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I am the OP. And I also replied to the "lot of work" comment, thank you very much.

My point is not so much that OO.o sucks, but that OO.o continues to suck in aspects that are well-known to be far, far sub-par, and that were announced to receive attention a long time ago, but then were blissfully ignored in favor of just polishing the interface some more. To get to your point, IMO saying that OO.o is somehow "better" at math is an overstatement. It is different, but at least as far from being "good" as the competition. In that light, building a first-number release on adding 768 columns to the spreadsheet is hypocritical at best.

Oh, one more thing: OO.o desperately begs to be compared to MS Ori^H^Hffice, so I don't see an issue with actually doing so. The LaTeX toolchain(s) have no issues with properly handling vector graphics and other niceties that would make a common office suite hide under a rock, and guess what: they're "FREE" too. And they don't run around crying for attention.

I've been looking around. The OO.o people know exactly that their drawing framework stinks out loud, and they announced far-reaching changes for 2.0. What they came up with is XCanvas. OO.o and Inkscape were officially started around the same time. Both had a base to work from. In that time, Inkscape has evolved into a quite powerful vector graphics tool with a rendering engine (libcairo) that is extremely capable, and with an interface that's actually fun to work on. OO.o on the other hand has done... what exactly? From my point of view, and judging by the set of functionality I regularly use, they've done exactly dick except changing the icon set every now and then and calling that a release. All issues that I found had already been discussed ad nauseam, but never resolved. Issues I found in Inkscape were actually fixed by the next release (which looked pretty much the same but was much better to use).

If the word processing tool hadn't worked from the start, OO.o would be dead and gone by now, since it has no other working features. I'm not wasting my time on that. (Plus I'm no good with praphics.)

I'll ditto encoderer here:

...it's just that for most people compatibility no longer an issue.

Plus, there's one feature that really belongs more in the "Basic Functionality" category, and that's accurate word and character counting. As documented on the OOo bug list for some years now, any combination of double-byte Asian text + regular single-byte alphanumeric text results in "word" counts that are worse than useless. A number of Asian languages do not count by "word" so much as by character (and for that matter there still isn't much agreement as to what exactly is a "word" in Japanese). OOo gives a total "word" count for either the document or selection, but does not break out any included Asian text -- which MS Word does, and has done for longer than I can clearly remember (starting maybe with MSO 97?). This makes OOo a non-starter for anyone working with such Asian languages in any situation that requires counts -- which includes just about all academic and professional use.

There's a sample .odt file included in the bug report (direct linky) that clearly spells out the differences in how the two apps count from a UI perspective (can't speak to the internals). I'd love to pitch in with the coding, but I sadly cannot afford the time and energy required to dig through OOo's extraordinarily convoluted API documentation to figure out how to update the source code myself; I started the process, but gave up in disgust at how the docs are organized. I've still got MSO, so until such time as the OOo team can get around to fixing this long-standing bug, and / or produce more sensible API docs, I'll keep using Word.

I'll ditto encoderer here:

...it's just that for most people compatibility no longer an issue.

Plus, there's one feature that really belongs more in the "Basic Functionality" category, and that's accurate word and character counting. As documented on the OOo bug list for some years now, any combination of double-byte Asian text + regular single-byte alphanumeric text results in "word" counts that are worse than useless. A number of Asian languages do not count by "word" so much as by character (and for that matter there still isn't much agreement as to what exactly is a "word" in Japanese). OOo gives a total "word" count for either the document or selection, but does not break out any included Asian text -- which MS Word does, and has done for longer than I can clearly remember (starting maybe with MSO 97?). This makes OOo a non-starter for anyone working with such Asian languages in any situation that requires counts -- which includes just about all academic and professional use.

There's a sample .odt file included in the bug report (direct linky) that clearly spells out the differences in how the two apps count from a UI perspective (can't speak to the internals). I'd love to pitch in with the coding, but I sadly cannot afford the time and energy required to dig through OOo's extraordinarily convoluted API documentation to figure out how to update the source code myself; I started the process, but gave up in disgust at how the docs are organized. I've still got MSO, so until such time as the OOo team can get around to fixing this long-standing bug, and / or produce more sensible API docs, I'll keep using Word.

I'm sure they would appreciate if you reported your problems here:

http://qa.openoffice.org/

seems as though this link is what you want. not sure if the version is in step with the Intel binary, though... downloading now...

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3395

BTW: work has started on it.

Lack of outline mode is bug nÂ3959 and if you had as much as skimmed its content you would know why it is taking longer to develop than you think it should.

Everyone agrees it is important, everyone is impatient, the developers know all about it, but it is not a trivial hack, so it will take resources and therefore time.

