Don’t get me wrong. I like the concept of OpenOffice, but just like many other open source projects (not all of them mind you), someone could teach these people about actually meeting user’s needs (and not some idealistic view of simply creating an “open standard”).
Today I had to open a SXW file (an OpenOffice Text Document) on a windows box today and found that nothing currently installed could open it. I didn’t really care too much for the formatting, but I desperately needed the content and opening it up in a notepad-like utility proved fruitless. I was thus forced to download the only “open” office that I could actually view this with (at least that I know of, I could be wrong).
Much to my dismay (not to mention distaste) I was forced to download a whopping 64MB file just to be able to view a 20KB file. I was lucky that I had access to broadband as it would have been super painful over dial-up (oh, yes people still use this!). As a user whose goal was to simply view the raw text in a document, I would have liked to either:
- Open up the document, ignore what special markup the formatting was in and be able to extract the raw data; or
- Be able to download the only application that I needed to view the file with.
Isn’t it just XML? Can’t you extract all the text with a tiny XPath expression?
Yeah, it’s just a bunch of XML files, CSS and images in a JAR-like file. You should be able to drag and drop them to, say, WinZip, look at the XML files and find the ones which have the actual content. OpenOffice produces some nearly understandable XML, too, which is pretty good if you have to work with those files programmatically.
Well there you go, I’m glad I showed my ignorance, because at least I know better now. It’s a shame I didn’t know about that yesterday and I could have saved myself some time. It would definitely be handy if you have to do something programatically with it. Thanks for the info!
That still doesn’t resolve the need of being able to download just the application you may want to use (Openoffice writer is not too bad functinoality wise, but Impress is still way behind Powerpoint. And now only if they could make it look nice too…)
Ummmm sorry, but is it really the fault of the open office community that other ‘office’ application cannot be arsed to build in open office support to their products? I think not! Also do you think M$ are that keen on adding Open Office support to Word et al? Think about it!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well “M$” included WordPerfect, 123, and other stuff. How about writing a wee little plugin for Word?
http://www.google.com, search for “sxw viewer“. First hit looks commercial, ignore that. Second hit is Krusader which simply must be part of KDE with that awful spelling, you’re on Windows, so ignore that. Third hit is a longish IBM article and I’m in a rush, skip that one.
Fourth hit is in foreign (.hu: Hungarian?) but contains an link to http://visioo-writer.tuxfamily.org and that name looks hopeful. Click through to the English page then download. Terrible spelling but I suspect English is their third language so I’ll let ’em off.
It’s a few hundred Kb of Python, but seems to come in some sort of Windows EXE format that weighs in at 3Mb. Presumably includes the interpreter too, bloating it a bit.
Anyway, this took me about 30 seconds in all. No idea if it’s any good, of course. I’m sure more dedicated googling could turn it up.
Yeah, I’m not saying that M$ is not making life easier for the open office community. It’s a poor reflection on their company not embracing open standards (not that there is anything new there). I agree it would be nice if they at least provided a plugin for viewing these files.
In defence of MS, at least they provide free, light-weight viewers for their Office suite for the 1% of the world* who don’t use MS Office.
*Statistic may have been made up on the spot and may not entirely accurate.
Shame on the person for distributing an SXW file instead of PDF 🙂
Henrik Just’s Writer2LaTeX utility looks pretty groovy: a Java program that transforms OOo Writer and Calc documents to XHTML … also includes LaTeX and BibTeX support for those poor fools who are yet to shake their addiction to that ugly format
As someone who came across this page while looking for an SXW viewer, I have to agree with Patrick that installing Open Office is not a good solution to the problem of reading SXW files. Neither is VisiOO, as it only works on the current hard drive. Thus, some sort of lightweight viewer is still needed.