open office – Grey Panthers Savannah

Resolving the problem with inserting formulas in OpenOffice with Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy)

gpanther — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:04:00 +0000

While writing some text (under Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy with OpenOffice 2.4) I wanted to insert a formula and much to my surprise the Insert -> Object -> Formula way grayed (greyed?) out. My first reaction was that this is probably because I was missing Java (or more precisely: OpenOffice didn’t recognize my installation of the OpenJDK 6). So I tried to configure it, to no avail. I kept getting the error message: no java installation was found in the given directory. Not to developers: it would be really nice to specify what file you are exactly looking for in the directory, so that I can search my HD and located the correct folder!

I solved the Java issue by installing the package openoffice.org-java-common via apt-get, but this still didn’t solve my formula problem:

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-java-common

Finally I found some posts on the ubuntu forums which indicated that all you have to do is install the correct package:

sudo apt-get install openoffice.org-math

This solved the problem, but begs the question, why wasn’t this package installed by default? I suppose that someone (Sun? Ubuntu? Debian?) was following the Microsoft Office practice of not installing the Equation editor, but this is the one optional component I always installed when I used Microsoft Office.

OpenOffice.org dictionaries

gpanther — Mon, 01 Jan 2007 19:11:00 +0000

When writing it certainly helps a lot to have spell check in that given language. An important, yet not very widely known, detail of OpenOffice.org is that it has dictionaries for many languages. Compare this with Microsoft Office: if you bought the English version, you probably got only the English spell check module. If you need spell checks for other languages, you must buy them separately, and many times you must hunt around for vendors who make such a thing, because Microsoft doesn’t provide it. And even if you found a third party vendor you have to ask yourself: is this software compatible with my version of MS Office? Until now I had only good experience with compatibility (installed dictionaries / spell check meant for Office 2000 on Office 2003), but the upcoming Office 2007 might change this. And if your vendor is not ready to support it, you’re out of luck.

Back to OpenOffice: the easiest way to download and install language modules (spell check, thesaurus, …) is to use the wizard.

To start it, choose File -> Wizards -> Install new dictionaries.
If you have a personal firewall, you should enable temporary (but only temporary!) OpenOffice to access the Internet (probably you will be prompted automatically when it’s the case).
Click on a language and then click the big gray button :). The language you select at this step is the language of the user interface you will be presented with, not the language of the spell check that will be installed, so choose at your will, but it probably helps if you speak that language
The first thing that will happen (most probably) is that the wizard sees that there is an updated version of it, and will ask you if it should download it. You should answer yes and select a folder where the new version should be saved.
While downloading the interface will freeze, because the wizard isn’t multithreader (don’t be too hard on it, it’s implemented in some macro language which doesn’t have the constructs necessary to implement multi-threading). Be patient, since the download isn’t too big (around 120 KB). After the new version has been downloaded, it will be automatically opened. Again, chose a language (for the user interface). If you want to open the updated version at a later time, just open the downloaded document (named DicOOo-[its version]). Be sure to enable macros for it because the wizard is written in them.
Now select the modules you want to install. You can select multiple ones by holding down the Ctrl key and clicking on them.
Let it download the modules (again, the interface freezes, be patient) and install them.
Restart OpenOffice and you got your new spell check modules installed

One final tip: many of the modules are not as high quality as some professional spell checks written for MS Office, however they are free. The trick which I found useful is to right-click on the words the spell check marks as incorrect and see if the dictionary suggests an other version of the word. For example, I written the word in plural and the dictionary suggests it in singular. If this is the case, you can bee 95% sure that you didn’t spell it wrong, just the dictionary doesn’t include it.

Wisdom of the crowds? Maybe not

gpanther — Mon, 02 Oct 2006 05:46:00 +0000

Yesterday I’ve spotted the following article on the digg frontpage: PacMan written entirely in Excel. On the page it linked too I’ve found two games written in Excel and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications – the stuff macro viruses are written in). What is interesting that as of the time of me writing this there is one and only one security related comment (toward the very end of the page) and even that is just complaining about the fact that it doesn’t work for him, because his security levels are set too high. So is a little fun worth running arbitrary code on your machine? It seems that for many it is.

If you still feel the urge to open these files, at least do the following precautions:

First try opening it in OpenOffice.org so if it an other 0-day for Excel, maybe it will crash OO / give a warning about the file being invalid (this is based on the fact that it’s very hard to write exploits that work across different programs)
Now set your macro security to high in Excel (Tools -> Options -> Security -> Macro Security) and open the file. Open the Visual Basic Editor (Alt + F11) and browse through the source code.
If you didn’t find any suspicious stuff, set the macro security back to medium, open the files, enable the macros and enjoy the game (hopefully you are not running as administrator).

The direct link to the files is:

The version which I’ve downloaded and look through seemed clean (disclaimer: I haven’t done an in-depth analysis on them, so you should check for yourself). In case the archives get swapped out, the ones I’ve looked through have the hashes (courtesy of fileformat.info):

Size 297640
MD5 08ffc69f00aa3704e98f62685a980f65
SHA-1 e6e2967c0c4c6e116e601765d02b84aace387a8f
Size 198209
MD5 14092473d3b60a602af67938653099cd
SHA-1 f0adc08f092684c04e4cd87dae8bd95b3f01bfc8