Final Version of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X Released

Ant writes "After two years of work, OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X (X11) is golden master and ready for immediate download by all Mac OS X users. This release marks a major milestone. It uses the Unix standard X Window and takes advantage of the immense wealth of open source material. To name but one feature, fonts are anti-aliased, making documents look smooth and clean and wholly professional. If you use Mac OS X there is no reason to wait. This will address your needs. And, as with all in the OpenOffice.org 1.0 family, this free release reads and writes Microsoft Office documents and works freely in heterogeneous environments where one might find Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X machines working side by side. The next step is to finish the Aqua version."

Comments

Selling points?

[Martin Kallisti]

Really, is there nothing more worthy of mention than (gasp!) anti-aliased fonts. I mean, this is supposed to be a productivity suite, not just a Microsoft document reader, right? Apart from that, I would love to hear from people having used recent versions. Is it actually good enough to fully replace Office v.X?

Re:Selling points?

[mashx]

One of the most useful things about OO for me has been this: being the only TiBook user in a company awash with Compaqs and very many different versions of windows, I get many different versions of Word documents, and some of them would force Office 2001 and Office v.X to quit: open the document, application quits! However, when I opened them in OO, it accepted it perfectly. I could then save them (type a space, delete the space) in the same format, but OO would save them in a format that either MS Office would then play nicely. Incredible but true!

However, I wasn't able to use the last beta for my work, simply because it didn't support the number of features that I required for working e.g. version tracking, embedded tables, full bullet point customisation, spacing between bullets etc. It has some of these, but doesn't pplay the same way as office, and in this company I can get away with using a Mac, but for presentation purposes, I need to play the same unfortunately.

If there was one thing I didn't like which I couldn't forgive it for was that you had to set all documents the same size - at least - I couldn't find a way to set them differently.

Still. having said that I have downloaded this latest version, and will again see how well it works. The IT guys want to get rid of Office (purely for the licensing), and are waiting for OO to be possible as a replacement..

What about native aqua?

[Yonder Way]

X11 is nice and all, but I'm going to risk losing some karma here and say that it is not going to be useful to me for day to day use because of simple little things like lack of system clipboard integration (X11 apps have their own clipboard). When/if OOo runs natively as an aqua app I'll be glad to switch.

Re:What about native aqua?

[EricHsu]

I'm using a beta of OOO (not the latest). Apple X11 lets you take X11 clipboards and paste to the Mac side. OOO had a bug that limited the clipboard to 255 chars, but I think they are working on that. There is another little issue with creeping windows in Apple X11, but overall I'm quite pleased with it. It's the only program I've ever used that comes close to decoding the (criminally obfuscated) MS Office formats. I think the interface is really clunky, but not more so than the Office that they are cloning.

Re:This will address your needs.

[gerbache]

The mere fact that X11 on OSX is still using a separate clipboard is enough to keep me from wanting to use it. I find it really annoying when I have to struggle to copy and paste between my word processor and the rest of the apps in my system. There is one thing I will say in it's defense, however. It makes it really handy for me as an engineering student because currently Matlab only runs on X11, so I can use it to integrate my plots and such into my reports. Otherwise, I'll stick with commercial office suites until oo.o goes aqua.

Re:Unfortunately...

[TheRaven64]

No, the Quartz version will behave exactly like this version. There are three threads to the OOo on OS X development effort.

1. The first is to get the whole thing to compile and work under X11 on OS X as it would on any other *NIX. This is the one that was released today.
2. The next stage is to replace the X11 code with native Quartz code. It will still feel the same, probably look the same (although they may introduce some more Aqua-like graphics at this point) but it will be a native OS X / Quartz app, with no need for X11.
3. The final stage (and I'm really hoping that Apple will get involved at this stage and bundle the resulting office suite with the OS as iOffice, or something) is to redo all of the menus, dialogs etc. so that they look just like a real OS X app. Once this is done (The roadmap says Q2 2004) then it should be a competitive office suite on the Mac.

Hopefully now that the OOo OS X team has a working release build they will be able to keep it synchronised with the main trunk.

I need to print

[Funksaw]

As a guy who's stuck with AppleWorks (since he's sworn off pirated software) and doesn't want to give money to Microsoft, I'm waiting for a usable port of OpenOffice to MacOSX.

However, I'm not sure that I can consider the MacOSX port of OpenOffice as "usable" until it has the capacity to -print- the documents I create in it.

An Aqua/Cocoa port would be great, but right now, I just want full functionality.