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actually, oo.org works fine for most of documents i receive. maybe you can try out your documents with latest 1.9 snapshot (m104, http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html) and see wether there still are some problems. if there are, you could try to specify them and file issues at http://contributing.openoffice.org/qa.html (you have to register first)

actually, oo.org works fine for most of documents i receive. maybe you can try out your documents with latest 1.9 snapshot (m104, http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html) and see wether there still are some problems. if there are, you could try to specify them and file issues at http://contributing.openoffice.org/qa.html (you have to register first)

i have to agree with this question. sure i carry a pad and paper with me most everywhere i go. you never know when an idea will hit you. however, if you get rather prolific with that pen and paper you eventually have to transfer those words to the word processor (OpenOffice preferably).

now before you toss up your arms and say "how hard is that?" you have to understand that some people write a LOT. and when you write as part of your living the last thing you want to do is to have to waste time writing over and over the same words (i would think coders would appreciate that).

of course even if you were to get something portable enough, entering text into one of those horribly user un-friendly keyboards would stink. so i guess what we'd be looking for was something of a micro-laptop like device.

anyway - i was just standing up for the man's question because i think it's valid.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say "IHBT, IHL, IWTTHAND". Apologies if you're not trolling.

Firstly, emule is open source.

I'm not quite sure what you mean by "Give me a valid use for bittorrent, apart for things like Distros?" Bittorrent has many legit uses... from your post it seems you realise this, but I'm not toally sure. However there are cases where there aren't official torrents, or the official torrents are being heavily hit after a release and so can't be accessed. I do agree that, sadly, the majority of usage is likely to be for copyright infringement, but I can still see it being useful for non-infringing purposes, and hopefully - unlike many other torrent sites - it won't be geared towards illegal content.

That's the policy already defined at OO.org on Jun 2004: http://council.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?lis t=agenda&msgNo=118

I was going to mod you down, but I think I'll reply instead since nobody seems to have responded to your errors.

Properly-written code should not care about what processor it is running on. It's wrong from a portability point of view to assume that a particular data type can be substituted for another data type just because, on one system, they happen to have the same bit size. Yet that seems to be at the very root of the issue here. I edited file after file, lost track of where I was at, and finally gave up.

I do not think you will see OOo 1.1 compiling in 64bits any time soon from what I have heard. Though, there are several people porting the development branch to 64bit arches like x86-64.

I don't defend proprietary software often, but you will see many open source projects where their code didn't/doesn't compile 64 bits. And the ones that do compile there regularly break 64bit arches from checkins that haven't been tested there. Mozilla is one such code base, and you will find more if you look.

Open source projects will work on whatever arches they have developers using the software. If you don't have developers on 64bit arches, then most likely there will be compile errors for those arches.

Now think. Sun also sell proprietary, closed-source stuff, which they don't have to worry about other people seeing. Stuff like Solaris and Java. If OpenOffice.org is so sloppily written that it won't compile on a 64-bit system without more mods than I was prepared to make, and that's what they deign to let us look at -- then what sort of state is the code in that they won't let us see?

If you are part of the JCP you can see the source, and participate also. I don't know if others can see the source though. Reminds me of "Shared Source" from you know who...

But, the code quality in OOo shouldn't be blamed on Sun since they bought the company that created Star Office and Open sourced it!

We will be able to judge the code quality Sun produces when they finally release the code to Solaris. That will be interesting.

It's been done, at least twice.

OpenOffice is the best I know of.

It seems that a reasonable transition step between a pure Microsoft environment and a pure FOSS environment would be to run FOSS apps like OpenOffice under Windows. But I suppose that would really twig the MS Sales Rep for the School District, and we just couldn't do that now, could we? I mean, better to pay the extra for the full package than to put oneself in the uncomfortable and sort of embarrassing position of saying to the pretty, young MS gal, that yes, we do want to renew the Windows licenses but no we are no longer interested in buying MS Office licenses...

A School District that can manage to be that impolite to an MS Sales Rep might, after a while, even start thinking about doing dual boots on some of its machines, which just might give some students the basis for developing some useful "compare and contrast" skills...

Microsoft MUST "crash" for supporting the Gay Agenda!

