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OpenOffice 641d Released, Next Stop: 1.0

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the moving-towards-office-killer dept.

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.""

8 of 168 comments (clear)

  1. but by bouis · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:but by Mister+Proper · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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.

    2. Re:but by Tet · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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...

      --
      "The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
  2. Well... by guinnessnwhiskey · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. Feature set? by RedWizzard · · Score: 5, Insightful
    "...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?
  4. Re:heated competition by sydb · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    Yours Sincerely, Michael.
  5. sadly, it doesn't matter how well it works by mmusn · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:sadly, it doesn't matter how well it works by tzanger · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.