OpenOffice builds extensions for v2.3
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Everyone-hates-Redmond week It's been a good week for anyone praying for the demise of Microsoft Office. Google unveiled its long-awaited, web-based PowerPoint competitor. IBM took the wraps off the free Lotus Symphony, a complete suite of MS-battling tools. And now we have a new version OpenOffice.org.â¦
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Sun has released the final version of its Open Document Format plug-in for Microsoft Office.
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PHPHacks.com shares some inforamation today on how to quickly and easily create OpenOffice documents with the help of a little PHP.   PHP DocWriter is a set of PHP classes that allows you to create documents in OpenOffice.org XML  format (that is, StarOffice/OpenOffice.org documents). You can download the library files from here (http://phpdocwriter.sourceforge.net/download.php?lang=en). Also, you can find installation steps in the mentioned link.   With the library installed, it's a simple matter of creating a new object, defining properties and using methods on it and exporting it from the script. There are several examples included in the tutorial, everything from a simple "Hello World" example out to creating documents with meta-information and tables.
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Take a look at how the new Office versions for Mac and Windows are rolling out, feature by feature.
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InfoWorld - After years of holding out, IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft&#39;s Office software.
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Most people are content to let their word processor determine hyphenation and  text breaks for them. And, most of the time, the result is acceptable if they do. However, just as the default justification can be improved if you want to take the time, so can the text flow. OpenOffice.org has the tools you need, but improving the text flow is as much about knowing the conventions of text flow (what you might think of as the typographical grammar) as the settings themselves.
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OpenOSX today announced Office 1.5 for Mac OS X, an easy-to-use solution for installing, configuring, and using the open source GNOME Office software on Mac OS X. OpenOSX&#39;s Office release includes the necessary
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Company joins project designed to bridge rival document formats and thus enable its OpenOffice customers to work with Microsoft Office.
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The charting component is probably the least satisfactory part of OpenOffice.org. A few minutes with the issue tracker shows that, since OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, 62 issues have been filed for charting. By contrast, the bibliography component and the formula editor, two other problematic subsystems that are comparable in size, have nine and 27 issues files against them respectively. Work has begun on many of the issues about charts, but complete relief is unlikely to come until the final release of Chart 2, the rewriting of the charting component that is due to be part of the as-yet unscheduled 2.6 version of the office suite. However, those who are impatient to see what changes are coming can get a few ideas from the recent release of Milestone 8, an alpha version of Chart 2 that gives the first glimpse of what improvements to expect, not just in the way of bug fixes, but, more importantly, in interface improvements.
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The new version of Works Suite includes Word 2002 plus updated editions of several other tools.
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Separate from Microsoft's efforts to create a translator that supports Office 2007's Open XML formats and OpenDocument, Sun has released the final 1.0 version of its own ODF plug-in for Office. However, Office 2007 is not yet supported due to what Sun calls a bug in Microsoft's newest suite.
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IBM today joined the OpenOffice.org open-source community and will contribute code to the office suite that serves as an alternative to Microsoft's Office software.
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On the Zend Developer Zone today, there's a new post from Maarten Balliauw about a set of PHP classes he's created to work with Office 2007 SpreadsheetML documents (yay! another format!).   I finished my first goals (some basic XLSX writing), and I want to share this set of classes to the community. [...] Each cell supports the following data formats: string, number, formula, boolean. Visual formatting is not implemented, but I'll get to that later.   Features supported currently include the creation of the Spreadsheet object, adding worksheets, adding cells, and exporting the object to the Excel 2007 OpenXML format.   You can check out the project and the latest version over on his blog.
