This year (2010) marks the 10th anniversary of a lot of things: Tuvalu’s entry into the United Nations, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the debut of Windows ME, for example. But much more importantly, 2010 marks OpenOffice.org’s tenth year of existence. To celebrate, here’s a look–literally, because there are a lot of screenshots–at how OOo has evolved throughout the decade.
OpenOffice’s history began on July 19, 2000, when Sun GPL’d the source code of StarOffice, which it had purchased a year earlier from the German company StarDivision. Granted, that means OOo won’t actually turn ten until this summer, but what kind of blogger would I be if I didn’t jump the gun from time to time?
Since then, OpenOffice has been one of the poster children of open-source development, demonstrating that free-software projects can produce high-quality products able to compete with commercial alternatives (the fact that dozens of fulltime programmers were paid to work on OpenOffice certainly didn’t hurt in its success).
It’s no stretch to say that without OOo, desktop Linux would likely remain a pipe dream for most people, since a huge amount of Ubuntu’s attraction and viability would be lost if it lacked a quality office suite. Sure, there are other great open-source office applications out there, like Abiword and KOffice, but they lack the cross-platform appeal and exhaustive functionality of OpenOffice.
Screenshots!
To trace OpenOffice’s evolution from its primordial days to the present, I took screenshots of various of its releases to see just how much has changed in a decade. Admittedly, the images below represent only OOo Writer, leaving out the office suite’s other important components. Apologies to fans of Impress, Calc, Math, Base and Draw, but I can only do so much in one day.
To start out with a view of OpenOffice from its nascent days, here’s version 1.0.3, released in May 2003 (it took a while for StarOffice to turn into OpenOffice). I installed the Windows build of the application in wine because I couldn’t find a Linux live CD old enough to include this version of OOo:
The basic features of the application that we know and love today were there in 2003, but its interface remained a bit bizarre and ugly.
For kicks, here’s the Windows installer for 1.0.3 (apologies for the jumbled text; the installer was in the middle of transitioning from one paragraph to the next):
Next up, here’s OOo 1.1.5, which debuted in September 2005 as the last member of the 1.x line:
Besides some prettier icons, not much had changed interface-wise since the beginning of the 1.x line.
Moving on, here’s the face of OpenOffice 2.0, which brought major improvements when it landed in October 2005. This is what it looked like in Ubuntu 6.06, Dapper Drake:
Personally speaking, this is the version of OpenOffice that facilitated my transition to the Free (software) world, since I first began experimenting with Linux in 2006. I vaguely recall using some 1.x version of OOo on a Mandriva live CD and being thoroughly unimpressed with its laggy, cluttered interface. The first time I tried OpenOffice 2.0, however, I felt confident that free software could work for me.
The 2.x series of OOo remained largely the same throughout its nearly four-year lifespan, with only incremental enhancements to its interface. The 3.x releases also didn’t include any major overhauls to the face of OpenOffice, but they did bring a few noticeable updates, such as those visible in this image of OOo 3.1 (released in May 2009) running on Ubuntu Karmic:
Of particular note is the zoom tool in the bottom-right corner of the main screen. Admittedly, this was a ripoff of Word 2007, but it’s a very useful feature.
And finally, to bring us all the way to the present, here’s OpenOffice 3.2 running in Ubuntu Lucid:
Beneath its visage, the OpenOffice 3.x series introduced important new functionality, such as out-of-the-box support for Office Open XML files–a.k.a. .docx, .xlxs, etc.
And on that note, of course, there have been plenty of other hugely significant improvements to OpenOffice over the years that aren’t obvious from the screenshots above. From its beginnings as a pretty bulky application, OOo has become steadily lighter and faster over the years. Its compatibility with Microsoft Office has also become nearly flawless, at least in Writer, which is a lot more than I can say about my first experience trying to open complex Word documents with OOo.
For the near future, OpenOffice development goals center on bringing Impress up to speed, so we’re not likely to see any remarkable new features in Writer soon.
All the same, I can’t think of much else I would like to see in Writer, short of a word processor that wrote my comprehensive exams for me. If only.
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I wish they would shrink down the menu buttons to like the size in the 1.0.3 screenshot on Windows you have!
That, and to include/improve/increase the ClipArt gallery.
“OpenOffice’s history began on July 19, 2010, when Sun GPL’d the source code of StarOffice…” Dude, July 19, 2010 is in the future! It should be July 19 2000 right? =)
I like OOo since version 3.0 but sometimes I pull my hair out trying to wrestle with some of its quirks.
Billy: right
Thanks for catching that. I updated the post.
