An overview of Open Office: an open source office productivity

1
An overview ofOpen Officean open source office
productivity

• A presentation to the SC4 Open Technical Forum
• February 27, 2005
• Jim U'Ren
• NASA/JPL

2
What is Open Office?

• An suite of open source office applications
• Word processing Writer
• Spreadsheet Calc
• Presentations/slides Impress
• Image editing - Draw
• Web authoring Web
• OO Uses XML as it's native format
• XML formats as Open Document are in OASIS
• OO's roots come from Sun's Star Office -
• Star Office owned by Sun Microsystems

3
Open Office File Formats

• Can read/write MS Office formats (.doc, .xls,
  .ppt)
• Native format of each application is a zipped
  collection of five XML files
• unzip -v document.sxw
• Archive document.sxw
• Length Method Size Ratio Date Time
  CRC-32 Name
• -------- ------ ------- ----- ---- ----
  ------ ----
• 2946 DeflN 965 67 12-13-02 0403
  44fee85c content.xml
• 4638 DeflN 1199 74 12-13-02 0403
  791e906a styles.xml
• 1120 Stored 1120 0 12-13-02 0403
  a921529c meta.xml
• 6183 DeflN 1362 78 12-13-02 0403
  c8586553 settings.xml
• 752 DeflN 254 66 12-13-02 0403
  11144701 META-INF/manifest.xml
• -------- ------- ---
  -------
• 15639 4900 69
  5 files
• File extensions
• Writer .sxw Calc .sxc Impress - .sxi

4
Open Office XML files

• manifest.xml - a listing of all the files in the
  package.
• meta.xml metadata elements associated with the
  document, such as the creation data, last edit
  date, total time in which the document has been
  edited, counts of words, pages, tables, pictures,
  etc.
• styles.xml - defines the various styles that are
  available in the editing session for the document
  in terms of font, pitch, decorations, spacing,
  tab stops, etc.
• settings.xml - records user preferences for the
  OpenOffice user interface.
• content.xml - the actual content of the document
  can be quickly transformed for casual viewing
  using XSLT null style sheet

5
Features potentially useful to Systems
Engineering Applications

• Cross platform support ( Windows, UNIX, Macs)
• Open Office XML data model submitted to OASIS as
  OpenDocument
• Active international community develops and
  support
• Open well documented API
• Interfaces to numerous backend data bases
  repositories e.g. MS Access, MySQL, Oracle, etc.
• Support for forms development
• Customizable user interface

6
A Shift in Control

• Open information architectures enable
  Computational Consumers take ownership control
  of
• The Information
• The Information Process
• This Ownership possibly signals the end of
  permission based computing