MAKE MICROSOFT GET OUT OF GAY POLITICS OR MAKE THEM CEASE TO EXIST! SEND A MESSAGE TO EVERY OTHER CORPORATION IN AMERICA THAT SUPPORTING HETEROPHOBIA WILL BE THEIR END!

http://www.nodnc.com/modules.php?name=News&file=ar ticle&sid=293

There's a VERY easy way to stop MUCH of the Microsoft supported liberal garbage, simply notify Microsoft that because of their financial and name support of liberal corruption that you are going to openly publicize and promote freeware replacements to their software products.

FREE OS - Linux (to replace Windows)
http://www.linux.org/

MS Office replacement (to replace MS Office)
http://www.openoffice.org/

WEB Server products (to Replace MS IIS Server)
http://www.apache-asp.org/

Linux Applications (many are free) (additional free applications)
http://www.linux.org/apps/index.html

Web Mail replacement for MS Exchange
http://www.squirrelmail.org/

PHP-Nuke Content Management System
http://phpnuke.org/

Combatting Microsoft Liberal Media Corruption through MSNBC, NBC, and MSN

Let Microsoft know that because THEY have their name associated with NBC / MSNBC / MSN that you will stop buying their products in the future, but that many of the great opensource (i.e. FREE) products below that work as Microsoft replacements will be promoted to friends, family, and businesses everywhere.

U.S.-based news media needing information on topics not specifically addressed in the list below should contact the Waggener Edstrom Rapid Response Team at
rrt@wagged.com
or 503-443-7070.

Additional PR contacts can be seen here (do NOT accept any excuses, THEY SUPPORT MSNBC AND NOTHING BUT STOPPING THE LIBERAL RANTS IS ACCEPTABLE. PERIOD!!)

There's a VERY easy way to stop MUCH of the Microsoft supported liberal garbage, simply notify Microsoft that because of their financial and name support of liberal corruption that you are going to openly publicize and promote freeware replacements to their software products. FREE OS - Linux (to replace Windows) http://www.linux.org/ MS Office replacement (to replace MS Office) http://www.openoffice.org/ WEB Server products (to Replace MS IIS Server) http://www.apache-asp.org/ Linux Applications (many are free) (additional free applications) http://www.linux.org/apps/index.html Web Mail replacement for MS Exchange http://www.squirrelmail.org/ PHP-Nuke Content Management System http://phpnuke.org/ Combatting Microsoft Liberal Media Corruption through MSNBC, NBC, and MSN Let Microsoft know that because THEY have their name associated with NBC / MSNBC / MSN that you will stop buying their products in the future, but that many of the great opensource (i.e. FREE) products below that work as Microsoft replacements will be promoted to friends, family, and businesses everywhere. U.S.-based news media needing information on topics not specifically addressed in the list below should contact the Waggener Edstrom Rapid Response Team at rrt@wagged.com or 503-443-7070. Additional PR contacts can be seen here (do NOT accept any excuses, THEY SUPPORT MSNBC AND NOTHING BUT STOPPING THE LIBERAL RANTS IS ACCEPTABLE. PERIOD!!) http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.asp

Can you be specific?

What I mean is, have you filed any bugs? Here you can learn about a bug's life cycle.

Please, document those inconsistencies.

Haven't you heard of OpenOffice.org lately? You don't need Microsoft to do word processing.

One of the things OOo 2 brings us is lower barriers to entry to their developer pool. Someone with great ideas like yours has the power to actually make those changes with their very own two hands. Starting now.

There's a VERY easy way to stop MUCH of the Microsoft supported liberal garbage, simply notify Microsoft that because of their financial and name support of liberal corruption that you are going to openly publicize and promote freeware replacements to their software products.

FREE OS - Linux (to replace Windows)
http://www.linux.org/

MS Office replacement (to replace MS Office)
http://www.openoffice.org/

WEB Server products (to Replace MS IIS Server)
http://www.apache-asp.org/

Linux Applications (many are free) (additional free applications)
http://www.linux.org/apps/index.html

Web Mail replacement for MS Exchange
http://www.squirrelmail.org/

PHP-Nuke Content Management System
http://phpnuke.org/

***

Combatting Microsoft Liberal Media Corruption through MSNBC, NBC, and MSN

Let Microsoft know that because THEY have their name associated with NBC / MSNBC / MSN that you will stop buying their products in the future, but that many of the great opensource (i.e. FREE) products below that work as Microsoft replacements will be promoted to friends, family, and businesses everywhere.

