Frequently Asked Questions

We are starting the equivalent of a computer for you. To do this requires computer servers and maintenance of the infrastructure. This is what we ask you for payment.

We'd ask, “why do you have to pay so little?” When you think about the costs for a PC and the administration it takes to keep everything going, we're amazed that the cost is already so low.

First, we need to start a whole computer on your behalf. Open Office is a very large desktop application that requires the resources of a full computer to operate properly. As when you boot up your home computer, this takes at least 2-4 minutes. We keep computers running on stand by so that most users won't see this except occasionally when we're doing maintenance or we have a large number of users suddenly come onto the system.

Second, for the first time you use this application on any computer/browser combination we need to download an approximately 4 Megabyte browser plug-in to support communications between your browser and the remote computer. This is first time cost only or when we need (infrequently) to upgrade the browser plug-in. This is a first time cost only. The next time this step won't be required.

Third, we need to establish a secure connection between the web browser and the remote computer. This typically takes up to a minute depending on exactly the state of the various computers and the network latency. This step will always be required.

In total, it may be many minutes before actually being able to type in the application. Typically we expect to take up to a minute most times. While this is longer than typically web applications, because we are doing more than what a typically web application is able to do we believe it is worth the wait.

The infrastructure is based on a remote desktop tool and distance from the servers does matter somewhat. The main servers which will dictate this performance are located in the eastern United States. We've had reports of very nearly desktop level response times for people in the US and Canada. We've also had reports of acceptable though not spectacular performance for users in Europe. If you're farther away then that, the performance may not currently be acceptable.

We do have the ability to expand our server farms to the European and Far East locations to reduce that latency drag. We have that on our roadmap but currently have no date for that. Let us know if that is important to you.

Not in the form of royalities or obligated payments. Again Open Office® is fully Open Source and we are not obligated to pay them directly. However, we feel that their program is excellent and worth investing in. As such we feel it is important to financially support their work and the set of open source packages used to support this site. As such we donate a portion of our net proceeds to these efforts.

In general any modern brower on a modern operating system like Internet Explorer 6+, Firefox 2+, Opera 9+ or Chrome on a Windows or Linux system with a modern version of Java installed will work. While the minimum that will work is Java Runtime Engine 1.4.2 installed on the computer, it is highly recommended that Java 1.6 update 10 or above is used.

More specifically the system requirements for Java are as follows:

• 1.4.2 for all systems,
• 1.6.0 update 10 for Windows Vista and Windows 7,
• 1.6.0 update 11 for Chrome browser (independent of OS version)

In some cases on Vista, ooanywhere.com reports an out-of-date Java version when in fact a newer version has been installed. In those cases, check for and disable older versions by going to the Control Panel, opening the Java Control Panel and on the Java tab check the Java Runtime Environment Settings by clicking on the View button. Unchecking older Java versions and leaving the newer version should correct the problem.

Mac support is limited to the latest version of the Mac OS only and even then we have seen problems. If you experience problems, we please ask you to report them. Of course if you can not use the service we will happily refund any money you have paid.

You will need to allow XWin and Java through the Windows Firewall if you wish to use this service.

We are currently technically not able to access the printers on your local machine. We're working on that. As a work around, when you click on Print within any of the programs in the OpenOffice.org suite and select the printer called "Printer" an Adobe(c) .pdf file is rendered and placed in the Printed Documents folder in the file manager. From that directory, you can then download the .pdf to your local machine and print natively.

NOTE: For users of Adobe PDF Reader 9.1.2, we've seen cases where an error message saying "The document could not be printed." and then "There were no pages selected to print." and then failing to print. We have not been able to consistently reproduce this to date and recommend the work around of upgrading to version 9.2

You can't disable the behavior, but you can dock the toolbars. Click on the title area of the toolbar and drag it toward any side of the main window until you see a thick black outline appear. Release the mouse button. The toolbar will be fixed at that location when it appears.

Instead of clicking on the big red X, click instead on the little grey x within the window. This is a quirk of the presentation method that is not readily changeable but easy to work around once you know.