Slashdot Mirror

I save in .doc only if I got the document in .doc, and then not always. Any new document I save in .odf. I normally send .odf documents by email, and when somebody tells me "I can't open it" I send them this link.

You are absolutely correct. I tried it and got pretty much the same results. If one exports to MS Word 97, you seem to get an image the size of the original, but the actual picture is a fraction of the size sitting in the top left corner. Seems to be some sort of sizing problem. I looked around on an OO.o users mailing list and found a relevant question posted in 2003 with no responses. Not very encouraging. Posted mine there as well. We'll see...

#17964. Mentioned in 2004, last modified slightly over two years ago and apparently still not fixed. Targetted for a "meh, whatever, we're actually ignoring this but pretending we're not" release.

All credit to this post (and a quick glance through the bug report).

Nice asshole attitude though. People like you are what's wrong with the open source movement.

To use an example from a previous OpenOffice discussion, let's say I want to use OpenOffice to translate a text from Japanese into English. I bill 'per-character' in Japanese, so to determine how much to charge the client, I do a word count in OpenOffice. And the results given for english are correct, but the Japanese results are entirely wrong.

Copy and paste the same text into Word, and the word count works fine the first try.

Thank you for bringing this up. This is basic functionality, people, and this very issue and related issues have been on the OOo bug list for freaking five years at least! And continually ignored!

I'm blooming well fed up with OOo's nearly complete lack of progress on fixing fundamental usability issues without so much as a comment on when they think they might get around to it (both issues linked above are vaguely targeted at "OOo Later"). For that matter, it took them several years simply to add the Word Count entry to the Tools menu, where everyone coming from MSO would expect to find it. And I'll say it again -- IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is ostensibly based on OOo 1.x code, already implements a proper word / character count that rationally handles mixed Western + CJK text. If IBM can come out with this, using the same blooming codebase, why in the devil's briefcase can't the OOo team? It's not like we haven't been pointing it out to them.

Feh.

To use an example from a previous OpenOffice discussion, let's say I want to use OpenOffice to translate a text from Japanese into English. I bill 'per-character' in Japanese, so to determine how much to charge the client, I do a word count in OpenOffice. And the results given for english are correct, but the Japanese results are entirely wrong.

Copy and paste the same text into Word, and the word count works fine the first try.

Thank you for bringing this up. This is basic functionality, people, and this very issue and related issues have been on the OOo bug list for freaking five years at least! And continually ignored!

I'm blooming well fed up with OOo's nearly complete lack of progress on fixing fundamental usability issues without so much as a comment on when they think they might get around to it (both issues linked above are vaguely targeted at "OOo Later"). For that matter, it took them several years simply to add the Word Count entry to the Tools menu, where everyone coming from MSO would expect to find it. And I'll say it again -- IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is ostensibly based on OOo 1.x code, already implements a proper word / character count that rationally handles mixed Western + CJK text. If IBM can come out with this, using the same blooming codebase, why in the devil's briefcase can't the OOo team? It's not like we haven't been pointing it out to them.

Feh.

Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right!

Well, I guess this might make it two features that MS got right -- OOo's word/char count is appallingly inadequate, and effectively keeps the software from being adopted by many academic and professional writers. Proper and comprehensive word/char counts are absolutely vital in any truly usable word processor, and such functionality is glaringly absent from OOo -- despite users having pointed this out numerous times.

I'm getting quite disappointed with the whole OOo team, not least since IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo, implements proper counting. This is basic, required functionality. Requests have been on the books, and effectively ignored, for half a freaking decade by this point. And folks still wonder why MSO hasn't been dethroned yet... Sheesh.

Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right!

Well, I guess this might make it two features that MS got right -- OOo's word/char count is appallingly inadequate, and effectively keeps the software from being adopted by many academic and professional writers. Proper and comprehensive word/char counts are absolutely vital in any truly usable word processor, and such functionality is glaringly absent from OOo -- despite users having pointed this out numerous times.

I'm getting quite disappointed with the whole OOo team, not least since IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo, implements proper counting. This is basic, required functionality. Requests have been on the books, and effectively ignored, for half a freaking decade by this point. And folks still wonder why MSO hasn't been dethroned yet... Sheesh.

Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right!

Well, I guess this might make it two features that MS got right -- OOo's word/char count is appallingly inadequate, and effectively keeps the software from being adopted by many academic and professional writers. Proper and comprehensive word/char counts are absolutely vital in any truly usable word processor, and such functionality is glaringly absent from OOo -- despite users having pointed this out numerous times.

