Jonathon Delacour the heart of things

OpenOffice rocks

In response to my question about a reasonably-priced, reliable tool for converting RTF files to XML, Dorothea Salo suggested OpenOffice. Why didn’t I think of that? Because I wasn’t aware that OpenOffice had an XML-based file format. Nick Richards, a member of the OpenOffice team, left a comment explaining that “in the stable 1.0 version it’s ZIP compressed but in the new developer builds there’s an option to save as ‘flat’ XML if you have plenty of space or a special need for it.”

So I downloaded the Windows version, verified the integrity of the download using an MD5 checksum (that was fun!), and installed OpenOffice. There were only a couple of minor glitches:

• the attempt to import my addresses from Outlook failed because the installer assumed Outlook was my email client (I use Outlook’s calendar and contacts but rely on Eudora for mail); and
• when I tried to open Mozilla after the installation, I couldn’t use my default profile (somehow the OpenOffice Quickstarter had taken over—uninstalling then reinstalling the Quickstarter fixed the problem).

OpenOffice is impressive: each application is fully-featured and works smoothly. I was able to open Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents in OpenOffice without any problems (though I don’t understand why the default font in Writer (word processor) and Impress (presentations) is Thorndale and that in Calc (spreadsheet) is Albany—neither of which is installed on my Windows 2000 system. (It turns out that they are part of a Windows compatible TrueType font set from AGFA Monotype.)

I have to admit to a slight degree of disappointment. I was hoping that—as well as word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation applications—OpenOffice would include an alternative to Microsoft’s execrable Outlook. But, to balance that omission, OpenOffice has first-rate Asian language support (enabled by clicking on a checkbox in the Language Settings dialog). I was entering Japanese text within a few minutes of opening the word processor (though I still can’t figure out how to enter vertical text—a Help page (rather unhelpfully) says Here you can define the vertical direction of the text without explaining where “here” actually is).

But I’m nitpicking. I’ve already started to make (XML) backups of my important Word and Excel documents. OpenOffice is definitely a viable alternative to Microsoft Office and for the price (nothing), it’s absolutely amazing. (There’s also a Macintosh OS X beta available.)

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