U.S.-based news media needing information on topics not specifically addressed in the list below should contact the Waggener Edstrom Rapid Response Team at
rrt@wagged.com
or 503-443-7070.

Additional PR contacts can be seen here (do NOT accept any excuses, THEY SUPPORT MSNBC AND NOTHING BUT STOPPING THE LIBERAL RANTS IS ACCEPTABLE. PERIOD!!)
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/contactpr.asp

Gee.. I wonder why you posted that as an AC

Using linux does not have to mean typing in scripts at a bash shell.
Linux can be made to look and act just as point-and-clicky as windows.

Using K12LTSP enables you to quickly set up a large school network where students have access to office applications, web browsing, photo editing, desktop publishing, web publishing,programming languages , etc.
It also centralizes network administration, allows for recycling hardware, and saves a ton of money on software licensing.
It is important to teach computer concepts, not just the nuances of the latest proprietary office suite.

Just remember, It should never under any circumstances be the responsibility of educators to teach brand loyalty.

Everyone does their resumes in Word

Not exactly ... 2 years back I did my resume in OOo 1.0 for a couple of reasons:

• I don't have Windows.
• Easy to export a quality PDF.
• Supports embedded PostScript images (for certification logos).

Judging by the significant salary increase I made shortly afterwards, I guess that OOo is "enterprise ready" ;-)

Coincidentally, I am currently rewriting my resume in OOo 2.0 (using the RPMs from the developer builds). I must say that Writer has really become rock solid in terms of features and stability.

There's a FreeBSD port, and NetBSD port being worked on. You should be able to get it working on your box:

http://porting.openoffice.org/

What he did say was:

Of course, the Office edition for students and teachers costs $149, and no one's checking IDs

Still, if you have a new home computer or are setting up a small office, I suggest giving OpenOffice a try. It may well meet your needs, and if it doesn't, you haven't lost much.

Those clicking on the link to Microsoft Office Online might well be influenced by the generous welcome, resources, ideas and support offered to new users that aren't to be found on the bare and geekish OpenOffice.org. home page.

Are there templates for open office somewhere? I'm no document designer so even the over used ones in MS are welcome. I know I can use the MS Office templates in NeoOffice/j but I obvously have office to use them in in the first place. I think that for a lot of average people those templates make a big deal. So I am wondering where I can get templates for open office. There must be someplace? I checked openoffice.org and couldn't find any. Maybe there needs to be a site that deals with just having OO templates or maybe they need to host them on the openoffice.orghttp://openoffice.org/ website.

Have you tried making a bug report?

You say you want keyboard equivalents for each field in Writer's text formatting dialog boxes. Have you filed this request in OOo's issue tracker, possibly with some keyword implying higher severity for requests needed to meet Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act?

I do care, myself. I try to use OO, but the exporting/importing from MS Office in 1.x has some problems.

I always feel that I need to count to 10 and calm down before refelecting on such statements. The main reasons I would never embrace anything from and related to Microsoft is that today there are very many people that really think that everything out there should be Microsoft-compatible, and _never_ the other way around. No matter if the others have genuine standards compliance, great open formats, etc. For them it's the MS way or the highway. That said, I do think OpenOffice.org does a very great job at importing and exporting Word documents, in spite the fact that the whole damn format is burried hundred feet deep under Everglades among rotting animal corpses.

and the 2.x betas are not provided as binaries

I honestly don't know what you are talking about.

the 2.x betas are not provided as binaries

I'm also primarily a Windows user (learning Linux on the side. I'll switch when I'm ready) and the 2.x betas are not provided as binaries.

The 2.x binaries are available as binaries. I've been using them on various Windows machines for several months.

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

They are a great way to port a word doc to PDF or readable-HTML. I can use OOo to fix broken Word Documents when Word itself cannot read the document.

Well, Gnumeric could be possibly ported to Cocoa in Mac OS X because the core portions of Gnumeric are written in C. However, since Gnumeric is a GTK application, it may take some time moving all of the graphical-related stuff to Cocoa.

As for a Java spreadsheet, I haven't seen a FOSS Java spreadsheet, but it is very possible. Maybe somebody could look at the sources for Gnumeric and OpenOffice or xspread as some inspiration

(While they're at it, perhaps a spreadsheet could be written in GNUstep; I'd like to see that since the GNUstep and Cocoa libraries are almost the same, all a developer has to do pretty much is write a GNUstep spreadsheet, compile it for GNUstep and for Cocoa, and it's done. Two birds hit with one stone.)

