OpenOffice Moving to Microsoft’s “Ribbon” Interface

Although a host of online word processors have come up, OpenOffice has been the only real competitor to Microsoft’s Office Productivity Suite. It is widely regarded as “one day will beat Microsoft” dream for most open-source evangelists. It supports Microsoft Office formats and provides great compatibility to edit documents and presentations in Linux. Infact, its been one of the goals of OpenOffice to be like Microsoft Office so that people can easily switch to it and get the same features for “free”.

And moving in that direction, in the next release, they are planning to copy the Ribbon interface of Office 2007. The Ribbon Interface has been one of the most talked about UI changes, some people hate it while others love it. In Windows 7, Microsoft has moved some basic applications like Paint, Notepad to the Ribbon interface. May be OpenOffice is just trying to get ready for Windows 7.

 

Try the new interface demo for Impress (Powerpoint alternative) with the new ribbon-like interface.

Office 2007 to Support ODF in SP2

According to News.com, Microsoft will be supporting ODF (Open Document Format) in Office 2007 through Service Pack 2 (SP2). Office 2007 SP2 is expected to be released in Q1 2009 and will be adding support for saving and opening ODF files, just like other competing office suites like OpenOffice has been doing.

Microsoft recently had been criticized widely for the ISO standardization of its OOXML format (docx, pptx...etc). The entire community of open-source document suites was against the standardization of OOXML. Thus, this announcement comes as a surprise after the recent tussle with the ODF community. Along with ODF, Microsoft will be increasing compatibility and support for Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) and XML Paper Specification (XPS).

Tom Robertson, general manager of Interoperability and Standards at Microsoft, said:

"We have heard from customers and governments that they would like to see us do this. Now is the time to announce this support. It's also important to announce this now because we want to get involved in the maintenance of ODF. We have ongoing dialogue with the EC, so we will absolutely have a discussion with them about these steps [supporting ODF] and get whatever feedback they may have on it".

Microsoft also has plans to join the Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards, or OASIS, which is the primary body for the standardization and improvement of the ODF format. How Microsoft is going to affect the future of document standards is really an important question that everyone needs to be asking? We will really have to see how Microsoft is welcomed by others in the community after the recent clash between the two formats!

Embed Google Presentations on Any Webpage

Google Docs has a good tool for creating presentations, but although being an online presentation tool, till now it could not be shared by enbedding on a webpage. But yesterday, Google announced that you can now embed your presentations on any webpage and share them with anyone just like YouTube videos can be embedded on any page.

All you have to do is after the presentation is created, click on the "Publish" button on the top-right and then it will give you an iframe tag which can be added to any webpage like I have done below.

This is a very useful feature and was probably the number one on user request list. Check out the presentation above and also look at the announcement from Google here.

Office 2007 & Vista Service Packs

Like I previously mentioned here, the Office 2007 SP1 was released yesterday and came up on the Windows Update for Vista or Microsoft Update for XP today morning. Windows Update or Microsoft Update is the recommended way to get the update, but for those who want to deploy the Service Pack 1 across a lot of different computers, can download the executable file here. The file size is 218.3 MB and the MD5 Hash is: d4e2c2678f0a2b839cf4a317b80f2d1c

In the meantime, Microsoft also has released a public version of Service Pack 1 Release Candidate (SP1 RC) for Windows Vista. It is still not the final build and I advise people to try it on their own risk. There seem to be a few problems with the build and I've been testing it for sometime now, when Microsoft released it last month for the beta testers. But for the strong-hearted, you can download and crash from here.

Office 2007 SP1 To Be Released On Dec 11

If the developers of Windows Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) need to look for lessons on timely releases then they don't need to look far away from their desks. The developers of the Office 2007 team need to be lauded for their effort in releasing the SP1 ahead of schedule. And SP1 for Office 2007 will be released on 11th Dec, 2007.

