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

[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.

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?:)

Re:heated competition

[sydb]

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 looks good, but when I tried it several times during 2001 it was slow and crashed all the flaming time. I'm sure it's improving but I got bored waiting. Therefore:

To replace Word: KWord looks cool, but I couldn't get equations to work properly. LyX is really nice if you take the time to understand the concepts behind LaTeX and WYMIWYG. LyX especially rocks for editing equations, but it'll do everything else you could want too, and the output is beautiful. Abiword isn't there yet (tables etc.) but might be one day.

To replace Excel: Gnumeric.

To replace Outlook: I actually use IMP, a webmail application. I retrieve pop3 email with fetchmail, make it available via IMAP (one of Debian's IMAP packages) and access it with IMP, on apache-ssl for security, from home and anywhere else with an internet connection. Best thing about IMP is it's the fastest email client I've used! I have folders with hundreds, some with thousands, of emails and the likes of Balsa or Evolution can take forever to access them (if they don't crash). IMP takes seconds, and it never crashes! (I use Galeon for my web browsing/ IMP access). The HORDE project of which IMP is a part is actually an entire groupware suite, but I've only used IMP.

PowerPoint: MagicPoint looks pretty good but I've never used it.

Access: Postgresql or mysql should more than meet your needs. There are nice GUI tools available for both.

Best of luck.

Re:how about OS-X ?

[nebbian]

From http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/:

How long will it be until the port is finished?
Progress on the Mac OS X port has been slow. At this time it's not feasible to estimate the amount of time it will take to complete the port.

They're still looking for developers, so if you've got some time to spare then help out!

Well...

[guinnessnwhiskey]

While i like the features of Openoffice, i hate the way the whole thing works. The desktop of Staroffice 5.2 has been removed, but OO is still one big process and the different applications are just modules. If only one of these modules hangs and you have to kill it, all your OO aplications get killed. Another result is, for me starting up the Writer takes as long as starting up the whole 5.2 Desktop.
I hope that this changes in one of the future versions, but i have the feeling that it won't.

How can they be close to version 1 ?

[msergeant]

Unless they are planning a linux only type release then openoffice is nowhere near version 1, I'm all for software for linux but really it isn't hard to make the code portable enough that it will compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OsX etc. Right now it compiles nicely in NetBSD ports n thats it, the others are all broken. If I was enough of a C hacker I would try and do my bit but my gripe is the portability issue should have been thought of from the start, if it had been then we could be close to a true open source office solution that everyone (nearly) can use.

Re:How can they be close to version 1 ?

[Arker]

Unless they are planning a linux only type release then openoffice is nowhere near version 1, I'm all for software for linux but really it isn't hard to make the code portable enough that it will compile on FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, OsX etc. Right now it compiles nicely in NetBSD ports n thats it, the others are all broken. If I was enough of a C hacker I would try and do my bit but my gripe is the portability issue should have been thought of from the start, if it had been then we could be close to a true open source office solution that everyone (nearly) can use.

Slow down there hoss.

OpenOffice is quite portable. It's being developed on Linux and Win32 x86, Solaris (both architectures, Linux PPC, NetBSD, and FreeBSD.

Not all of the ports are keeping up with the main tree, it's true. Since it's a volunteer effort you know what to do about that... the tree itself is probably as portable as anything out there.

Feature set?

[RedWizzard]

"...we would like you to download it, test it, and finally vote on the feature set.""

A bit late to be voting on the feature set, don't you think?

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:*BSD IS DYING

[larien]

They've been saying that about Unix for years. Trouble is, we have a damn good necromancer keeping it going.

version number

[sebol]

6 38c
6 41b
6 41c
6 41d

Why the version number contained with bra size?

after this is 1.0,
what's next?
1.0PU
1.1
1.1PU
1.2
1.2PU

(PU = Push up)

sadly, it doesn't matter how well it works

[mmusn]

It doesn't matter how well it works. 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.

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.

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.

Re:Where is the slowness coming from?

[mark_lybarger]

yep, you're paranoid!

the source code for both these products you mention are OPEN SOURCE. if you can show some of these time loops in the free version, we'd love to see it. i'm sure the developers of the software would love to see it as well.

641D is a step forward

[travail_jgd]

I tried the previous release (641C) and it had a lot of issues. Writer would hang whenever I tried to change fonts or import a document from MS Word. KWord and Abiword didn't import my documents correctly, so I was stuck with either Star Office 5.2 or MS Word.

I grabbed 641D a couple of days ago, and I have to say that I'm impressed! Other than a few fonts that I haven't migrated to Linux, it's done a great job with complex tables and formatting.

The only thing that would stop me from using it as my regular word processor is that I can't figure out how to make it use imperial units (inches) instead of metric.

Re:I'm confused about the version

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi,

To clear that up OO642 is the first wave for new development and has lots of new code that breaks and things.

If you want what will be OOo 1.0 eventually, simply grab 641d and ignore 642.

Hope this helps,

Kevin

Re:Where is the slowness coming from?

[IamTheRealMike]

One thing I have wondered using OpenOffice (and als o Mozilla) is: How do they manage to make them so slow?!

Simple - it's largely because they're cross platform. This means that they cannot take for granted ANY system services at all. With Mozilla for instance they reimplemented COM (into XPCOM) because only Windows has such a component model. They created XUL (as far as I'm concerned the coolness value makes that worth the effort alone) because at the time there were no robust enough XP GUI toolkits under the right type of license. Qt would have been ideal, but I think there were problems with the legalese.

So they used their kick-ass rendering engine to do the GUIs. But this makes it larger, as all the widget logic has to be contained within the software. I'm amazed Moz is as small as it is.

OpenOffice is the same - they created their own component model, not sure about the widget set, but because they could assume nothing they had to make a lot of stuff pure Windows/Linux/Mac developers can take for granted.

I was a skeptic

[tkrotchko]

But after using for about 1/2 an hour, I'd say this thing is pretty impressive.

Just a couple of notes:

1) I find the interface a little (stress "little")clunky, but I'm a long time Office user. But I'd get used to it in about a week.

2) The Document default views are awful. I'm going to see if I can mess with this to make it more livable for me.

3) It opens Office XP Spreadsheets, Documents, and Powerpoints pretty well. I haven't thrown the kitchen sink at it though.

4) 1/2 hour isn't long enough to judge stability. But I haven't had any crashes or oddities yet.

This is a good package so far as I've looked. I'm going to try to work in it for the next few days and see if its good enough to recommend to relatives who need MS Office compatibility.

Hats off to these guys. This is excellent work.

Re:I'm confused about the version

[_aa_]

I am running 642, the developer version. I am yet to encounter any buggies.
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/source/642/rele ase_notes.html -- Release notes. I guess it's the stable version that's important.

WordPerfect import filters

[AntiNorm]

WordPerfect import ability would really help.

First impressions

[Platinum Dragon]

A few days ago, I posted a quick personal review of OO 641C. I've been impressed by the software, and my main complaint was the speed of the program as a whole.

I can gladly say that 641D has introduced significant speed increases under Linux. Startup time fell by half; whereas I used to wait 20 seconds to get a workspace, I now wait 10 seconds or less. The interface in general has sped up. Things feel much snappier, far less laggy. Dialogs open faster, new windows open faster, the whole thing feels like the developers spent much of their time between releases on optimizations and speed increases. I'm already very impressed.

The one thing I used to dread about starting up OO was the speed. I don't think I'll have any such worries anymore, as it doesn't seem to bog down the system either anymore - or at least, not as much.

I'm a happy user.