A major factor in my switch to Macintosh as my primary platform was that I could run both perl and Excel on the same machine.

So you're able to install Excel, but being unable to download and install Perl drove you to the Mac? What business do you have evangelizing that platform? Choose your poison:

* Activestate Perl
* Cygwin

Two completely different ways of getting Perl on Windows.

Maybe if more geeks played with the spreadsheets we could come up with best practices to hand over to the PHBs.

This is entering the realm of a technical artist - somebody who knows something about the underlying math, but also has a good eye for presentation.

It has been over a decade since the last innovative new spreadsheet - Lotus Improv. Time for something new.

I agree that Excel is ancient, but there are still modern newcomers like Gnumeric or OpenOffice?

Perhaps this has been posted and I simply missed it in the thread, but just in case nobody has seen this... OpenOffice.org has a site for outreach/marketing type information, which includes a section for schools. You might find some helpful information, like a case study and such there. The link to their site is

http://marketing.openoffice.org/education/schools/

Oh I don't know... I run it on my desktop... oh... and I run it on my users desktops at work too... Openoffice and Koffice are quite sufficient for MS Office replacements. Firefox makes a fantastic replacement for IE and Thunderbird for Outlook. I could easily go on. The issues you have mentioned... some of them worthwhile, are still somewhat minimal. Build a good image, specify / build all the boxes the same... it's cake after that...

Plus there are many different standalone PDF readers out there for MS-Windows, Linux, OS X, and so on. MS-Word doesn't have a standalone reader except on ... MS-Windows. And if you already have MS-Windows, MS-Office is probably already on the machine.

PDF's can even embed metadata, which is a great bonus for locally searching your collection. e.g. Finding all documents of a particular author, or in a particular project, or about a particular topic.

The big drawback to PDFs is that it is not practical to re-edit them. But then that's not what they're for. They're essentially paper that hasn't come out of the printer yet.

For editable documents, the industry looks to be moving towards OpenDocument, which is a vendor-neutral, open, royalty-free, XML-based file format being shaped up by OASIS. All the big (and many of the small) international names in electronic publishing are members in OASIS. OpenDocument is being supported and encouraged by the EU as well and will be the main format for OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, AbiWord, Kword, and others. Google already indexes it.

OpenDocument is being supported and encouraged within the EU. It will also be supported in OpenOffice 2.0, which is due out soon. The beta for OOo 2 is out already for testing.

The GPL is not viral.

Well, why do you think, viral doesn't describe the paragraph 2.b) of the GPL adequately?

2.b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

I don't question the way, GPL violations are handled at court today. But the GPL demands rights on your code which is problematic and made many open source projects either dual licensed (Mozilla, OpenOffice.org) or tagged with an exception (MySQL).

"The libraries and component functionality of the OpenOffice.org source code" are LGPL, which allows them to be linked in to proprietary works.

It is also possible to license OO.org under the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). This allows you to make proprietary, binary only distributions, if you maintain compatibility with with the APIs and XML formats. Microsoft could download the entire source, add an MS-Office GUI and a their own Word importer and make "MS-Office Released" out of it. As long as they don't break any interfaces, that's OK under the SISSL. Why doesn't MS import OO files? Because they don't want to. Perhaps they need some convincing...

Beginning with version 2.0 OpenOffice.org uses the open standard OASIS OpenDocument XML format as the default file format. The OASIS OpenDocument format is a vendor and implementation independent file format, and thus guarantees freedom and independence. In addition to OpenOffice.org itself, the open source office suite KOffice as well as OpenOffice.org derivatives like the StarOffice software support the OASIS OpenDocument file format. The OASIS OpenDocument file format is also one of the file formats recommended by the European Commision. oo.o-2.0 feature-guide

Fileextensions:

• OpenDocument Text [.odt]
• OpenDocument Text [.odt]
• OpenDocument Text Template [.ott]
• OpenDocument Master Document [.odm]
• OpenDocument Spreadsheet [.ods]
• OpenDocument Spreadsheet Template [.ots]
• OpenDocument Drawing [.odg]
• OpenDocument Presentation [.odp]
• OpenDocument Chart [.odc]
• OpenDocument Database [.odb]

If the software doesn't meet the spec, it can't be used. And this isn't even a hard one...

