OpenOffice 641d Released, Next Stop: 1.0

Damek writes "In the spirit of the proliferating news about Office alternatives and 1.0 versions this week, OpenOffice.org has released a new version of OpenOffice, 641d, the last planned release before 1.0. They're calling for help in pinning down and eradicating final bugs before they hit the big milestone: "...we would like you to download it, test it, and finally vote on the feature set.""

Comments

but

[bouis]

Whatever happened to porting OpenOffice to GTK? Was this ever seriously considered or did I just imagine it?

Re:but

[Mister Proper]

Whatever happened to porting OpenOffice to GTK? Was this ever seriously considered or did I just imagine it?

I've wondered about that myself too. The nice thing is that Michael Meeks talked about doing that at FOSDEM, also he has mentioned the same thing on one of the GNOME mailing lists (can't be bothered to look this up).

Miguel de Icaza too has said that time is better spent on improving OpenOffice rather than working on say Gnumeric (which he wrote part of too).

So, nothing concrete but who knows, maybe Michael wil work on integrating OpenOffice with GNOME some day. Another possibility is that Sun will do the integration after they switch to GNOME (perhaps they could pay Ximian to do this for them?).

Just dreaming out loud here.

Re:but

[georgeb]

Ehem! :) Gnome - KDE. Mozilla - Konqueror. All sorts of OSS projects collide and compete. And it's all for the best. Because, evermore than in real economics, OSS WANTS competition.

Did you see how Mozilla got so much better? I've been so busy admiring mozilla's progress that one day it hit me in the face just how wonderful and fast Konqueror is. I did not switch to Konqueror, but I do use it once in a while and I certainly would not mind browsing the web with Konqueror.

The same with KDE. Once upon a time I was stupid enough to consider both KDE and Gnome a total waste (that was back in the GNOME 1.0 ages). Then I've upgraded my computer and fell in love with Gnome. Every time I saw KDE's face I would turn my face in desgust -- I was a GNOME guy! Only recenty have I been able to lift my head and see the Reality: Gnome and KDE are both mature and wonderful projects that have benefitted immensely from one-another. Just like mozilla and konqueror. And I hear that those guys working on gtkhtml are doing some wonderful progress. Am I wrong? There's always room for a third HTML renderer. ;) So we'd have (Barque/Encompass vs Mozilla/Galeon vs Konqueror) VS ( the rest of the world ) ;))

That's competition!

Re:but

[Tet]

Miguel de Icaza too has said that time is better spent on improving OpenOffice rather than working on say Gnumeric

Which is yet another indication that Miguel has lost the plot. Gnumeric is a stunning app that could seriously rival Excel. OpenOffice isn't close to rivalling either Word or Excel any time soon. But Miguel has long ago forgotten the Unix concept of small specialized tools, and is heading towards MS bloat at an alarming pace. OpenOffice is significantly better than it used to be (and light years ahead of StarOffice 5), but it's starting out on the wrong foot, by trying to be an "office suite", rather than a set of apps that work well together with a consistent look and feel. The sad thing is that I remember Miguel from when he was working on the SPARC and MIPS ports of Linux. How the mighty have fallen...

Hooray for the team!

[xophos]

I recently had to convert 100 pages of M$-Word to Latex. There was loads of mathematics in it, and Open Office helped me a great deal in seeing what the original looked like, since i don't have any M$ on my machine.

I really like Open office

[SuperCal]

I liked it alot, but I had some trouble running it at first. I fiddled with everything to get it to work, finaly I just gave up and started to read slashdot, after a few mins I went down to the taskbar to check the status on a POV render and low and behold there was a button on the taskbar for open office so I checked it out and the damn thing started up. I havn't had a problem sense.

heated competition

[morgajel]

with the recent stories about the implications of star office being charged for, it's good to see that openoffice is setpping up to the plate.
if I were the developers working on openoffice, I'd be thankin my lucky stars(no pun inteded) that sun decided to charge for it. with the growing wave of 'open and free is better' I think they can capitalize on it.
As a former BeOS user, I also noticed gobe productive made the news. sweet.
Now comes the important part. in a month, I'm switching over to a completely linux system, and I'm gonna need a replacement for Office. so who's it gonna be?:)

OpenOffice at work

[vandan]

We were using the StarOffice 6-beta release, but when I heard of the 31-3-02 timebomb in it, we moved to OpenOffice 641C. Of course now there is a patch to extend StarOffice, but we won't be needing it.
The 641 build is quite stable and complete. Oh - except for that Australian dictionary. Maybe I should go make one...
I'm looking forward to the proposed changes to the toolbars (look under the 'Todo' section on their site). Looks very nice. Maybe it will come with a performance improvement too. Hint, hint!!!

Re:sadly, it doesn't matter how well it works

[tzanger]

The main thing that matters to most people in an MS Office replacement is how well it reads and writes MS Office files. And that's, unfortunately, a moving target.

Agreed on both points. My experience with 641C (win and linux) is that it reads and writes Office97/2000 files with ease. Really large excel files it barfs on, but your normal .doc with graphics, "normal size" xls files, etc. all work great. I was really surpised at how well it writes the files, too.

Maybe...if the M$ is sufficiently....

[bubbha]

...restrained from exploiting their monopoly...the PC vendors can install openoffice, java, Perl, Mozilla on EVERY PC that they ship....that might give us a base to start with. Perhaps the XML file formats will become the basic document exchange standard...

Re:sadly, it doesn't matter how well it works

[robson]

Yep, and it does a good, solid job of reading and writing Office formats. It's a moving target, but it just takes some effort to keep it updated.

For this reason, just this week I convinced 4 co-workers to switch to OpenOffice. "Read and write Office files without supporting Microsoft!" That easy.

WordPerfect import filters

[AntiNorm]

WordPerfect import ability would really help.

Re:WordPerfect import filters

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep.

Unfortunately, the WP file format is so hideously god-awful ugly that it makes Word files look reasonable and straightforward. Like most other formats (RTF, Quark, or XML, for example), the Word format puts the change-this and end-change codes next to or around the words to be changed. You can interpret the document with direct translation of the codes and get pretty close, and errors in one translation have little impact on other translations.

WP format is the equivalent of having a plain-text document with a macro attached that, upon opening, does the formatting recorded the last time. It's all stuck at the end of the file, and a misinterpretation at any step can screw up the entire rest of the document. You can't just write a "filter", you have to write a whole macro language interpreter...

Re:sadly, it doesn't matter how well it works

[_Sprocket_]

I was disappointed in how StarOffice 6.0beta handled bullets when exported to MS Word format. And while I can appreciate that issue may not be trivial, still... the end result was unacceptable.

So I turned to Open Office 641c. And to my suprise, bullets exported in an acceptable format. Not perfect. I would still like to see improvement in that area. But its close enough for me to continue using OO rather happily.