering. Between them, they will accomplish anything except what you want.
• It is slower than Word to load and save documents, though quick once they're loaded.
• You can't eaily put two documents in split windows side by side. This can be worked round to some extent by using the "Navigator"
• The autotext is slow and grisly; badly designed; badly implemented, and difficult to navigate.
• The macro IDE is not nearly as good as Word's. It lacks syntax completion, a proper object browser; and the documentation of the API has recently improved from "nightmare" to "disturbing but incomprehensible dream". This matters because all Word macros have to be translated to work in OOo. This labour will almost certainly cost many companies far more than they could save by moving to a "free" office suite.

• OOo handles long documents with much greater speed and reliability than Word 97. You can tell it to print a book, and it just does. Try that with Word 97: I get crashes every chapter.
• The "navigator" feature, which looks absurdly silly, turns out be really rather useful with a large screen and large documents, though it does need a certain amount of getting used to. It's possible to use it to show all the notes for an article, in organised, outline form, side by side with the finished product, and to drag them across where needed.
• It's very easy to write and mark multingual text, though you remain at the mercy of the dictionary writers when you've done so. The US English dictionary is full of the accumulated errors of ten years of computer science students. It's terrifyingly bad. The UK English dictionary, thanks to David Bartlett and Brian Kelk, is very much better.
• If you are a Java programmer, you can make OOo do almost anything, including the mass conversion of Word documents.
• Version 1.1 can be scripted in Python. The API remains barbarous, but at least it can all be wrapped in the language that the Devil made, to ensure we were dicontented with all others.

In general, Open Office will read and write MS Word documents flawlessly.

The revision marking features import and export perfectly well from Word 97 (not tested on more modern versions) though there are some minor wierdnesses with the colours used. In some respects the OO revision markings are usefully superior to those in Word 97. You can filter them by type (see only deletions or insertions); by the time they were made, and by who it was who made them. You can also add a comment next to any revision from the same dialogue box as you move among them with. So I can, for example, check everything I added to an article yesterday, or all the editor's nitpicks I removed.

The only two areas where you can expect trouble are outline numbering, and graphic layout. I have found a couple of gotchas there.

• Outline numbering, and other things that depend on it, like running chapter heads, work differently in Word than in OOo. Things can get broken in horribly irritating ways when round-tripping large files. I have never been able to get the running, numbered, chapter headers that used to adorn the worm book manuscript to run and number themselves properly after exporting to Word and then re-editing in OOo.
• If you find footers climbing up the page in documents imported from Word, count the tabs in them. OO and Word deal with "extra" tabs differently. Word throws them away. OO puts in a line break to accommodate them.
• Documents with fancy repeating graphic elements seem to screw up monumentally. I don't write those, but the bug database is full of comments from people who do.