Coupling of Octave with Open Office

[Horst Salzwedel]

the main software which children in school, students at universities and
engineers are using is Office. In office they are using the spreadsheet to
do calculations for their work.

Spreadsheets are data view programs that hide the model/algorithm and are
ill suited to support our model based thinking, research and engineering.

Octave is a great SW system that is easy to use and mathematical models and
algorithms are easy to implement. However, only relatively few have it on
their computers.

We are trying to make model based an analysis capabilities available to all
students and engineers and have developed an interface that integrates
Octave into the open source Office: OpenOffice (OO). We developed a
graphical interface (using some features of an earlier CtrlC derivative,
SatLab) for octave with the OO graphical environment, thereby trying to
overcome some of the limitations of Matlab. It is now e.g. possible to have
a model in Octave, the parameters in a spread sheet, and attach the
parameters in the spreadsheet to a slider. By moving the slider, the event
loop of the spreadsheet triggers the reexecution in octave and you can
observe how the octave graph is changing. This is really great for doing
trade offs and particularly for teaching. I think what our 13 year old
learned in 8 weeks in Middle School in Palo Alto about linear equations, can
now be taught in 1 day.

Having Octave in OpenOffice would also make it possible to do model based
approaches for all the other OpenOffice functionality and meake it really
the tool of choice for teaching, research and engineering.

For this integration we only had to add a few functions to Octave to support
the Open Document standard and replaced to input function of octave.

Integrating Octave into OpenOffice would make it instantly available to the
260 Million users of OpenOffice.

I have talked with the OpenOffice development team. They are very interested
in this and invited us to present this to them.

Before I talk with them and pursue this further, I would like to get your
opinion about this. 

I have a diploma thesis (in German) of my student Tino Jungebloud, which
describes the interface. I uploaded this Thesis.
http://www.nabble.com/file/p22396824/Diplomarbeit-jungebloud-2009-02-09-0004.pdf
Diplomarbeit-jungebloud-2009-02-09-0004.pdf 

Horst

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