You should take a look at this bug:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3959

And if you really want an outline mode, please go vote for it! Really, popularity is considered when features are added to OOo.

The ability to edit PDFs.

I'm aware of at least one - see AbiWord bug 11359/OpenOffice bug 64237.

Both AbiWord and OpenOffice.org support hidden text. According to the ODF spec, if you say 'text:display="true"', you're supposed to see the text. However, OpenOffice.org uses "true" to mean "hide the text" and "none" to mean "show the text". Or, the inverse of its correct meaning (or what you'd expect from the CSS && specs). This will supposedly be corrected in OO.o 3.0, which is due out soonish. However, this leaves a problem with a bunch of documents that won't render "as intended" (either by the user or by the ODF spec).

The expectation is therefore that an MS Office 2007 document should be pretty close to valid according to the TRANSITIONAL schema.

Sure enough (again) the result is as expected: relatively few messages (84) are emitted and they are all of the same type.

<m:degHide m:val="on"/> where "val's" values are supposed to be "true|false".

[snip]

Making them conform to the TRANSITIONAL will require less of the same sort of surgery (since they're quite close to conformant as-is)

OpenOffice.org is a free, open source, cross-platform office suite available for a number of different computer operating systems. It supports the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF) for data interchange as its default file format, as well as Microsoft Office '97-2003 formats, among many others.

You can use it whenever you want, wherever you want, for how long you want, all for free. Nobody is going to take it away from you.

http://www.openoffice.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org

Where have you been? Java source code has been available for a long time but after years of people complaining that it wasn't "free enough", Sun fully released Java under a GPL 2 years ago.

O.K. so it's LGPL So what, so is Gtk, most of GNOME and probably 80% of what you and joe-sixpack considers to be "opensource" in "Linux". GPL is just one license. GPL was never fully tested in court and doesn't provide patent indemnity as CDDL does. I'd be happier if Java, OpenOffice and MySQL were CDDL but there would be too much gnashing of teeth from the Linux creationists.

OpenSolaris is licensed under CDDL. Look here for an FAQ which explains in simple terms why CDDL is superior to GPL.

OpenSolaris, from which came features such as Dtrace and ZFS ,

OpenOffice.org,

GlassFish,

OpenSSO, or

OpenDS

(and probably several others that I missed) aren't really open source?

Thanks for enlightening me. After scratching all these projects off my list, it looks like you're right. Sun hardly open sources anything!

Where have you been? Java source code has been available for a long time but after years of people complaining that it wasn't "free enough", Sun fully released Java under a GPL 2 years ago.

O.K. so it's LGPL So what, so is Gtk, most of GNOME and probably 80% of what you and joe-sixpack considers to be "opensource" in "Linux". GPL is just one license. GPL was never fully tested in court and doesn't provide patent indemnity as CDDL does. I'd be happier if Java, OpenOffice and MySQL were CDDL but there would be too much gnashing of teeth from the Linux creationists.

OpenSolaris is licensed under CDDL. Look here for an FAQ which explains in simple terms why CDDL is superior to GPL.

I have been an IT professional, and I am a nerd who has been playing with computers since about 1980. I know how to do an OS install, update drivers, etc. And yet MS Office managed to get screwed up on one of the incarnations of my built-from-parts PeeCee running Windows 2000 that I couldn't use it, uninstall it, or reinstall it from CD. Amazing. I still can't figure out how that one happened.
The only solution I eventually found was to reinstall Windows, something I recently got tired of doing. As a result, that machine will be getting Ubuntu 7.04 installed on it so I can use Stoq, a Free Software "commercial automation" (cash register, store management, etc.) package to make it into my ice cream shop's cash register. I'd install a more recent version of Ubuntu, but 7.04 is the last one tested and approved for use with Stoq. Stoq appears to be my only realistic non-Windows-based option as a small retailer in Brazil.
Anyway, getting back to the Office story, when Office got all screwed up, I didn't have time to do a full reinstall of Windows and everything else (at the time, I didn't make slipstream CDs, so reinstalling Windows took forever), and I needed to edit some Office documents. In the absence of a solution to the Office-just-won't-work problem, I found a workaround that served me very well. So well, in fact, that it ended up being my long-term solution. You can see it here.

I've never used it but you can try out OOO Base which is a copy of MS access. I'm guessing that is the solution you are looking for. I'm wondering, thought, how many people still use MS access? I mean you can make a simple web-based app and people can access it from anywhere. Why bother with a full blown app?

the new OpenOffice.org 2.4 release. Tell me how to install it! Because it ain't apt-gettable my friend. And there's no setup.exe to double click.

