i guess you can try installing from source, although the difference might not be all that noticeable, and that would be painful to do over 150 machines....

anyway, you can get the source code here:

http://download.openoffice.org/1.1.1/index.html

I'm sorry we can't help you do more =(

I guess I have no choice than to keep watching users rant and puff and telling me strongly to reload windows...lol...OO 2.0 release looks at least 6 months away (My project will be over within that period!)

--amit

I've never tried it, but Crossover Office is supposed to be an excellent product also... I found a review here http://madpenguin.org/Article1513.html which sounds promising. The major downside that I can see is that it costs money, but $40 isn't really all that much, and I have no idea what kind of budget you're working on.

Hmm...migrating windows and windows based apps to linux solutions is what our goal is...so we are not looking to use MS Office anymore....

--amit

have you tried the psprintconfig trick yet?

Did you try using Star Office. It runs on many operating systems, so the other employees that are still using Windows can try learning Star Office. Star Office costs around $75 but it comes with similar programs as the MS Office Professional Suite. OpenOffice does not come with all the similar programs as MS Office Professional and you may run into illegal issues.

Well, I appreciate the suggestions, but I would like to say that the company wants to cut off all costs related to software..This is the main reason why they want to migrate to linux...By migrating to linux, we would be saving money on following:

1. A free O/S ( Windows 98/2000/XP becomes expensive as they charge on per machine or per user basis)

2. An Office Suite ( OpenOffice has been chosen to replace MS Office..Moreoever, Star Office/ Cross Over Office are commercial products..and the company dosent want to spend money on acquiring their purchase)

Therefore, Open Office as an office suite is very essential as it is the closest alternative to MS Office...If we encounter problems in small small issues, it becomes difficult to get user cooperation in migration...so I guess u people would understand my situation..)

Today, I had to troubleshoot a weird problem....One of the users was opening a .doc file in openoffice and when he tried to save that file after adding more text, the entire application crashed, resulting in all changes to be lost....that guy was furious as it wasnt such a big file..(only 235 KB) ...It may be a case that the file would be created in MS Word and it might be containing some excel feature that OpenOffice dosent support...and thats why probably it used to crash everytime the file was tried to be saved...we tried all methods..copy-paste, file-save as......ultimately, I had to save the file in native open office format (.sxw) after which i got a message that some items in the file may be lost due to change of format...

Now, I really feel bad for users as they arent concerned about the product they are using....no one will shift from a comfortable position to a tedious and slow application, unless forced to...and we do not want that...if the users are happy, migration process will be very easy, which is not happening.....Due to problems with OO, I had to reformat one of the user's hard disk and load win2k on his machine....and he was more than happy to see windows back.....now I feel that OO people will have to make the app load and open documents faster and also support MS Office features ASAP so that users do not feel compelled to stick to MS Office anymore..

Regards,

--amit

The first problem, about print preview showing only 6 colums instead of 10 is really caused by the spreadsheet setup and terminology

II tried Open office 1.1.3
The issue is really with the cell width.

You can go and change the size of the cells, there is no "best fit" .. but option labeled
optimal column width (in right click as well as in Format->colums menu) will do.

you should also check the Default Size check box
That will set the size of the columns to the size of the content.
Then print preview will show more columns, there is nothing fixed about 6 cells, it's just that's the size that will fit in a 8.5 (or A4) paper in portrait mode. ..

Page setup is buried under Format->page .. unlike MS where it's in the File menu

Terminology is terrible,
From a user presepective the whole thing is frustrating, for the amount of hype and effort .. this should be a lot better.

Try going to openoffice site to see if you can report these problems.. EVEN GOD can't figure out their problem reporting structure , I wonder why these people are doing bizzare stuff.

I tried. It had all exactly the same problems as OO.
Finally, I stick with OO. It's a POWERFUL thing, if you know how to use it:
1. You can use frames, it replaces to certain extent the Adobe Pagemaker.
2. You can connect it to MySQL.
3. You can open whatever compatible files in it, you can print to file (PS & PDF)
4. You can make decent tech drawings, and save them as PDF or graphics
5. Well, that's all I need, but it can do more.

... but, it loads hell slowly.

I know the features of OpenOffice. People will only use about 10% of them. This is the same statistics as Microsoft Office.

The problem with slow loading can be fix by optimizing the settings for the kernel (no need to recompile it), putting /usr and /usr/lib on seperate drives, use hard drives with 8 megabyte of cache, run soffice instead of just the word processor, speadsheet, presentation programs, adding a few lines in "/etc/ld.so.conf", and use the kde or gnome applet to load up OpenOffice a little faster.

On my systems OpenOffice loads about 10 seconds or less.

I tested on an AMD Athlon 700 MHZ with 512 SDRAM memory and on an AMD Athlon XP 2400+ with 256 megabytes of DDR. Both loads up at the same time. It seems OpenOffice is limited to the hard drive speed.

You can always do what Microsoft does. Loading the program into the background. This is why MS Office programs loads up in an instant.

From what I understand StarOffice is the commercial and more complete version of OpenOffice. Does anyone know if it has the same speed-trouble?

Imho, StarOffice isn't more complete. It feels and looks exactly the same.
It is also equally slow. On my system (Pentium IV, 1300MHz, 512 SDRam) OO takes 1min 8 seconds to load.

HOW DID YOU GET IT EXACTLY?
I guess, if I put /usr and /usr/lib on separate drives, I will crash my system (that is, I will have to restore it back to its original state from the command line, if I ever get there).

I don't think his problem was the time it took to load OpenOffice, but in the time it took to load and open documents.

The hacker nicknamed Micha told

1. to remove the file called pspfontcache
2. restart oowriter

This will create new pspfontcache
Every time you run oowriter this file swells up till it becomes huge and the performance of oowriter goes down.

I chmoded this file so that it can not be written to.

The results:

Before: it took 1min7sec to startup oowriter.
After: it takes 7 seconds. This is not bad at all, speicially if you compare it with the best of the best softmare on the globe - M$ Office.

Thank you, Micha.