Newbie observations and questions

[eckie]

Hi y'all from Germany!

First of all, I am absolutely delighted that I finally tried NeoOffice for myself. The main reason was that my young daughter, who was raised in Canada and now lives with me here in Berlin, needs German spell-checking, and our older version of MSOffice X didn't have a fitting dictionary, and switching languages is not convenient either.
This alone makes NO a dream come true. Especially nice, to combine an English interface with local language contents.

I was up way into the night, customizing NO and generating templates.

The only bug I have found sofar concerns cut-and-paste in the spreadsheet. NO removes the cut data completely (unlike MS) and several times, didn't paste with command-v. I had to use the multiple undo, to get back. That does concern me a little. Haven't been able, to reproduce this today, though.

Right now, I'm still not sure "this thing's for real" and so I shall probably run NO parallel to MSOffice. I guess everyone does that at first, eh?
There's still the question, how something so good could be free and what would happen, if Sun were to stop supporting OO.... mind you, with Redmond one can also not be sure, can one?

By the way, what format should I save my docs to? What would be the most convenient and yet secure? I rarely exchange with Windows users, since I print and mail everything from PDF, where NO shines as well.

Thanks to Sun and the Mac community for producing such a fine programm. I'll lurk around from now on.

ciao for now from Berlin!

[ovvldc]

Dear Eckie,

Welcome to NeoOffice. I am very glad you find it a pleasant and useful application .

As for your questions:
* Copying and pasting for me sometimes is a matter of not having copied before trying to paste and sometimes a matter of trying to paste something in a place where it cannot go. But it rarely happens to me. Please let us know if you find anything reproducible.
* NeoOffice is pretty real. We have heard no serious rumours of Sun wanting to throw out OOo, though from a recent thread here you can see that we sometimes wonder why they sponsor it. In any case, OOo has been gaining ground recently and NeoOffice has proven quite surprisingly popular. I think it will be around for a while longer. Even if no new features were added and only the existing ones were improved and consolidated, it would be something we can use for many years to come.
* I sometimes use MS Office on the Mac, because I have documents with Endnote bibliography data which Neo throws away , but I prefer not to. So yes, many people start out that way
* If you want to exchange with other systems, MS Office files are still the easiest. I do not know what you mean by secure, but I think many, if not all, of the macro viruses simply have nothing to hold on to on OS X. If you want to keep your documents exactly the way you entered them and have to edit it only on your system or on another with NeoOffice or OpenOffice, you can use the OpenDocument format. This would make good sense if you send out files as PDFs anyway.

I hope you have some use for this

Best wishes,
Oscar

[Guest]

Also at the Neo Wiki page you should be able to read about having NeoOffice save your Neo opened and/or Noe created documents as M$ .docs, .xls and .ppt documents as the default 'save', 'save as' setting instead of the native Neo format setting.

http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/Main_Page

under 'Tips' or some other links there.

[Guest]

Yeah, here it is:

http://neowiki.neooffice.org/index.php/Setting_the_default_file_format_for_saving

[eckie]

Judging by the responses to my newbie post, the combination of Mac and Open Source (I have been using Macs since the very first 128K model) promises to be a very helpful environment.

My question as to what format to save into was primarily aimed at future uses of the data, which of course is a problem even within the MS product palette. Who knows how long M$ will support their product. Right now, I save into the Office X format, since that's the program I own. That seems the most logical choice, until I have decided to go full-bore with NO.
Meanwhile, I have instructed the Finder to open all .doc or .xls docs within NeoOffice.

Are there any operational advantages - ie speed - to using the native OO format?

Again, thanks for the fast responses!

ps: I shall observe the cut-paste problem (hasn't happened today) and post them, should it reoccur.

[Lorinda]

eckie,

I don't know about speed, but there are some features of NeoOffice (and OpenOffice.org) that don't translate/stick in MS formats.

For example, I created a template for funerals using fields so I could type in the deceased's name and gender once, and Neo would put the name and the correct pronoun in all the right places. The pronoun fields are conditional fields, set up so that if gender="female" then Neo uses "she" (or "her" or "hers;" I had to create three different fields); if not, Neo uses "he" (or 'him" or "his').

This worked great, until I had a funeral where two other pastors were involved and I had to send them the funeral liturgy; I sent it to them as a .doc file, not realizing that conditional fields don't transfer over into .doc files. So everywhere there was supposed to be a "she" or a "her," there was nothing! I didn't discover this until 1/2 an hour before the service. Luckily I had my copy, which was printed from the Neo-native odt file rather than the .doc version.

A good source for the differences between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org use and formats is the Migration guide, which can be found here. It is written for OpenOffice.org, but most of it is transferable to NeoOffice. The biggest thing to remember is that were the Migration guide reads "control" the equivalent Mac key is always (or almost always) "command" (the one with the apple on it).

In terms of being able to access the files at some point in the future, the Neo/OOo native formats might be your best bet. Unlike MS formats, which are proprietary, it is my understanding that the formats used by Neo and OOo are open, so that anyone can access/read them, meaning that even if Neo and OOo bit the dust, it shouldn't be hard for some company to make translators/filters for them.

My pattern is to use Neo native formats unless I need to share the document with others who use MS Office. For example, I always save my bulletins in .doc format becuase I e-mail them to someone else to print. But my sermon notes and other documents are usually saved in Neo native formats.

[eckie]

Hallo Lorinda!

Wow, I had no idea that such conditional were even possible!

You make sense about future translators being available. So, as soon as I have tested the remaining few templates (Avery labels and business cards), I just start saving to Neo.

Cross-platform compatibility isn't really an issue for me, since everything I send out is first converted to PDF anyway.

Your post has really made me curious. I downloaded the manual you suggested.... haven't read one for ages, but perhaps, there may be some completely unexpected uses in there!

ciao for now

eckhard

[LemonAid]

[Guest]

eckie said,

"Who knows how long M$ will support their product"

I have a feeling M$ isn't going anywhere anytime soon...