OpenOffice macros

[Greg Lovern]

I've been asked twice in the last week whether I develop OpenOffice
spreadsheet macros, and one of my largest clients has expressed
interest before that.

Are many of you being asked to do OpenOffice macros? Any sense of the
market share for OpenOffice development compared to Excel development,
and where it seems to be headed?

Of the two people who asked about it last week, neither was really a
client. One was just a person I was chatting with who does web
development, and the other was an admin who was asked to attend a
meeting between me and a client.

For the large client that had expressed interest a while back, it
seemed to be fairly low priority for them compared to Excel. What's
interesting about that client re OpenOffice, though, is that the work
I do for them is used by thousands of their vendors, worldwide. So my
client's interest in OpenOffice is probably a direct result of their
vendors wanting to use OpenOffice.

My general impression is that OpenOffice macro documentation is poor,
and I would be surprised if it was a very thorough implementation for
a major spreadsheet automation project. I would not expect a major
project to go smoothly (yet).

I also noticed today that someone is working on getting Excel VBA
projects to run in OpenOffice. That would be nice, but I would be very
surprised if it ever works well for major projects.

Any thoughts?


Thanks,

Greg

 

[Tim Zych]

From what I have seen, Open Office today appears to be what Excel 95 was
(circa 1995). I hear about the occasional request to use something other
than Excel for some spreadsheet automation, and the business need is always
very simplistic.

IMO, there is just no comparison between Excel and any other spreadsheet
application on the planet. Look at the specs on the Microsoft website of
what the new version of Excel offers, and how it interoperates with other
apps (Office, .Net, SQL Server). Nothing else even comes close to it.

As for where Open Office automation is headed, I have not a clue, except I
can guess that Open Office automation is needed by businesses who have the
most simplistic of needs, which they may regret building in Open Office and
when the time comes to advance it to the next level, and they discover it
can't be done in that simplistic suite.

Just my $.02.