Alexandro Colorado

OpenOffice.org is a powerful application, yet opendocument is aiming to be a standard it should be on not so powerful applications to be a true standard. Mozilla Firefox might hide the key to mak OpenDocuments the true standard, not because FF is not powerful but because FF is greatly deployed and when web 2.0 meets OpenDocuments we can start aiming a new era where information from office documents meet the web ambiance.

A new area of business might be a three level tier service, when you integrate HTML-XML-OpenDocuments and start making a three level service (blog, cms, webservices). When you make your OpenOffice.org on your desktop, text editors generating opendocuments, and finally a fast transformers that make OpenDocument Webpages.

Browsing the web on opendocuments might be a hassle but making the web writable might be a cool thing to have. Is hard to explain yet this conceptual web but merging the deployments of rich internet applications, desktop applications with web-services and Opendocuments interacting with the services.

On other news I have been doing some video-tutorails which have proven to be well accepted in the community. Some even have been able to jump into this video tutorial train and as I see more and more people getting interesting in using this medium to solve problems and also explain the use of openoffice.org.

So the OOoCAST has hit a break, almost officially stoping, basically laizyness has been the reason. I have been involved in other things like the video tutorials and also with actual real work.

I think I will launch a series of OOoCASTs so I assure that I will be delivering more on time. Yet it also look a lil bit demotivating that I am not getting as much hits as before. I hope I can get more people excited about the idea of delivering a great podcast.

OOoCAST might be sooner this week since there seem to be more news available. Since I dont want this ideas to get lost in the weekend. I should make a list about the stuff that happened this week:

• Interview with Aridane from Sun\’s Translation League
• Issues on the OpenDocument XML
• Interest on the libodt project
• Contact with the \’movers\’ from Spain
• Promoting OpenOffice.org in FLISOL
• Klick project and OpenOffice.org
• Difference between MSO and OOo
• Reaching the universities as a ground foundation

Most of the OpenOffice.org people has been lacking on their marketing efforts. I have had a more forward approach but I will start changing my tune. Now I am going to be proactive, that means that I will only informs things I will do not things I want to be done. I will start contacting with Leo Laporte and other Podcasters and start giving interviews about the community about OpenOffice.org.

I am really looking forward to finally master all the Writer tools availables and i all this time there is no other tools that I have kept more ignorant than Variables.

Variables are somehow complex but powerful automation tools for complex text documents. However this variables are not really studied even by power users. The interface might look a bit intimidating which causes users to simply not even understand the whole concept of the tool.

So far I haven\’t been able to understand but at least I will try to sumarize the interface and see if people might take it further.

Variables

Variables:Variables focus on the management of this ones and it can be either mathematical or character based. There are regularvariables and page variables.

User fields and DDE fields also are special customizable fields. DDE is similar to OLE and means Dynamic Data Exchange. The help file says:

Inserts a DDE link into the document, that you can update as often as you want through the assigned name.

The management of this variables are still something that I ignore.

Reference

The reference module uses 3 main options, Set reference, insert bookmark and bookmarks. With just a name field and different formats.

Reference might have something to do with the variable tab since it seems they are interchangable, meaning that the reference fields will be available to use use the variables tab.

Functions

Depending on the field type that you select, you can assign conditions to certain functions. For example, you can define a field that executes a macro when you click the field in the document, or a condition that, when met, hides a field. You can also define placeholder fields that insert graphics, tables, frames and other objects into your document when needed.

This looks like the most interesting and dynamic type of Variables this surely add functionality to the document however the interfac is a bit awckward.

The functions seems to be a higher set of macro management which makes the potential of this interface quite powerful. I wonder if power users will get their curiosity in shape to develop things on top of this visual framework.

Hopefully I will get more time and information to do this myself.