Multi-Lat™ is pleased to announce the availability of our spreadsheet for the Sun Microsystem’s OpenOffice.org Calc suite of products. Moving to the OpenOffice platform (formerly known as the StarOffice suite) eliminates the compatibility problem with different releases of Excel and maintain compatibility with most Excel spreadsheet functions as well as the industry standard XML based file format.
While this may delay the first beta release, we found it to be a reasonable alternative that can provide a platform that has been available in public domain since 1988. Multi-lat™ was originally written in Excel for Office 2007. Problems occured when saving files in earlier formats. Sun Microsystem’s OpenOffice.org Calc is fuly compatible with all version of Excel up to and including Excel 2003.
Multi-Lat™ will be available in either the native OpenOffice Calc ODS format or in Excel XLS or XLT format for those who wish to remain with Microsoft Excel 97 or later. This move insures compatibility and provides an affordable alternative that is under constant development to keep up with the industry demands.
The following project statement is found on the OpenOffice.org website located at http://about.openoffice.org/index.html. I highly recommend you familiarize yourself with their software as it is an alternative to the commercial Office Suites that are presently available.
To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format.
StarDivision, the original author of
the StarOffice suite of software, was founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. It was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999 and StarOffice 5.2 was released in June of 2000. Future versions of
StarOffice software, beginning with 6.0, have been built using the OpenOffice.org source, APIs, file formats, and reference implementation. Sun continues to sponsor development on OpenOffice.org and is the primary contributor of code to OpenOffice.org.
CollabNet hosts the website infrastructure for development of the product and helps manage the project.The OpenOffice.org source code includes the technology which Sun Microsystems has been developing for the future versions of
StarOffice(TM) software. The source is written in C++ and delivers language-neutral and scriptable functionality, including Java(TM) APIs. This source technology introduces the next-stage architecture, allowing use of the suite as separate applications or as embedded components in other applications. Numerous other features are also present including XML-based file formats based on the vendor-neutral
OpenDocument standard from
OASIS and other resources.
Foundations of Office Productivity in a Networked Age, a
white paper from Sun available on this site, presents a general outline for the technology roadmap. There you will find outlined the design of the source. However, because of the nature of open source, the community at large is ultimately responsible for realizing OpenOffice.org’s promises.
–>A FAQ addresses the changing differences between OpenOffice.org and StarOffice.
OpenOffice.org uses the
LGPL (GNU Lesser General Public License). For documentation and website content not intended to be included in the product, we use the
Public Documentation License (PDL). Our
License page provides more information on our licenses and on our policies regarding the application of those licenses. As well, our we have several
FAQs dealing with licensing.”The links above will launch your browser for additional information and the location of the download site for the OpenOffice suite of products.
~ by structuralist on February 11, 2008.
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