The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 3 (of 5) - How Open Office can thrash Excel, but is not

How Open Office can thrash Excel, but is not

Active X/OLE (whatever is called by MS now).

Imagine the possibilities. There are two worlds , the world of office applications (Word,Excel) and the world of database driven applications (anything from CRM to ERP to.....).

If open office would provide a nice active X layer to interact with it without launching the whole damn software(which it does now) and give samples for major programming languages, it can thrash excel in a few years time.

I was not able to use its active X implementation. Has someone succeeded?. And does anyone know the licening restrictions?

Kar
Thursday, January 15, 2004

It seems to work with VB, but works as a insertable object.
A Pity

Kar
Thursday, January 15, 2004

Apparently, the Mozilla team doesn't intend to support ActiveX controls because of the security risks, but someone on their team is developing an ActiveX version of the Mozilla browser.

http://www.iol.ie/~locka/mozilla/control.htm

No idea how fast that would translate in support for ActiveX controls in OpenOffice documents to connect to remote servers.

Frederic Faure
Thursday, January 15, 2004