Oh wait, sorry, my misunderstanding.

Well, it looks like someone beat you to it already, with the most interesting issues being 72559, 72957 and 81365. Issue #72559 so far has 79 votes (which is quite a lot for a a bug marked as DEFECT) and since the changes involve the framework and drastically changing the UI, the target was unfortunately set to 3.0 /as this version reportedly won't support Windows 98/Me anymore :/.

Well, it looks like someone beat you to it already, with the most interesting issues being 72559, 72957 and 81365. Issue #72559 so far has 79 votes (which is quite a lot for a a bug marked as DEFECT) and since the changes involve the framework and drastically changing the UI, the target was unfortunately set to 3.0 /as this version reportedly won't support Windows 98/Me anymore :/.

Well, it looks like someone beat you to it already, with the most interesting issues being 72559, 72957 and 81365. Issue #72559 so far has 79 votes (which is quite a lot for a a bug marked as DEFECT) and since the changes involve the framework and drastically changing the UI, the target was unfortunately set to 3.0 /as this version reportedly won't support Windows 98/Me anymore :/.

I don't mean to sound like format correctness Nazi, but your PDFs could be much, much smaller.

You just need to substitute the Nimbus family of fonts (which are in Type 1 format) for some corresponding TTF fonts, like the FreeSans/FreeSerif families.

The problem is that OpenOffice PDF exported currently cannot do subsetting for Type 1 fonts, only for TTF fonts. So it embeds the full Type 1 fonts (Nimbus in your case) in the file. All the characters, including unused ones, like Japanese, Hindi and Chinese glyphs!

That's why your PDFs are almost 1 megabyte when in fact they could be twice as small.

Look in the properties of your PDFs (or use pdffonts utility) - when your see font names like "DAAAAA+font_name" then it's good - they are subsetted.

But font names that aren't prefixed with those "?AAAAA+" strings are embedded fully, without subsetting - they occupy lots of space!

Eliminate those fonts from your document when exporting to PDF, until OpenOffice issue 46305 is resolved (not likely in the near future...).

I put a Get OpenOffice button on my website. That may not be much but still too many people use m$ word just because they don't know ooffice exists. So a marketing campaign can help the same way it did for firefox.

There are *nixy xml manipulation tools like XMLStarlet. However, using XPath isn't quite a straightforward as grep. If you want to use traditional *nix tools on the text in an ODT (Open Document Text) document, the simplest approach is to export a plain text file from one of the several ODT editors like AbiWord, Google Docs, or of course, OpenOffice.

Are you using the Ubuntu OpenOffice.org edition? For all its goodies, it has some bugs too. I always use the vanilla OOo edition from http://www.openoffice.org/ . I have no problems with slide shows of your size.

They've been working on it for a long time now, but it seems to be a very difficult task. OpenOffice seems to have serious design problems in this area, and fixing them apparently requires changes all over the place. We can only hope that they manage to put this in for 3.0, which, as far as I know, is the current target for this work.

Check out the MD5 hashes, as best as you'll get:

http://download.openoffice.org/2.4.0/md5sums.html

2.4 is supposed to be the last X11 release for Mac OS X. There have been some QA hold ups on the Mac OS X port. It will likely lag behind the other ports by a day or two in getting out. See http://porting.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?list=mac&by=thread&from=1981668

3.0 should be Aqua-only for Mac OS X. At least, that is the stated goal.

Thank them with your wallet. http://contributing.openoffice.org/donate.html

I'm really looking forwards to a native (non X11) Mac version. NeoOffice works OK but seems a bit slow. I see that about a week ago a new native development shapshot was released.

Uh. Because we actually do have a product like this?

OpenOffice.org has support for pulling data from a database.
It also has support for a forms-like interface.
It also has it's own vb-alike language. (Still in development perhaps, by the looks of it)

There are also plenty of other tools. RealBasic, etc.

Uh. Because we actually do have a product like this?

OpenOffice.org has support for pulling data from a database.
It also has support for a forms-like interface.
It also has it's own vb-alike language. (Still in development perhaps, by the looks of it)

There are also plenty of other tools. RealBasic, etc.

I followed a bug like this a while ago. I believe it's been fixed: http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=74609

You can download the 3.0 (DEV300_m2) Aqua snapshot here: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua-Intel.html

Right you are http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Java_and_OpenOffice.org

While I agree that being able to define a range for error bars is nice, does anyone within the scientific community seriously use a spreadsheet for data analysis? In my experience the capabilities of Excel and the like are woefully inadequate for this purpose.