I'm getting quite disappointed with the whole OOo team, not least since IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo, implements proper counting. This is basic, required functionality. Requests have been on the books, and effectively ignored, for half a freaking decade by this point. And folks still wonder why MSO hasn't been dethroned yet... Sheesh.

Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right!

Well, I guess this might make it two features that MS got right -- OOo's word/char count is appallingly inadequate, and effectively keeps the software from being adopted by many academic and professional writers. Proper and comprehensive word/char counts are absolutely vital in any truly usable word processor, and such functionality is glaringly absent from OOo -- despite users having pointed this out numerous times.

I'm getting quite disappointed with the whole OOo team, not least since IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo, implements proper counting. This is basic, required functionality. Requests have been on the books, and effectively ignored, for half a freaking decade by this point. And folks still wonder why MSO hasn't been dethroned yet... Sheesh.

That's a pretty good feature - have you actually requested it?

It's been requested numerous times, and has been on OOo's issue list since at least April 2002 -- see here for reference.

Cheers,

OOo provides an API for programming Java OLE objects. The problem is not OOo, it is a lack of third party developers actually using this feature.

Incidentally, OOo also allows for the use of Python and other programming languages as well. However, while it might be my lack of Java-ness, it looks to me like the underlying problem is that the OOo API docs are mindbogglingly poorly organized. Say for instance you have an object of type TextCursor, and want to find out quickly what properties and methods such an object has. So you go into OOo's online API documentation and find the entry for TextCursor -- only to discover that you cannot tell what properties and methods this object provides. The docs show what *interfaces* it has, but while this might be exciting in terms of software architecting and discovering how OOo reuses its own code base, it doesn't offer a lot to anyone simply trying to make use of OOo objects. To actually find the methods and properties for any object, you'd have to click through each and every interface listing, which is hardly convenient or easy to use.

I strongly suspect that a reworking of the API documentation would give OOo a big leg up in terms of third party development.

Cheers,

I ranted about a year ago and found that I was not the only one. In spite of a five year old wishlist bug, the recriminations have not fallen on deaf ears, and last February I heard some encouraging noises from the dev team. Outline mode is not coming soon, but some day maybe... I'm keeping the faith but meanwhile I hate to say that for now Ms Word is my outliner of choice.

If you don't think you need outline mode, then it is just that you have no idea what efficiently working with big documents is like.

Disclaimer: I am one of the founders of NeoOffice.

Being based on OOo 1.x, IBM does not need to release the source code for Symphony. OOo was originally dual licensed both under LGPL and the SISSL license. SISSL allows companies to make completely closed source forks, only providing notice of the original vendor and SISSL license. This license was one of the primary motivating factors for why we forked and created NeoOffice, to prevent companies from making a commercial product whose improvements couldn't be shared back with all the volunteers that had worked to create it.

Closed source forking is also our reason for using full GPL since it guarantees everyone's freedom to access the code. Not even LGPL provides that ability since commercial closed source proprietary code can still be incorporated provided it's in a shared library. Only the full GPL provides enough protections to ensure that everyone must cooperate and that no one can make key parts of the project rely on closed source solutions.

ed

They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a number of closed issues in the OOo issue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."

The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.

They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a number of closed issues in the OOo issue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."

The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.

They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a number of closed issues in the OOo issue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."

The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.

They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a number of closed issues in the OOo issue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."

The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.

They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a number of closed issues in the OOo issue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."

The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.

They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a number of closed issues in the OOo issue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."

The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.

Terrific package. It's the only office product w use. We use tons of features and rarely have problems. But.... Finally, after months of dishing out gobbledygook, someone has decided to explain the new features in plain English. Keep it up. If they are serious about this project they won't slip back into this: http://development.openoffice.org/releases/2.3.0.html which is all we've had until very recently.

So this has nothing to do with Novell shying away from the JCA which could see them forking some of your useful contributions into a GPLv3 version sometime down the road? ;)

OpenOffice.org IS the name of the software. Look at the about box on Sun versions. Look at the website http://www.openoffice.org/

Just because you can't does not mean Linux can't.

VideoConference http://ekiga.org/

Edit Video http://www.kdenlive.org/

Make mp3s: Insert CD copy mp3 folder with kde.org or Create new with http://audacity.sourceforge.net/

play video games with http://www.winehq.org/ or http://www.transgaming.com/ or god forbid you play open source games designed for linux. Too many to list see here http://icculus.org/lgfaq/gamelist.php for a start.

make a slideshow, Ever use http://picasa.google.com/linux/ or KDE creates them on the fly from directory of pictures. Not to mention openoffice Impress http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html

How about a couple of kernel devs drop off and help Linux go the last mile.

