Go-oo (also Go-Open Office; previously called ooo-build) is a discontinued free

office suite Productivity software (also called personal productivity software or office productivity software) is application software used for producing information (such as documents, presentations, worksheets, databases, charts, graphs, digital paintin ...

which started as a set of patches for

OpenOffice.org OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice being considered mostly d ...

, then later became an independent fork of OpenOffice.org with a number of enhancements, sponsored by

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

. ooo-build was started in 2003. The go-oo.org

domain name In the Internet, a domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority, or control. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services, and more. ...

was being used by 2005. The first separate release of Go-oo was 2.3.0, in October 2007. Go-oo was discontinued in favour of

LibreOffice LibreOffice () is a free and open-source office productivity software suite developed by The Document Foundation (TDF). It was created in 2010 as a fork of OpenOffice.org, itself a successor to StarOffice. The suite includes applications ...

in September 2010. Go-oo had better support for the

Microsoft Office Microsoft Office, MS Office, or simply Office, is an office suite and family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. The first version of the Office suite, announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at CO ...

OOXML Office Open XML (also informally known as OOXML) is a zipped, XML-based file format developed by Microsoft for representing spreadsheets, charts, presentations and word processing documents. Ecma International standardized the initial version ...

file formats than OpenOffice.org, including write support, as well as other enhancements that had not been accepted upstream. Many

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

advocates worried that Go-oo was a Novell effort to incorporate

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

technologies that might be vulnerable to

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

claims, and that the effort legitimized OOXML which harmed actual document compatibility. The hybrid PDF export (

PDF Portable document format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe Inc., Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, computer hardware, ...

that includes original source documents), Sun Presentation Minimizer, and other functionalities were directly available in Go-oo. Later analysis of Novell's contract with Microsoft show that Go-oo feature compatibility was intentionally limited.

in later distributions, like Debian Stretch, uses

Java Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...

instead of

Mono Mono may refer to: Biology * Infectious mononucleosis, "the kissing disease" * Monocyte, a type of leukocyte (white blood cell) * Monodactylidae, members of which are referred to as monos Technology and computing * Mono (audio), single-c ...

. The package branded "OpenOffice.org" in many popular

Linux distribution A Linux distribution, often abbreviated as distro, is an operating system that includes the Linux kernel for its kernel functionality. Although the name does not imply product distribution per se, a distro—if distributed on its own—is oft ...

s was in fact Go-oo, not the upstream OpenOffice.org code.Go-oo derivates in Linux distributions

History

The ooo-build patchset was started at

Ximian Ximian, Inc. (previously called Helix Code and originally named International Gnome Support) was an American company that developed, sold and supported application software for Linux and Unix based on the GNOME platform. It was founded by Miguel ...

in 2003, before that company was bought by Novell. This was originally because Sun was slow to accept outside patches to OpenOffice.org, even from corporate partners. Most Linux distributions used ooo-build rather than OpenOffice.org upstream code directly. Since the end of 2007, various Linux distributions, including SUSE in its various forms, Debian and Ubuntu, had cooperated in maintaining Go-oo as a large set of patches to the upstream OpenOffice.org that, for various technical or bureaucratic reasons, had not been accepted (or, in some cases, even submitted) upstream. Others also offered Windows builds based on Go-oo, ''e.g.''

OxygenOffice OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, is a discontinued open-source software, open-source office suite. Active successor projects include LibreOffice (the most actively developed) and Collabora Online, with Apache OpenOffice bei ...

Professional and OpenOffice.org Novell Edition. Michael Meeks, from

(who also worked on OpenOffice.org and

GNOME A gnome () is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors, including those of modern fantasy literature. They are typically depict ...

), said that the differentiation was done because

Sun Microsystems Sun Microsystems, Inc., often known as Sun for short, was an American technology company that existed from 1982 to 2010 which developed and sold computers, computer components, software, and information technology services. Sun contributed sig ...

wanted to preserve the right to sell the code on a proprietary basis, as they did for

IBM Lotus Symphony IBM Lotus Symphony is a discontinued software suite, suite of applications for creating, editing, and sharing text, spreadsheet, presentations, and other documents and Web browser, browsing the World Wide Web. It was first distributed as commer ...

. Sun was accused of not accepting contributions from the community.Can IBM save OpenOffice.org from itself?
Go-oo encouraged outside contributions, with rules similar to those later adopted for LibreOffice. In September 2010,

The Document Foundation The Document Foundation (TDF) is a non-profit organization that supports the development of LibreOffice, a free and open-source office suite. Established in 2010 by members of the OpenOffice.org community, TDF aims to provide a vendor-neutral p ...

announced

as a fully separate fork of OpenOffice.org. Go-oo was deprecated in favour of LibreOffice and Go-oo changes were incorporated into LibreOffice. LibreOffice and

Collabora Online Collabora Online is an open source online office suite based on LibreOffice, enabling web-based collaborative real-time editing of word processing documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and vector graphics. Optional apps are available for deskto ...

are current descendants of Go-oo.