Yes, but one of the really awesome projects that is underway is R integration with Calc. It's very preliminary right now, but the goal is to be able to use R functions from inside Calc. Should be pretty sweet when it's ready.

You might want try a new aqua build http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.html DEV300_m2, which has some major improvements compared to previous builds.

Instead of fixing fundamental flaws like the the sorting algorithm, they chose to add new features. So OO 3.0 is still no viable alternative to MS Office :/.
This is an over 4 year old "feature request". Currently marked as "to be fixed in OO 3.x".

Gah.
A notch more digging reveals that this is not something specific to OxygenOffice. It is the result of a joint Novell & Sun incubator project (http://vba.openoffice.org/)

See also
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA
http://www.linux.com/feature/58348

Gah.
A notch more digging reveals that this is not something specific to OxygenOffice. It is the result of a joint Novell & Sun incubator project (http://vba.openoffice.org/)

See also
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/VBA
http://www.linux.com/feature/58348

The feature that is not yet available Hybrid PDFs: fully editable PDFs with embedded OpenDocument files (issue 65397) is a real killer. What it means is that you can attach a PDF to an email that anyone with normal PDF software can read. If the recipient has open office then they will be able to edit it too.

This will be really useful in that you can avoid having to distribute some files in "exported .doc format" so that it can be read by anyone and edited by other editors, or attaching two separate files.

A quick google search

http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000252 shows how to implement pivot tables in OO2. http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/wednesday_186.pdf tells us that Pivot Table support will be improved in OO3

At least open office 2.0 didn't really support that...

It does, but not nearly as well as Word. For instance, I'm not sure how well it handles tracking edits by multiple people, and I do know that deleted text shows up in the original place, just strike through, which probably throws off the pagination. Word displays deleted text in the margin, like the new notes feature. I was excited when I read that because I expected OO Writer to follow suit, but according to the article, that's not yet. Still, the notes in the margin seems like the fist step there, so hopefully better track changes support is not far behind. Here is another issue with the track changes feature that I had forgotten about.

(This is a feature I use myself a fair amount, and have been disappointed with OO's support for it.)

I also have a couple votes for this improvement, which is to add something like Word's normal mode. Having the margins there I think is really obnoxious. Normal mode in Word will make it so that successive lines aren't a couple inches apart on the screen. Even Word's page view mode lets you collapse the top and bottom margins.

There aren't major issues with OO Writer, but at the same time, there are enough minor annoyances that I'll still take Word in a second.

(Calc vs. Excel is another matter... I go back and forth there. Excel has a bunch of annoyances too...)

At least open office 2.0 didn't really support that...

It does, but not nearly as well as Word. For instance, I'm not sure how well it handles tracking edits by multiple people, and I do know that deleted text shows up in the original place, just strike through, which probably throws off the pagination. Word displays deleted text in the margin, like the new notes feature. I was excited when I read that because I expected OO Writer to follow suit, but according to the article, that's not yet. Still, the notes in the margin seems like the fist step there, so hopefully better track changes support is not far behind. Here is another issue with the track changes feature that I had forgotten about.

(This is a feature I use myself a fair amount, and have been disappointed with OO's support for it.)

I also have a couple votes for this improvement, which is to add something like Word's normal mode. Having the margins there I think is really obnoxious. Normal mode in Word will make it so that successive lines aren't a couple inches apart on the screen. Even Word's page view mode lets you collapse the top and bottom margins.

There aren't major issues with OO Writer, but at the same time, there are enough minor annoyances that I'll still take Word in a second.

(Calc vs. Excel is another matter... I go back and forth there. Excel has a bunch of annoyances too...)

What more can I say? This has been requested and brought up for *years*. I really don't get why it's so hard to do, especially considering something that there's already indentation and structure support for lists. I'm not an OOO hacker, but this doesn't seem like something that has a huge technical hurdle preventing it from being done.

Maybe I missed it - there was no mention in the articles listed.

Wait - the first article linked to this page:
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?Submit+query=Submit+query&issue_type=DEFECT&issue_type=ENHANCEMENT&issue_type=FEATURE&issue_type=PATCH&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=OOo+3.0&email1=&emailtype1=exact&emailassigned_to1=1&email2=&emailtype2=exact&emailreporter2=1&issueidtype=include&issue_id=&changedin=&votes=0&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=&chfieldvalue=&short_desc=&short_desc_type=allwords&long_desc=&long_desc_type=allwords&issue_file_loc=&issue_file_loc_type=fulltext&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=fulltext&keywords=&keywords_type=anytokens&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time
  which mentioned an outline mode. Maybe it's coming after all?