How about you let the kernel devs do what they do best, and acquaint yourself with a little thing I like to call Google http://www.google.com/webhp.

No thanks! I'll wait for the real online open source office. [PDF Alert]

...can be found HERE.

I had to call Microsoft thirteen times over the course of 2 weeks to get it working again.

I never would have gotten that far. After the 4th try, I would have moved to the where do I return for a refund route. In the meantime I would be moving on to something else. By the way, the new version of Open Office was just recently released.

http://download.openoffice.org/

Only at Slashdot would this be considered a problem. Obviously, Microsoft does not consider unactivated software "legit" for the purposes of downloading add-ons. To me, this makes sense within the product activation concepts. Why would a company want to provide additional functionality to products that had not been activated? Within their scheme of DRM, products that have not been activated are probably not legit.

RTFA. He said it was Visio that was not net activated, but that prevented him from downloading OFFICE add-ons, which WAS fully activated. Yes they're both from the same company, but one not-yet-activated program shouldn't cause everything on the system to get hosed. Oh, wait, that's right, Microsoft was ordered to separate their browser from their OS, they got out of it, but the point still remains. They don't care how they cripple you from doing what you want, as long as they can cripple you.

http://www.openoffice.org/

I'm not sure that I care where Microsoft Excel fails and where it doesn't when it comes to discovering the pattern of failure. If I were a Microsoft Excel user I wouldn't be allowed to inspect the program to see what it's really doing with my data, fix the program (no matter how expert a programmer I may be), alter the program (in violation of the license), or help my community by sharing my improved version of Excel. Then there's the hypocrisy of how proprietors (also known as monopolists) are treated compared to free software developers and distributors—knowing that the program fails where it shouldn't would be enough for people to cry foul and either stop using or never start using a free software program that exhibited such a bug. We rarely hear serious discussions of one's software freedom. Instead, we're encouraged to push that discussion aside in favor of exclusively stressing technocratic ends. Not hearing cries of "Dump Microsoft Excel Now!" or something calling for a switch to a free software spreadsheet (like Gnumeric or OpenOffice.org's Calc) is saddening. Please take this opportunity to learn more about software freedom.

45 issues filed. Most of them are to do with language support patches and build issues as I worked on South African language support. Some had patches that have been accepted. I know OOo process is sometimes crazily slow but I was just pointing out that it doesn't help to abandon hope - a lot of things are actually fixed. In addition the upstream distro people are often very responsive - I had some crashes of OOo on Fedora fixed pretty quickly.
Any further questions?

1. It uses a more modern business model
   free software => free unlimited innovation possible
2. OpenOffice uses ODF which is a multi-platform ISO standard instead of that OOXML crap.
   => you can exchange documents between many different platforms.
3. It runs natively on GNU/Linux, Mac, Solaris, (soon FreeBSD) and many other systems, no need for e.g. Wine.
4. It can generate LaTeX, which is good when you want to make a professional publishing of your text.
5. OO can generate PDF natively even though I rarely use this option as the generated PDF files are too big.
   I use to print to PS and then run ps2pdf instead

OK, OK, ctrl-N wouldn't be such a great key combination to use, but you get the idea ...

On another note, I've been fiddling with the newly-released IBM Lotus Symphony, based on OOo (v.1.1, not 2.x, it seems). Apologies for posting this to the wrong story, but it is kind of relevant in the sense of providing a comparison between the two. There's a lot to like. Tabbed documents are good, and I like the expose-like ctrl-T that allows you to search text in all open documents simultaneously. (Plus they've corrected the right-click behaviour that always bugs me in OOo ...)

But it seems to hide a lot of options away. They've sometimes turned tabs into dropdown menus, so e.g. that doubles the mouse-clicks required to move from paragraph styles to character styles in the stylist. More importantly, it doesn't appear to be possible to assign styles to key combinations, as I was describing in my previous post. That's a big usability downgrade right there.

Finally: I see no trace of the GPL in what I downloaded. All I found is a whole bunch of IBM-specific licences, and a bunch of notices including the following:

What the ...? Is it not possible to get the altered code?

This is why I don't use OO. 5 year old bug, hundreds of votes. Target milestone: Later

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4914

Go read: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ESC_minutes#Inclusion_of_non-Sun-owned_components

Sun refuse to accept the license they give to everyone else: why ? go figure.

Almost the same story with me. The solution is to fix the bug yourself.

