Some people say that <a href="http://www.openoffice.org/" target="_blank">OpenOffice doesn&#8217;t completely suit their requirement as compared to the Microsoft Office. Though most of the times I do not have that problem 🙂 But there are still couple of things that do not work with OO seamlessly and thus if you want better OO (with respect to working with MS files more seamlessly) here&#8217;s something worth a try.

You can try the <a href="http://go-oo.org/" target="_blank">go-oo OO.

If you are using a rpm based distro like Fedora and have yum installed then simply add the yum repo create a file called go-oo.repo in /etc/yum.repos.d with the below content:

[GoOo]
name = GoOo OpenOffice.org packages
baseurl = http://go-oo.mirrorbrain.org/stable/linux-i586/
type = rpm-md
enabled = 1
gpgcheck = 0

Now once this is done, just intall OpenOffice using the frontend of you choice like PackageKit or Yumex or any other frontend. Ensure that there will now be two versions:- one from Fedora repo and one from the GoOo repo. Install the one from the GoOo repo. You are done.

There is a catch in doing this, whenever you are updating the packages though, the soffice might be broken because the Go-Oo provides openoffice.org-ure which is mostly a version below the one provided by the Fedora repo. So if you want that the system update does not break this, then you should install the protectbase plugin of the yum and add the below line in the go-oo.repo and you are done.

protect=1

Here is a screenshot of the suite.

<img class="size-full wp-image-530" title="Openofficeorg Writer" src="http://blog.amit-agarwal.co.in/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/openofficeorg_writer.jpg" alt="Openofficeorg Writer" width="409" height="299" />

Here is a list of the features that the suite boasts of :

SVG support
3D transitions
Rich fields support
Better Startup Performance
Unix systray quick-starter
Calc solver
Improved Excel interoperability
VBA support
GStreamer integration
Text Grid rendering
Improved EMF rendering
MS-Works import
WordPerfect Graphics import
Lotus Word Pro import

Related Articles:

• 2008/11/16   go-oo.org Startup and better integration with MS Products.
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