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Microsoft said on Friday that it has added Office binary formats to a list of technologies that are protected against patent-violation claims, answering criticism from some involved in the OOXML (Office Open XML) file-format standards process.The OOXML format is being considered as an international standard by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), but translation between the original Office binaries and OOXML is necessary for there to be seamless document exchange between older versions of Office and Office 2007. Corporate developers and makers of other office productivity products need access to the formats in order to write converters between Microsoft&#39;s format and the possible standard.Microsoft has listed binary file format specifications for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint -- that is, .doc, .xls and .ppt -- under the OSP (Open Specification Promise). These file formats are the defaults in pre-Office 2007 versions of Office; Office 2007 was the first version to use OOXML as its default file format.Microsoft published the OSP in September 2006 as a promise that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against people who want access to the specs for technologies it has developed. Since then, Microsoft has been periodically adding to the list of OSP-protected specs, which can be found on the company&#39;s Web site. In a press statement, Microsoft said that adding the Office binaries to the list is to &quot;promote interoperability between the binaries and Open XML and make Office Open XML accessible to an ever-wider group of users and developers.&quot;The move came out of discussion in the ISO around OOXML as national standards bodies requested more open access to the Office binaries, said Brian Jones, an Office program manager, in a posting on a company blog last month.According to Jones, the specs for the binaries already had been available royalty-free via e-mail to anyone who requested them as outlined in an article in Microsoft&#39;s Knowledge Base. But since the national bodies were concerned with the steps someone had to take to get access to the binary formats, Microsoft -- working with an Ecma International technical committee, Ecma TC45 -- decided to make it easier for people to get them, he said.Microsoft has been working to fast-track OOXML through the ISO approval process through Ecma, another international standards body, since November 2005. Ecma approved OOXML in December 2006, but approval by the ISO has been more problematic. A final vote on ISO is expected in March after an ISO ballot resolution meeting for the OOXML format, scheduled for Feb. 25-29.To help companies build connectors between the binaries and OOXML, Microsoft on Friday also went live with an open-source project on SourceForge to create software tools, guidance and show how a document written using the binary formats can be translated to the current ISO spec for OOXML, ISO/IEC DIS 29500. The resulting translators will be available under the open-source Berkeley Software Distribution license, and members of the community are free to use the translators, submit bugs and feedback, or contribute to the project as they wish, Microsoft said.Translators already exist between the Office binary formats and OOXML&#39;s rival file format, ODF (Open Document Format), which already is an approved ISO standard. For example, the Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office enables conversion between Microsoft Office documents to and from ODF.
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The open source project to build a translator between Microsoft's new Office Open XML format and OpenDocument, the standard backed by OASIS, reached its first milestone Friday, releasing 1.0 of the technology for both Microsoft Word and competing ODF-compatible office suites.
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Sun plans to announce on Monday that it will provide support for the OpenOffice.org productivity software suite, citing a wave of momentum behind the open-source project.The support, which starts at $20 per user per year, will be offered to companies that distribute OpenOffice.org, not directly to end-users, according to Mark Herring, senior director of marketing for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org and Network.com. &quot;For a lot of distributors, they wanted to distribute OpenOffice.org and had no option for back-line support,&quot; he said.OpenOffice.org and StarOffice, Sun&#39;s accompanying commercial product, are compatible with Microsoft Office and identical in terms of capabilities, which include word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation software. But until now, Sun only supported StarOffice.Another difference will remain -- Sun does not plan to provide indemnification against lawsuits for OpenOffice.org, as it does for StarOffice, Herring said.Sun&#39;s move comes as OpenOffice.org is being downloaded 1 million times per week with total downloads to date standing at about 110 million, Herring said.Out of that number, Sun estimates that &quot;tens of millions&quot; of people are actively using the software, according to Herring. The most recent version is 2.3. Version 2.4 is expected in March and will contain significant new features, according to the openoffice.org Web site.&quot;Microsoft Office is still the dominant tool out there -- only a fool would deny that,&quot; he said. &quot;But [OpenOffice.org] has had a huge amount of momentum.&quot;Sun believes the average OpenOffice.org user skews younger on average and that download activity in Europe and the U.S. has been greater than in Asian countries, he added.Developers can create extensions to the core OpenOffice.org suite. Sun has made a new one for shaving down the size of presentation files, Herring said. The wizard-like tool goes through a file and asks users whether they want to keep or compress the various elements, he said.Sun plans to provide support for any extensions it creates, according to Herring. As for ones made by third parties, &quot;we would have to work with them on that code on a case-by-case basis,&quot; he said.Sun is also releasing StarOffice 8 Server. Herring described it as a conversion engine that changes 40 document types into PDF files. The server, which costs $11,000, is aimed at enterprises with large stores of legacy documents that aren&#39;t archived with an open standard, according to Herring.
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New plug-ins enable the IDE to accommodate newly popular dynamic languages.  Features include visual tools, test support and refactoring.