Not according to the system requirements:

"For full functionality, jdk/jre 1.4.0_02 or newer or jdk/jre 1.4.1_01 or newer is required"

While I greatly appreciate the work that is done on OOo, there does seem to be something wrong when it comes to getting bugs fixed. For example, cell notes became badly broken in oocalc 2.x because they no longer move when their cells are moved (e.g. by sorting). The bug (yes, I filed it and I am biased) has remained open for nearly two years, and the developers have classified it as an "enhancement" rather than a "defect" even though it worked fine in version 1.x and is apparently causing problems for quite a few people with no work-around. I don't mean to whine, but leaving such obvious and problematic bugs unfixed for so long isn't good for the project. I don't know if this happens because they are understaffed or if there is a problem with how things are being managed, but getting the OOo people to pay attention to bugs seems to be a problem.

Oops, I was a bit too quick to post there, that was an added enhancement. The original RFE for error bars is here. Target was recently set to release 3.0 (which won't be released until somewhere in 2008 I believe). As they say in the list, if you want it, vote for it instead of filling Bugzilla with noise.

Oops, I was a bit too quick to post there, that was an added enhancement. The original RFE for error bars is here. Target was recently set to release 3.0 (which won't be released until somewhere in 2008 I believe). As they say in the list, if you want it, vote for it instead of filling Bugzilla with noise.

I got really excited when I read your post. Error bars were the sole reason I reinstalled MS Office last week. Unfortunately, I just ran Calc and checked out the new chart tool. Nothing seems to have changed, other than a new, fancy interface. It still lacks the ability to use a data range as error bars for a range of data points, and still lacks the ability to display a trendline equation on the graph.

I was curious and looked through OOo's Bugzilla, and it seems this issue was started on today! Either a nice coincidence, or they read Slashdot. :)

I already modded in this topic too... oh well, just a +1 funny.

So maybe you are saying that OpenOffice is not ready for the power user. But in that case, I would like to know where and why.

"The fundamental problem here is that OpenOffice just isn't as good as MS Office."

People keep saying this, but not backing it up. I can think of a few things MS Office has that OOo does not.

I'll back it up. How's this bug for starters. It's been on the tracker for over four years. It covers the basic fundamental functionality of counting words and characters in a word processor document. Anyone who writes / edits / translates professionally needs this to work well, simply, and accurately -- and OOo simply doesn't measure up.

I know -- I translate for a living, and I *very* much would like to be able to use OOo as my primary office software solution. But I cannot do so, as I need accurate counts that break down Western and Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK, i.e. double-byte) character counts. MS Word has done this for a long time, at least since around 1998. And yet despite reporting this bug and detailing what needs to happen, the OOo dev team still has not even acknowledged the CJK issue, let alone set a specific target milestone.

Try it yourself. Open MS Word in one window, copy or type in a paragraph or three. Copy the same text to an OOo Writer window. Run the word count function in both apps, and compare. Pitiful. And even worse if your sample text includes any CJK text.

There is always room for improvement, but what we need is more people trained to use OOo. There is room for improvement, always, but if people were trained on OOo...

This isn't an issue of training. This is an issue of "room for improvement". In this case, enough room to park a semi, complete with an enormous, though ignored and weatherbeaten, sign right next to the gaping hole in the wall, saying "PUT GARAGE DOOR HERE".

It looks like the limit for Calc is indeed 32K, unless the documentation is obsolete.

I would have liked to use Calc for some of my blogwork (which entails spreadsheets of 70K+ records), but went with Office XP instead.

According to their online documentation, Calc has a limit of 32,000 rows per sheet. Is that out of date?

Ahem - This may clear it up for you.

Although the word "universal" may be a bit much.

http://documentation.openoffice.org/manuals/oooauthors/Mail-Merge.pdf While I haven't had a chance to try it,the pdf looks pretty straightforward.

It hasn't yet. It's at RC2, so almost there.

http://download.openoffice.org/680/

and changes What's new

It hasn't yet. It's at RC2, so almost there.

http://download.openoffice.org/680/

and changes What's new

In my experience, Microsoft Office is more full featured and a better program than Open Office.

Let me give you just one example: Microsoft Office, since at least Office 2000, has an easy way for you to assign special symbols to keypress combinations. OpenOffice doesn't. This is a known bug. The reason why MS Office can have this feature and OO doesn't is because OO doesn't have the manpower to add features like this. This is because you didn't pay for the software, so their isn't enough money to pay developers to make the software as feature-full as MS Office is.

And, yes, I agree about the Office 2007 interface. What was Microsoft smoking on that day?