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Integrate OpenOffice

April 8th, 2003

ZDNet is reporting that OpenOffice.org has released a software development kit to allow developers to more easily extend this open source office suite. [Addendum: link via Ed Tech Dev]
At work, I use Microsoft Office because that’s the company standard. At home, I still use Microsoft Word for writing because (a) I’m used to it and (b) it came on my Windows XP laptop (as part of the otherwise-useless Microsoft Works Suite).
However, I have installed OpenOffice 1.0 on that laptop and see no good reason to ever pay for Microsoft Office again. OpenOffice provides about 86.75% (I’m guestimating) of the features that are available in Microsoft Office, writes RTF, and reads most Office files fairly well. The other 13.25% of the featuers are only used by eight people worldwide anyway, so who cares?
The on glaring ommission in OpenOffice is the lack of a relational database with a simple GUI front-end (a la Microsoft Access). OpenOffice should build a comparable GUI for MySQL and optionally ship that with OpenOffice 1.0.

Greg Technology & Internet

  1. charlie
    April 9th, 2003 at 01:15 | #1
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    “The on glaring ommission in OpenOffice is the lack of a relational database with a simple GUI front-end (a la Microsoft Access). OpenOffice should build a comparable GUI for MySQL and optionally ship that with OpenOffice 1.0.”
    I think what you are looking for is in Star Office. Some of the code’s proprietary:
    http://wwws.sun.com/software/star/staroffice/staroffice_base.html

  2. Greg
    April 10th, 2003 at 08:05 | #2
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    Yep, but StarOffice isn’t free (as in free beer). ;-)
    Although ~$80 for Sun StarOffice is a lot better than Microsoft Office for ~$600!
    –greg

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