Versions

Stable builds of Go-oo were usually available a couple of days after OpenOffice.org stable builds. Windows builds had a different last number in the version's number than Linux builds. A stable version for Macintosh computers was available.

Differences between OpenOffice.org and Go-oo

Advantages

* Go-oo works faster in some operations than OpenOffice.org. This makes it perform faster than OpenOffice.org. * The OpenOffice.org 3.0 installation no longer includes a large number of dictionaries for writing aids (spell checker, hyphenation and thesaurus), as this impacted application performance. Localised releases may include dictionaries for particular primary and secondary languages. Dictionaries are now available as downloadable extensions, separately for each language. Go-oo installation from version 3 on includes dictionaries in many languages, as a single extension, being a part of installation files. Inclusion of a large number of dictionaries in a default installation may affect performance. * Better

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free software cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and proprietary s ...

integration. * Better Chinese font rendering.

Features

* Go-oo includes 3-D transition effects in Presentations (Linux). * Use of the GStreamer multimedia framework in Linux for multimedia content; * Use of

framework for UNO automation, allowing automation from other languages such as C#, Boo, and so on. * Go-oo uses a combo box in place of the zoom button in stock OpenOffice.org. Newer OOo 2.x feature releases have a clickable status bar item for a zoom menu. A zoom slider was introduced to OOo 3.0 Writer and later added to OOo 3.1 Calc, Impress and Draw components. * Go-oo Calc can set color for sheet tab label. * Go-oo Calc 2.4.x has a built in function called "Solver". It is a little different from the Solver function of the same name, which is available from OpenOffice.org 3.0. OpenOffice.org 2.4.x has no Solver.

Filetype support

* Go-oo can write OOXML files, and not just read them. ;Import * Go-oo 2.4.x has built in support for opening Office Open XML files and brings this function also for Windows 98/ME users. (Note: OpenOffice.org 3.x has built in support for opening Office Open XML documents, but those versions of OOo cannot be installed under

Windows 98 Windows 98 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the second operating system in the 9x line, as the successor to Windows 95. It was Software ...

/ ME.) * VBA macro support; *

Microsoft Works Microsoft Works is a discontinued office suite, productivity software suite developed by Microsoft and sold from 1987 to 2009. Its core functionality includes a word processor, a spreadsheet and a database management system. Later versions have a ...

filetype import; *

Lotus Word Pro Lotus Word Pro is a word processor produced by IBM's Lotus Software group for use on Microsoft Windows-compatible computers and on IBM OS/2 Warp. Word Pro was available as part of the Lotus SmartSuite office suite. Word Pro was based upon Ami Pro ...

import; * Go-oo Draw has built-in functionality to open SVG files. OpenOffice Draw requires an extension.SVG Import Filter
- OpenOffice.org wiki * The PDF Import extension is included by default in Go-oo 3.0. * Improved EMF drawing; *

WordPerfect WordPerfect (WP) is a word processing application, now owned by Alludo, with a long history on multiple personal computer platforms. At the height of its popularity in the 1980s and early 1990s, it was the market leader of word processors, disp ...

Graphics import. ;Save/Export * From version 3.0 on, Go-oo can save password-protected XLS files. It uses only one basic encryption method compatible with many spreadsheet applications (for example

Gnumeric Gnumeric is a spreadsheet program that is part of the GNOME Free Software Desktop Project. Gnumeric version 1.0 was released on 31 December 2001. Gnumeric is distributed as free software under the GNU General Public License; it is intended to ...

). * Go-oo 3.x can save Office Open XML files such as docx, xlsx, pptx by using Novell OpenXML Converter. Because Go-oo for Windows and OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows are similar, Novell OpenXML Converter can work with Go-oo 3.x.

Disadvantages

* Go-oo localizations are available only as language packs to the English installation. Translations of the user interface and dictionaries for different languages in Go-oo are in some cases not the same as in OpenOffice.org.

Other differences

* Go-oo uses "

Tango Tango is a partner dance and social dance that originated in the 1880s along the Río de la Plata, the natural border between Argentina and Uruguay. The tango was born in the impoverished port areas of these countries from a combination of Arge ...

style" application shortcut icons, quick launch icons and icons for associated files.OpenOffice.org 3.0 icons
* Go-oo installation files were usually available for download a couple of days after OpenOffice.org builds were released. * Go-oo for Windows was similar to OpenOffice.org Novell Edition for Windows. For example, Go-oo has version 3.0-19 and Novell Edition 3.0-22. * The first time OpenOffice.org is started, a wizard opens to guide a user through the setting of user name and the registration process. This wizard is disabled in Go-oo.

References

External links

* Last version of go-oo.org {{Office suites Open-source office suites Office suites for macOS Unix software Office suites for Windows Formerly proprietary software Free PDF software Free software programmed in C++ Portable software OpenOffice Office suites