Cybersite Consulting is involved heavily with the OpenOffice.org project at a number of levels and are able to offer their well-gained knowledge to our customers. One of the biggest areas of concern from our clients is that of having macros work after being brought across to OpenOffice. Their existing macros are written in the VBA form of Visual Basic, but this is not recognised by OpenOffice.org.

The process of converting the macros is simple for the language in that StarBasic, the language used by OpenOffice, is very similar to Visual Basic. The main difference with the languages is that of the object libraries. Visual Basic uses the Microsoft COM objects, whereas StarBasic uses OpenOffice's own inbuilt object libraries.

The conversion process is one of first converting the language over, and then converting the objects to something more appropriate for OpenOffice.org. Depending on the complexity of the macros, and in particular, the graphical content, this may or may not be a complex task. Most of this conversion process is done on Microsoft Excel workbooks and bringing them over to Calc.

Alternatively, with the newer version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org coming out, there is now the option to have macros written in a more familiar language to the client such as Java, C++ or Python instead. These macros will function just as effectively as the StarBasic macros, but can often be easier to read and easier to integrate into other software, if it is based on the same language in which the user is currently programming.

Cybersite Consulting is also able to develop any new macros that you may require to be used in OpenOffice.org. This could be either as a simple set of macros to make certain tasks easier, or it could be to implement features which are not yet available in the OpenOffice.org package. If you have any interests in adding features or simplifying a process, please don't hesitate to give us a call.