OpenOffice is an open-source suite of programs that includes a word processor, spreadshet, presentation, drawing, database, and math program. As such, it is an alternative to Microsoft Office, and is specifically designed as a free replacement for it. It can read and write most Microsoft Office formats.
MHo has been using OpenOffice for as long as he can think (beginning with StarOffice for MSDOS...) and hardly ever had problems with it.
One thing that could have been made better: OpenOffice is using a Basic dialect for programming. It seems to me that people have fun always reinventing the wheels ;-) Why didn't they use Tcl, ready for embedding in every application as its perfect macro language? (RS: See tcluno for that...)
But the situation of OpenOffice seems to be comparable with Tcl's: the bosses responsible for buying software tend to prefer Microsoft Office as they tend to ignore Tcl ("Tcl? what's that? never heard... let us better use some 20 Gig compilers and runtimes with 10.000 dll's... and let us only use Microsoft tools because the other ones are sometimes buggy... (and free of charge ;-)" - hahahahaha).
Time for better marketing, I think!
wdb True spoken, but the main reason for taking B****C is probably compatibility with other docs (older OOo, other MS docs).
Does anyone know of any resources explaining how to write/create an open office spreadsheet (.ods) using tcl?
I have imported data using Mk4tcl but would like to avoid the intermediate step of exporting to an excel file format using the above.
SRIV 2010-09-18: I wrote a quick .ods writer, i'll post it on the wiki: Creating an OpenOffice Spreadsheet in pure Tcl
Janka 2024-03-26: A quick hack I needed for some larger project, Reading an OpenOffice Spreadsheet with tDOM