Office 2007 was a completely revamped product and has a lot of new features including a complete change in the User-Interface (Ribbon) as well as the file formats (docx, pptx, xlsx...). Thus, it was expected that there would be a few bugs in the release. But like previous Office releases, this version was well received by the industry and the Office Suite is one product from Microsoft that has maintained its reputation of good releases.

The Office 2007 SP1 is an update based the user feedback and hence has lots of small hotfixes for compatibility. SP1 also brings a lot of improvements to the compatibility between the Office 2003 and Office 2007 file formats i.e. doc with docx. Few other improvements in SP1 include support for .Net Framework 3.5 and easy development with Visual Studio 2008. Some fixes to animated text in Powerpoint have also been added. Changes to DirectX overlay is another useful enhancement to make the Powerpoint slideshows a little slicker!!

Use Office 2007 Online For Free

If you thought you had enough of the world moving online and everyone forgetting the desktop forever... THINK AGAIN. Google's promised its going to eventually have the OS and apps online and thats where your computer is going to be.

If Google Apps, Zoho weren't enough to convince you about the online office suite move, Sabeer Bhatia, the man behind creating "Hotmail" and selling it to Microsoft, has developed another web app. This time its to take your Office 2007 suite online and that too for free. The name as Microsoftish as it may sound is not a Microsoft product and is called "Live-Documents". Its still an invite-only process and you can go to www.live-documents.com to register yourself for an invitation.

If the statistics are correct Microsoft hasn't seen any decrease in its sales for the Office suite and people still haven't completely moved online for their work. So, I'm unsure of whether Sabeer Bhatia has thought enough on the success rate of this venture. May be he'll be pitching another one for a Microsoft sale with this one, but he'll also be tense, since he hasn't got much success in his ventures after Hotmail. Just for the record, if after using live-documents, you start liking the product, don't laud Microsoft about it. The product is actually developed by a Bangalore, India based company called Instacoll.

The good about this whole thing is that when you don't have Office 2007 installed and you want to edit the .docx file, you don't have to kill yourself for thinking everyone is up-to-date. You just have to find an internet connection and login. Open your .docx and have fun!! We'll find out more when it's out of the invitation beta!!

Does It Make Sense To Take Gmail Offline?

About a week back, when I was working with an intern on a project which required AJAX in an Java application. I showed him a few sample codes on using GWT (Google Web Toolkit) and he left. About an hour later, he called me up and told me about Google Gears. Somehow I missed the news announcement on 30th May and had heard it for the first time from this intern. I downloaded it and installed it on windows machine and realized it was so much like GWT, but without Java and a lot simpler. Google Gears was handling the database and AJAX easily, while doing it in my Java app required GWT and JDBC. Google Gears was slightly slower in performance, but then was simpler to implement. I know that GWT is more for apps and Gears is for webapps, but I really compared it that way since that was my first look at Gears. After that I checked out Google Reader, a nice app from google that uses Google Gears and I was pretty excited about this API!!

The next thing I was doing was sending emails to other interns from that project. While doing that I read few discussions, how gmail could be used offline and read this today. I think it'll be pretty easy for google to port gmail using Google Gears and will be the next step from the Gmail developers. We know that everyone uses an email client at work or home to send/receive emails. But then with broadband getting popular and people connected 24hrs to the internet, how much does an offline email app be a requirement. I don't understand why I use Outlook to send emails, when I could do everything with gmail open in a browser window all the time. The reason I do it is that my work email is not a gmail account and everyone at office uses the office domain email. I guess a lot of Outlook users use it only for sending/receiving the company email. So I really don't think it makes much sense to have Gmail Offline. But yes, I also need to think about dialup users, who can have their phone lines connected all the time.

The main killer application I think for Google Gears are Mobile Devices or "Really Thin Clients". You could have web applications like Sales CRM, Survey Systems, Poll Agents etc. that run on mobile phones / Thin Clints where network access is unavailable, and whenever a network is available it synchronizes with the server and updates the changes. I think I'm gonna try to implement my Mobile Reminder Application as a pilot using Google Gears now and see the results for myself!