You know what? I love OpenOffice. And I hate it. At the very same time.

I love OpenOffice because it's the office suite I can work best with.
And everytime I want to automate it, for example to fill in an address automatically based on data from our CRM tool, I JUST HATE IT. The OpenOffice UNO API is that f******ng weird and complicated that it always take ages for me to digg through it until I can do even trivial stuff.

Take Word, have a look at it's object model, read some stuff in the dev's help and you're done. It's simple and mostly the objects have the capabilities a developer expects them to have.

Take OpenOffice, look at the UNO API, and you don't understand anything. There are interfaces and services and factories and just to create a new document via Java you need several lines of very weird code, full of stuff you don't want to understand.

Sure, if you're working with that API for a month or so, and if you're not doing anything else, then it might be wonderful and powerful. But I don't do that. I just want to get simple things done. Sigh.

However, having said that, I have a recommendation for you: if you want to automate OpenOffice via Java, take Nice Office Access from ubion AG. It's a wrapper for the OpenOffice UNO API which provides you with an usable OpenOffice API.

And the best is: the Linux version of NOA works on the Mac with OpenOffice 3.0, too. You just need to set the OPEN_OFFICE_ORG_PATH to "/Applications/OpenOffice.org.app/Contents" in your Java code. See the NOA examples and you will know what I'm talking about.

So, OpenOffice on the Mac, here I'm coming. Get ready to be integrated in our CRM software.