I find it hilarious that in EVERY version above the horizontal scrollbar is visible. Just shows that that particular bug isn’t going anywhere any time soon…
@dragonbite – the button size can be adjusted as follows:
goto Tools -> Options and then click on ‘View’ in the OpenOffice.org section. Just set ‘Icon size and style’ to ‘small’, restart OOo and you’re good to go.
On topic – Yes, OOo has improved over the last decade, but if I compare OOo’s progress to MSO’s, I can’t help starting to feel a little depressed. And Office 2010 isn’t even out yet… Let’s hope the OOo Renaissance project produces some significant improvements.
“…if I compare OOo’s progress to MSO’s…”
OK, whine shields up.
MSO is making great progress, except that it is mostly in the wrong direction IMHO. I’ve used 2007 at work for over a year now, and *still* frequently turn to Google in search of the new location of a long-standing feature. (Repeat after me: You don’t insert a new slide in PowerPoint from the Insert tab…)
I nearly went blind last week trying to cross-hatch an area, only to discover on MSDN that the cross-hatching feature was *removed* in 2007.
And I really, really miss the ability to align objects with a single click (via a custom 2003 toolbar), instead of the tiring multi-click affair required in 2007. Why, exactly, can’t I change the toolbars to work the way *I* do?
OK, end whine. Deep breath.
I suppose that I’m arguing that change-for-change’s-sake is a *bad* thing, and I *like* the methodical pace of innovation in OOo. OOo is like coming home – it’s not shiny, but boy oh boy is it *productive*.
Just my $0.02 worth.
“Its compatibility with Microsoft Office has also become nearly flawless, at least in Writer”.
For certain values of “nearly”
Come on Christopher, compatibility with Microsoft Word is horrible. I don’t remember the last time (if ever) a .doc or .docx was flawlessly converted and opened by OOo Writer.
I really don’t care for open source having to be forced to be compatible with Microsoft. Microsoft don’t want it to be compatibled and rather lock-in its users. The irony is that now MS have to be the other way around to compete with open source: http://www.itworld.com/open-source/101547/microsoft-says-its-contentious-relationship-open-source-changing.
But you can always use Go-oo.org, which is the Novell version of OOo. It should be more compatible.
Oh and screw docx.
[...] Ten Years of OpenOffice.org This year (2010) marks the 10th anniversary of a lot of things: Tuvalu’s entry into the United Nations, Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, and the debut of Windows ME, for example. But much more importantly, 2010 marks OpenOffice.org’s tenth year of existence. To celebrate, here’s a look–literally, because there are a lot of screenshots–at how OOo has evolved throughout the decade. [...]
OpenOffice and other free open source software are still not compatible when using their own document formats like ODF.
When creating a document in ODF and opening it in another open source office suite or word processor, all the formatting have been corrupted. Try that with MS office and you will see why most people still like to use it.
Have you ever considered SSuite Office as a free alternative to MS Office?
Their software also doesn’t need to run on Java or .NET, like MS Office and so many open source office suites.
http://www.ssuitesoft.com
GeorgeP
A. How many open source word processors do you use? Why not use Openoffice for everything? Of course .doc’s work in (most) msoffice versions, it’s the same program! With that said, .docx doesn’t work in older versions….
B. How is SSuite better? Besides the crappy looking website, when I looked at screenshots, all the icons on the toolbar looked like they were stolen from word 97! Also it only runs on MS windows, so whats the point of it not using java and.net?
[...] Ten Years of OpenOffice.org [...]
Open Office is terrible.. like every other open anything .. sucktastic.
Blade, don’t be angry at an app that you aren’t ready for, learn to use computers first then start judging the applications.
Kron
# Blade Says:
March 21st, 2010 at 7:31 pm
Open Office is terrible.. like every other open anything .. sucktastic.
———
I bet this dude (or lady) has barely ever used OpenOffice or Linux. I bet he/she has been chained to Microsoft stuff for so long than the existence of a good suitable alternative is a “pipe dream” to them. Sad, sad…such close-mindedness and ignorance
I just found out recently why my openoffice calc in Ubuntu had 1 million+ rows, while my oo calc in Windows had only 65,000+ rows – when both were in version 3.20.
Ubuntu’s OO repositories apparently point to a branch of OO maintained by a different set of people (www.go-oo.org) while the original OO remains in http://www.openoffice.org/
Nice thing about the go-oo version, aside from being able to read more than 65k of rows, is that it can run VBA macros even in Ubuntu! It rocks!
a very enlightening read on openoffice – http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2007-10-02.html