Linuxlookup.com was kinda slow for me, grab the patch here

-- gid

The patch is available here:
http://ftp.stardiv.de/pub/OpenOffice.org/contrib/r c/1.1.4secpatch/

Here is the issue:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=4 6388

And the BugTraq report:
http://www.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/securityfoc us/bugtraq/2005-04/0150.html

More usefully, if you want free as in beer and open as in source software to create PDFs on Linux get yourself over to OpenOffice.org

Has it ever occured to this ignorant cartel that perhaps people download things besides music? I'm so pissed off at the music industry anymore that I only listen to public radio stations like NPR and my local University's station.

You wouldn't believe how much better music actually sounds when it comes from an artist instead of a billfold.

> I'll hand it to PDF for being pretty good, even if the software to use PDF (read AND write) is very expensive

On what planet, exactly, is writing PDFs expensive ? I manage to do this for free all the time with a variety of software packages. I thought everyone else did the same. If not, well, I'm glad to have possibly helped you cut your PDF production expenses ;-)

> I believe a browser should be smart enough to withstand whatever's thrown at it, and if it recieves errored data, to notify the user as such, and move on

Most browsers, when they receive erroneous[*] data, are perfectly able to "withstand" it (actually, they just ignore whatever tags or parameters they can't understand). I suppose you're talking about not rendering the page if it has bugs ? Well, you *can* force a browser to do that (Gecko will do it if you send an application/xhtml+xml MIME type header), but you cannot generalize this beahviour, for the following reasons : (1) the *vast* majority of Web pages out there are invalid (*cough*Slashdot*cough*), and (2) even those who are valid can be rendered invalid by external factors (ad banner code, for instance). And you cannot fail to render much of the Web, at least, if you want to have users, because without a large userbase, you won't be able to push for more standards support (yes, it's quite ironic, I know).

> it is also our fault for not implementing all of the features

It would probably help if the standard was a tad less obscure. Of course, you've a lot of conformance tests out there, but still...

> As Microsoft does have more of the market share, that shouldn't stop people from creating pages that don't work with Internet Explorer

Huh... Yeah, sure. Whatever. I'm sure my customers would be thrilled at the opportunity to break their site for ~80% of their visitors, don't you think so ? Seriously, that's not (yet) possible, the best people can do is make standards-compliant pages that work on most browsers (note I didn't even say "all browsers" because there are differences in CSS rendering between nearly every one of them. *Sigh*).

> If it was anyone's "fault" [...] it's the Web Developers for not using the standards

What about the funny people at Netscape who started the nonstandard tag mania in the first place ? The W3C for not being vocal enough ? I only heard about Web standards fairly recently (a few years). That campaign should have been launched much earlier, *before* the damage (i.e. gazillions of invalid pages all over the Web) was done !

[*] Yes, I'm a grammar Nazi, too. You're out of luck, today *grin*

I havent started work yet and am still in education at the moment but, even though the school is mainly M$ XP based, i think one of the network servers runs off Linux.

There is also OpenOffice on some of the computers which is very good when i transfer work from my laptop with MandrakeLinux on it. There is also GIMP on the network too and I think the head of the IT department was thinking about installing FireFox or Mozilla over the network. I tried using portable firefox on my USB pen once but the proxy server is really restricting and let me to bugger all.

• 2.0 feature guide
• Wordperfect filter development

• 2.0 feature guide
• Wordperfect filter development

Disclaimer: I am an OpenOffice.org Mac OS X developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project

One of the biggest problems with Java in OOo is the way that it's being used. Probably the largest volunteer developer community outside of Sun is in the porting project which mostly aims to recompile OOo onto other Unix and Unix-like platforms. Part of the portability lure is that the older architecture of OOo made porting easy; OOo itself has its own internal complete abstraction layers for operating system functionality, windowing, widgets, and the kitchen sink. By simply porting those layers, OOo could run anywhere and even the most obscure Unix variant could have access to a MS Office compatible office suite.

Java breaks that. Why? Not all of the platforms on which previous versions of OOo could be built have any official Java implementation (e.g. Linux/PPC).

Now, Java is no longer optional. Java is actually becoming a requirement not only for running OOo. Some of the build tools are becoming implemented in Java. What's worse, many of these newer Java-dependent features and build tools actually require a specific version of the VM in order to be functional (e.g. reliances on libraries distributed with Java 1.4+).

