OpenOffice2GoogleDocs a bust at the moment

I’ve been using Ubuntu on and off since I’ve been rather busy with finals and financial planning for the new year. There’s a bug with Ubuntu that sometimes leads the wifi to be rather unreliable and causes me to not be able to reconnect if I sleep/hibernate or if I get kicked off accidentally. Of course, it is not something that is really reliably reproducible (now THAT’s alliteration!) so I’ve decided to do my work for school exclusively on Vista since the wifi rarely gets into a wonky state. Also I’ve abandoned SimCity Societies. It’s got a lot of niceness about it, but it’s just not fun. The game is really way too easy and gets boring fast. I’ve since picked up SimCity 4 Deluxe and have been enjoying the oldish-skool way SimCity goodness–unfortunately this requires being over in Vista-land.

I did some experimentation with a tip Luke left on my post regarding VMWare booting my Vista partition but ran into the same crashing issue upon boot with VMWare Workstation that I did with the hack-ish method of getting Vista to bootup with VMWare Player. Oh well, I suppose I’ll setup a WinXP SP3 and/or Vista virtual disk that I can use with some manner of virtualization tool on Ubuntu. If I find it fits my needs performance and stability wise, then Vista will walk the proverbial plank on my M1330.

The good news is that I’ve completely kicked the Microsoft Office habit and have moved over to Google Docs and Open Office completely. I found the OpenOffice2GoogleDocs plugin but have been unable to get it to function with my GDocs account since the plugin will only display files that I have hidden in my GDocs…funky. Nevertheless, my financial tracking spreadsheet that I’ve been carrying around for many years will be retired at the end of the year and will be replaced with a new set of Google Spreadsheets that I will (hopefully) be able to seemlessly use with OpenOffice since I’ve hit upon performance issues with GS when it comes to having large sheets open. I’m sure the big G knows about these issues and is working on a fix…I only wish they would put an intern on helping out the OO2GD guy and get that all locked up. Of course, my time is rather limited as I do way too much driving back an forth between Berkeley and Mountain View.

Anyway, I was bumming around del.icio.us and found a great set of tips for the n00b like myself. Unfortunately, most of the tips are for those who are able to run compiz fusion (I am not able to do this)….sigh. Oh well, they’re nice to know about for when I finally get an updated graphics driver for my laptop:

Eight features you didn’t know about in Ubuntu « Richard’s linux, web design and e-learning collection

OpenOffice-Fu

So now that things are looking rather stable on Ubuntu, I figure I’d get cozy with OpenOffice.org.  I currently have 2.3 installed and the OxygenOffice extensions added to it.  So far, I’m a happy camper.  I think the big test will come when I try to write a longer document like a research paper or something in Writer and migrate my master budget spreadsheet over to it.  At any rate, I can already see why Microsoft must be shaking in their boots.  They’re under siege by two competitors (OO.org and Goog docs) that are both free and for the most part, get the job done.  I’d really love to see some sort of syncing between OO and Goog docs though.  Not sure how this would work, but I do know that I need something offline for Goog docs and hope they figure out something soon (gears, anyone?).

OpenOffice.org Training, Tips, and Ideas