FAQ

General questions

What is EuroOffice?

EuroOffice is the name of a free and open-source OpenOffice.org derivative and a set of accompanying free and non-free extensions. Almost all of the extensions support OpenOffice.org as well as EuroOffice.

How is EuroOffice different?

Some of our current and future extensions require functionality that OpenOffice.org does not currently provide. We implement these in EuroOffice and hope that OpenOffice.org will one day take these changes and integrate them to OpenOffice.org. Currently EuroOffice includes the addition of support for the Adaptive Interface.

With the commercial version of EuroOffice (that includes all of our extensions) we also offer support.

How do I get the source code?

Our changes are minor, but if interested let us know at support@multiracio.com. We can provide it as a large archive or as a set of diffs against the OpenOffice.org codebase. We also submit our changes that are considered to be widely useful as patches in the OpenOffice.org issue tracker.

What extensions do you provide?

We provide more than 10 extensions. For the full list see our products page or the OpenOffice.org Extension Repository .

What are the supported platforms?

All of our extensions work on Windows XP, Windows Vista, Linux (32-bit and 64-bit) and Mac OS X (10.4 or later) with the exception of EuroOffice Self-Portrait, which only supports Windows.

Our target application is the official (Sun) build of the latest stable version of OpenOffice.org (the application that you get from http://download.openoffice.org/). We do our best however to support older versions of OpenOffice.org, unofficial builds of OpenOffice.org (such as those included in many Linux distributions) and OpenOffice.org derivatives (such as StarOffice). IBM Lotus Symphony is not supported.

Technical questions

How do I install an extension?

We recommend this detailed guide for instructions. It also includes a video of the process at the bottom of the page.

How do I use them?

The help pages (available through the about box) will do their best to explain the usage of the extensions, but nothing speaks as clearly as an example. Especially these annotated examples for EuroOffice Map Chart and EuroOffice Solver. We also provide manuals, which are the same as the help pages, and tutorials, which cover specific topics.

What languages are the extensions available in?

Many of our extensions are available in English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish and Hungarian. This includes the EuroOffice Map Chart, EuroOffice Solver and EuroOffice Dictionary extensions. Our most recent extensions have not yet been translated to other languages, so EuroOffice Sparkline, EuroOffice Online Clipart, EuroOffice My Progress and EuroOffice Self-Portrait are only available in English. EuroOffice Map Chart is available in Dutch, thanks to the editors of the Dutch c't magazine.

Our extensions can easily be localized with our Extension Translator tool.

How do I set the user interface language?

The user interface of the extensions is automatically set to match the language of the user interface in OpenOffice.org. If such a localization is not available, English is chosen as default. There is no way to switch to a different language after installation.

What do I do with all these XML files and stuff?

The examples for the EuroOffice extensions are in OpenDocument format. This is the file format of OpenOffice.org and is a standard valuing interoperability with other applications. To this end they are technically made up of a number of XML files packed in a ZIP archive. You should not unpack these files. Simply save the example with the ODS extension (for OpenDocument Spreadsheet) and open the file from OpenOffice.org Calc.

The same goes for the EuroOffice extensions themselves. OpenOffice.org extensions are ZIP files with OXT extensions. They contain a number of files that make up the code, data and metadata of the extension. You should not however extract these files. Save the extension as a file with the OXT extension and navigate to this OXT file (for example EuroOffice_Map_Chart.oxt) in the OpenOffice.org Extension Manager.

I get an error message mentioning Python!

You get this error message in OpenOffice.org 3.1 if you are using an early version of our extensions (released before 10 May, 2009). These early versions do not work with OpenOffice.org 3.1 and unfortunately can not even be uninstalled easily. See below for the solution.

How to manually upgrade an extension

One way is to manually uninstall it and install the new version. To do this:

• Quit OpenOffice.org.
• If you installed the extension only for yourself, it is in your OpenOffice.org user profile. How to reset your user profile.
• Alternatively if you installed the extension for everyone, it is in your OpenOffice.org shared folder. This folder is "c:\Program Files\OpenOffice.org 3\share\uno_packages" on Windows. You can delete this folder to remove all shared extensions.
• Once the old extension is gone, you can start OpenOffice.org and install the new version without problems.

The above method is destructive — it will remove all your user settings and extensions (or just your shared extensions, in the shared case). A somewhat more complicated solution is to manually upgrade the extension without using the Extension Manager.

• Quit OpenOffice.org.
• Locate the installed extension. It can be either in your user profile or the shared folder under "uno_packages/cache/uno_packages" in a randomly named folder. Within the randomly named folder there is a folder named EuroOffice_Something.oxt.
• Download the new version of the EuroOffice extension. Note that this is actually a ZIP archive with the OXT extension. Extract its contents. (It may be practical to change the extension to ZIP to simplify this.)
• Copy the extracted contents of EuroOffice_Something.oxt to the folder named EuroOffice_Something.oxt so that the old files are overwritten with the new. The name and location of the folder should stay the same.
• After restarting OpenOffice.org take a look in the Extension Manager dialog. If the status of the extension is listed as disabled or unknown, enable it.

I get a different error and I am using Mac OS X

You get this error message on Mac OS X if you are using OpenOffice.org 3.0 or a derivative of it (such as StarOffice 9). This problem has been fixed in OpenOffice.org 3.1, so it is recommended to upgrade to the latest version. However as a workaround we have also released a patcher to solve the issue until 3.1 was available.

The Adaptive Interface does not work!

The Adaptive Interface only works in EuroOffice and not OpenOffice.org. In OpenOffice.org you can check out its settings window and the about box, but it will not actually do anything useful.

The extensions do not work in StarOffice 8!

True, because StarOffice 8 does not support Python extensions. StarOffice 9 is supported.

I have bought a Professional EuroOffice extension. How can I download it?

Normally your download starts automatically after the payment process. If you pay through a method that does not clear immediately (such as eChecks), you will be sent an email with the download link when the payment has cleared.

In any case after the first download we will send you another email with download details for the next time. Our download links are single-use and are always sent in email to the address you have used with PayPal. This method makes a single click download access possible for our customers without the need for registration and login and without the danger of download links leaking to the internet.

Email is not 100% reliable though. It is possible that an email we sent to you will be delayed or will not arrive at all due to network errors. If you suspect that this may be the case please visit our Customer Downloads page and have a new email sent to you.

How can I change the email address to which you send the download links?

If you still have access to the email address to which we are currently sending the links, then you can use the Customer Downloads page.

If you no longer have access to the old email address, then please contact support@multiracio.com.

I need more help! My question was not answered here!

Please contact us at support@multiracio.com so that we can help you and possibly add your question to the FAQ to help others!