This choice leave platforms without Java in the cold, but sadly it also leaves platforms with outdated Java VM versions in the cold. I only hope this doesn't further cause headache for some of the intrepid 64 bit porters out there since I don't know of any VM that can be safely embedded in 64 bit apps yet.

Porting developers have raised this issue as far back as 2002 and earlier. There's no excuse for the Sun-dominated engineering of OpenOffice.org to have been ignorant of them. Instead of lowering the bar for the build process, the dependencies have just been injected into core functionality! It's sad when the pleas of some of the most prominent non-Sun volunteers to the project get blissfully ignored by the powers that be.

I don't have a problem with using Java for open source software since, after all, NeoOffice/J is dependent on Java. As NeoOffice/J is focused solely on Mac OS X, however, portability isn't one of the NeoOffice/J goals. For OOo, however, portability used to be one of its strengths and is still one of the strongest development communities within the project that doesn't originate from Sun. It's sad to see decisions made that alienate one of the only vibrant non-Sun communities.

While OOo has built a great community of marketing, translation, support, and evangelization volunteers, there is no substantial core developer community outside of Sun. Alienating the precious little that exists doesn't help the situation either. Unless there is serious effort to build up a non-Sun developer community, the project can only be doomed for failure when Sun cuts their development team (or goes out of business).

ed

OpenOffice only offers spell checking, not grammar checking. However, there is talk of a Grammar API that could allow grammar checking for all languages.

I'm sure most /. readers can relate: I'm the tech support guy for the entire family. I just helped my sister buy a Mac Mini because I just can't in good faith tell my family to buy Windows any more due to the rampant security issues. That, and I'm tired of cleaning spyware off of their computers everytime I visit.

1. Yes, I've heard of this Linux thing. I don't have time to listen to my family complain about not having MS Office for Linux. No, really, it's important to them. (Trust me, I'm working on it.)
2. Yes, I'm also familiar with OO.o and no, my family doesn't consider it the same thing.

It's my first foray into the Mac world, so we'll see how it goes.

OpenOffice is currently based of MySpell and has no support for Aspell. Perhaps you could sponsor someone to write such and interface and thus receive better spelling suggestions...

Speaking from experience I know how hard it is to compile OO.o on Slackware :)

First download the tarball.

Now su to root and perform a network install:

tar -zxvf OO_tarball_name
cd OO_source_directory_name

./setup -net

Now return to your user and:

cd /opt/OO_directory_name
setup

Or see The instructions for full details.

Boy that's hard, I'd rather write a kernel driver using my feet to operate the keyboard anyday of the week. Damned unusable Slackware making me both think & type. It'll never catch on. Never I tells ya.

It is being worked on. No, it hasn't made it into 2.0, but it looks like they have a provisional svg2draw translator - it just needs a little more work. It's not like they are completely ignoring the issue.

Jedidiah.

What strides as 2.0 made in GUI and usability? From the screenshots of the beta, I see none.

What exactly are you looking for? A rough outline of the design goals is here with specific target improvements for 2.0 here. For very specific improvements actually made not just target concepts you can read through this and look for all the "ease-of-use" improvements made. There are actually a lot. Yes, some are small. No, OOo 2.0 is not somehow magically a perfect usability application. It is an issue, and they are focussing on it. It is an incremental process however.

Jedidiah.

What strides as 2.0 made in GUI and usability? From the screenshots of the beta, I see none.

What exactly are you looking for? A rough outline of the design goals is here with specific target improvements for 2.0 here. For very specific improvements actually made not just target concepts you can read through this and look for all the "ease-of-use" improvements made. There are actually a lot. Yes, some are small. No, OOo 2.0 is not somehow magically a perfect usability application. It is an issue, and they are focussing on it. It is an incremental process however.

Jedidiah.

What strides as 2.0 made in GUI and usability? From the screenshots of the beta, I see none.

What exactly are you looking for? A rough outline of the design goals is here with specific target improvements for 2.0 here. For very specific improvements actually made not just target concepts you can read through this and look for all the "ease-of-use" improvements made. There are actually a lot. Yes, some are small. No, OOo 2.0 is not somehow magically a perfect usability application. It is an issue, and they are focussing on it. It is an incremental process however.

Jedidiah.