Montag April 04, 2005

Almost 40 Million OpenOffice.org Downloads
As you can see here almost 40 million downloads of the OpenOffice.org software have been tracked at the main OpenOffice.org website. The number does not include many mirror sites, CD's bundled with magazines, CD's given out at trade shows, CD's shared with friends, Linux distros including OpenOffice.org, etc. Isn't this cool?

BTW, according to an online survey in which subscribers to the OpenOffice.org announcement mailing list participated, people have downloaded OpenOffice.org about six times on average. However, the same people also reported that they installed the software on nine machines on average. Thus, the actual deployment numbers could be even higher than the download numbers. It will be interesting to see what market share numbers the different analysts will calculate and estimate in the future.
( Apr 04 2005, 11:03:55 PM CEST ) Permalink

Just switch! - Business Intelligence with StarOffice
In order to show that StarOffice is more than just the plain office suite I thought it would be a good idea to talk about some existing plugins and extensions. Today, I will give a very brief overview about the StarOffice Add-in for Hyperion Essbase by Applied OLAP, Inc.

People who use the Hyperion Essbase business intelligence application might find it useful to know what the StarOffice Add-in looks like. The same applies to StarOffice users who are looking for a business intelligence solution. The following screenshots provide a brief overview.

After installing the add-in I have to sign on to a database:



After signing on and selecting a data cube I can retrieve the first data:



Now I can easily zoom into the data in order to retrieve more details:



For example, I can zoom into the year ...



... and then into the third quarter:



Then, I dig into the product data ...



... and use the Pivot feature ...



... to mirror/rotate the data:



The StarOffice Add-in for Hyperion Essbase is just one example that shows that StarOffice is an extensible product for which a growing number of tools and add-ons exists. In the future I will show you more extensions, e.g. a statistical tool that is used within Sun. Stay tuned!
( Apr 04 2005, 12:29:41 PM CEST ) Permalink

"Firefox Tests Beefed-up Popup Blocker"
"The Mozilla Foundation is testing a patch to its Firefox browser that puts the kibosh on popup ads which have been slipping through the open-source browser's blocker. In recent weeks, said the group, advertising networks, in particular Fastclick, have started exploiting the fact that Firefox's popup blocker doesn't stymie Flash and Java popups by default."
The full article can be found here.
( Apr 04 2005, 11:35:18 AM CEST ) Permalink

"Use XSLT to prepare XML for import into OpenOffice Calc"
"The popular open source office suite OpenOffice.org is XML-savvy at its core. It uses XML in its file formats and offers several XML-processing plug-ins, so you might expect it to have nice tools built in for importing XML data. Unfortunately, things are not so simple, and a bit of work is required to manipulate general XML into delimited text format in order to import the data into its spreadsheet component, Calc. This article offers a quick XSLT tool for this purpose and demonstrates the Calc import of records-oriented XML. In addition to learning a practical trick for working with Calc, you might also learn a few handy XSLT techniques for using dynamic criteria to transform XML."
The full article can be found here.
( Apr 04 2005, 11:33:37 AM CEST ) Permalink