Category Archives: OpenOffice

Microsoft Visio in LibreOffice 3.5

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I like that LibreOffice seems to be experiencing rapid innovation and bloat removal since The Document Foundation was formed, and the software was forked from OpenOffice.

While I won’t write at length about all the changes I’ve noticed, I did want to show one of the new features coming to a stable release due soon.

The ability to open and display Visio files… more reading about it:

LibreOffice 3.3 Released

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The fork of OpenOffice (LibreOffice) has been released in stable form and is ready for download. Some of the more exciting new features are listed below as seen on the “Featured Selection” portion from the New Features page on the LibreOffice site :

  • Import SVG pictures into Draw and edit them interactively
  • New easy-to-use dialog box for title pages
  • Navigator lets you unfold one heading as usual in a tree view
  • Easy-to-find “new sheet” tab button (colorable tabs)
  • MS Works import filter
  • Lotus Word Pro import filter
  • Useful bundled extensions, such as Presenter View in Impress
  • 1 million rows in a spreadsheet in Calc
  • Improved slide layout handling in Impress
  • Much improved wordperfect import

Office Compatibility

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OpenOffice or Microsoft Office. Use either. It’s like OS X vs. Linux… whatever tool that is best for the job right?

Here’s how you can make the two play a little nicer…

OpenOffice

Users with older versions of Microsoft Office Products, including Word 2000/2002/2003, Excel 2000/2002/2003, PowerPoint 2000/2002/2003)

Users of Microsoft Office 2007

Connecting MySQL with OpenOffice Base

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OpenOffice Base makes it incredibly easy to hook up to a MySQL database. Once this is accomplished you can easily create a front end to browse through your data, edit it, report on it, etc. Below are a few steps I took to create a functional setup:

What I did was:

  1. Have OpenOffice installed
  2. Access to a database (for this example I used my wp_posts table from WordPress) from the workstation running OpenOffice
  3. Downloaded MySQL® Connector/J and installed
    1. Within OpenOffice clicked, “Tools > Options > OpenOffice.org > Java > Class Path… > Add Archive…”
    2. Selected “mysql-connector-java-5.1.5-bin.jar” or current version
    3. Restarted OpenOffice (had to make sure the process was fully “killed”)
  4. Created a new database within OpenOffice
    1. Within OpenOffice, clicked “File > New > Database”
    2. clicked the “Connect to an existing database” radio button
    3. selected “MySQL” from the drop down list
    4. clicked the “Next >>” button
    5. selected the “Connect using JDBC (Java Database Connectivity)” radio button
    6. clicked the “Next >>” button
    7. entered the “Name of the database” into the text field
    8. entered the MySQL “Server URL” into the text field
    9. clicked the “Test Class” button and received “The JDBC driver was loaded successfully”
    10. clicked the “Next >>” button
    11. entered as “User name” into the text field
    12. checked the “Password required” checkbox
    13. clicked the “Finish” button and save
  5. Made a form based on wp_posts:
    1. This screenshot is of the form I made to browse the raw data of my WordPress posts from my Thoughts and Notions weblog and is showing data from this post in particular:
    2. OpenOffice Base wp_posts

Free Office Suite

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Here it is, OpenOffice has just released version 2.0.

Some of the exciting features it has:

  • PDF export
  • Mail Merge Wizard
  • Highly compatible with Microsoft Word and Excel
  • etc, etc, etc.

Most importantly it is free and standards compliant.

Download it:
http://download.openoffice.org/2.0.0/index.html

Read about it:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/2.0/index.html

See it:
http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots/ooo20/index.html

For more information:
http://marketing.openoffice.org/2.0/featureguide.html
http://www.openoffice.org/

Still using Microsoft Word?

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Yeah, I know, I like grammar check too. I also, enjoy… wait a second, I think that is all I miss when I use programs other than Word, say OpenOffice. It is well beyond my understanding why people perpetuate vendor lock-in by continuing to use a program that has been made a commodity.

Think generic drugs. Does anyone buy Tylenol when they know they can get the same thing cheaper. It’s called Acetaminophen. Well, I don’t anyway… I guess you could buy specially packaged, elderly friendly, long lasting, Tylenol gel tab, eh… back to word processors… :-)

Anyhow, why pay the extra? In this case it is 100% more expensive to buy Microsoft Word, than to download OpenOffice. And, there are others who are tired of Word… and not just because it is expensive. John Dvorak of PC Magazine fame seems to think it is time to ditch the software.

And while you are at it, check out OpenOffice Impress. Think of all of those times you have used “Power Point” as an noun… “I am going to make a Power Point”… how about we change that to, “I am going to make an Impress Presentation”…

Yeah, it doesn’t sound as catchy, but I can still hope someday it will change. :-)