----- Original Message ----- From: "Jacqueline McNally" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, September 21, 2005 9:26 AM Subject: [Marketing] integrating OOo with other "things"
> Hello > > Is there page other than http://development.openoffice.org/#GENERAL that > lists other organisations that have developed add-ons, plug-ins or > integrated OOo into their products ? We're not ready to be listed on the page, but are moving that way. I thought I'd write up some detail by way of a "mini case sudy". One of our Group Companies makes a specialist add-in for Excel that sells for UKP several thousand. This was, until recently, written entirely in VBA. Last month, we completed the migration to two-tier - a core compiled DLL, and a set of "wrapper" scripts to call the DLL functions from VBA. A major part of the motivation is to give cross-application comptability. The next part of the process is to port the wrappers to OOo and/or StarOffice. This is judged to be about 1000% easier than porting the entire code base across :-) The downside is that it won't give us O/S portability - only Spreadsheet portability on the Windows platform. The part of the code that may NOT be ported soon is the bit that creates a completely new menu in Excel to give access to over 100 market-sector-specific functions. This isn't something we've yet looked at within OOo - is there a tutorial on "creating menu items programmatically?". The other thing that we have Excel-specific code for is our own version of the "function wizard" which gets around some nasty limitations of the MS function wizard. Office 12 is actually likely to be a major crossroads for us as a commercial add-in developer. The existing codebase is cross-compatable with Excel 97, 2000 and XP. Office 12 makes life a lot more complex, because much of our "added value" is around the aforementioned menu structure, and Office 12 is doing odd things to the menu structure. If truth be told, NONE of our clients has even raised OOo compatability as being on their roadmap. It's a tricky job juggling commercial resource for which there's no perceived demand coming from our marketing people. It's, of course, a chicken/egg issue. Obviously, the kind of clients who will spend thousands on an Excel add-in are not particularly fussed at the costs of Excel itself, so we're not an obvious target market for OOo. Regards, Mark --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
