OpenOffice 1.1 RC 1 Released

Missing features still... by jkrise · 2003-07-15 00:11 · Score: 4, Informative

Simplicity, like AbiWord.
Less bloat, like Gnumeric (which yet scores over Excel)
Performance - It's a lot slower than MS Office, specially on Linux.

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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....

Re:Missing features still... by jkrise · 2003-07-15 00:26 · Score: 4, Informative

You've run MS-Office on Linux? It was faster?

About 80% of my clients use Windows to run Office, mail and a bit of browsing. The speeds I measured were on the same system:

MS Office (Word) on MS Windoze : 100
Open Office on Windoze : 134
Open Office on Linux : 176
AbiWord on Linux : 27

MS Office (Excel) on MS Windoze: 100
Open Office on Windoze : 110
Open Office on Linux : 140
Gnumeric on Linux : 33

Both AbiWord and Gnumeric support the Windoze MS Office formats quite well. In short, I can't think of any reason to run OpenOffice on Linux systems - except for hyper-sensitive users.

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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Re:Missing features still... by Rogerborg · 2003-07-15 00:31 · Score: 2, Informative

It's slower than MS Office running on wine on linux. It starts up more slowly, it responds more slowly, it uses more memory. Is that clear enough for you?

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Re:Missing features still... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-15 00:38 · Score: 1, Informative

I think he's scaling it, using MS Office as the base (100).
Re:Missing features still... by jkrise · 2003-07-15 00:50 · Score: 4, Informative

These speeds are meaningless unless you give us some context. I assume you're giving relative speeds at performing some task since both the MS Office speeds are 100.

All speeds are in seconds - MS Office speeds are pegged at 100 for scaling. For Word, I measured 'file- open speed' for 10-page files (there's little point in measuring 'editing' speeds). For Excel I opened 6 page spreadsheets with a bit of formulae. Again 'updating' and 'editing' speeds were not measured.
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Re:Missing features still... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-15 01:30 · Score: 1, Informative

These days, KOffice won't even read OO-documents.

That is a fault of KOffice, not OpenOffice. The file format for OO is well documented so adding support should be easy.
Re:Missing features still... by mj01nir · 2003-07-15 01:34 · Score: 3, Informative

Reveal Codes! Please give me WordPerfect style reveal codes. I haven't used WP in 6 years and I still miss reveal codes.

That said, I've been using 1.1b1 and 1.1b2 for some time now and have been quite pleased with the progress. With OOo 1.1, I finally moved my wife's computer from Win2K to Linux. No regrets.

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the no .sig .sig
Re:Missing features still... by kannibal_klown · 2003-07-15 06:51 · Score: 2, Informative

Have you had a lot of experience with large corporations? They have certain standards, rules, regulations. For example, anything in my company with even the slightest bit of importance has to be readable by MS Word. I'm not saying whether this is right or not, but that's just the way it is. If you work for a big corp, you have to follow their rules. And by the way, many corporations have give their user very limited acess to their machines, retstricting installations to only developers. I'm not just talking about simple Windows permissions, but third-party addons and such. If you want OOo to spread corporately, you have to convince the higher (WAY higher) ups that it's good. Simply sending them OOo fiels will jsut piss them off and wind up with someone getting reprimanded.

Re:xooo by TheRaven64 · 2003-07-15 00:14 · Score: 2, Informative

Since Ximian have released the code to the modifications that they made to OOo, there's no reason why their icons couldn't be integrated back into the main codebase.

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I am TheRaven on Soylent News

Re:#1 Problem by gilesjuk · 2003-07-15 00:17 · Score: 2, Informative

It does both of the things you mention. Not perfectly, but then neither does Word when importing older doc versions.

What rock have you been hiding uder?

Showstopper #1820 still open. by deragon · 2003-07-15 00:19 · Score: 5, Informative

But bug #1820 remains unresolved. In all fairness though, things are a bit moving for this showstopper. Hopefully there will be a solution for it in the near future.

For the few unaware of this bug, in Calc, if your locale uses "," (comma) as a decimal separator, your numeric pad is worthless because the num pad "." (dot) is interepreted as something else than a decimal separator. You imagine how difficult it is to convert people using Excel when you must explain that they cannot use their num pad anymore. And before you suggest remapping keys, please read the bug report. Many non english locales are affected by this bug.

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Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...

Changes since 1.1 beta 2 by ChrisRijk · 2003-07-15 00:25 · Score: 4, Informative

New features in OpenOffice.org 1.1rc over OpenOffice.org beta2 release:

# a "talkback" style crash reporter to collect stacktrace and error information
# new command line parameter -start to automatically start a presentation after the document is loaded
# ability to update existing OpenOffice.org 1.0.x single user installations
# support for drawing objects in headers and footers
# an example XSLT filter for Office 2003 XML format
# support for MS Excel 95 and older form controls
# UNO python bridge - python is now a first class language for creating UNO components for OpenOffice.org
# built in spell checking dictionaries for English (UK) and Italian
# built in hyphenation support for Danish, English (UK), German and Russian
# integrated Bitstream Vera fonts
# improved spelling suggestions using n-gram scoring

OpenOffice 1.0.3 behavior hopefully changed by Jugalator · 2003-07-15 00:29 · Score: 3, Informative

Something I thought was a very annoying feature in OpenOffice 1.0.3 was that it tries to be "smart" and open a file in a part of the office suite it "thinks" is best fit to do the job, and no apparent way to turn that function off.

For example, if I choose to open a tab-delimited .txt file in Calc, it still open it in Writer. What?! I didn't tell it to open it in Writer. Even MS Office is more smart than that and imports it as best as it can by figuring out the delimiter etc, and certainly not tries to open it in the word processor, when I basically issued the command "ooocalc.exe table.txt". If it lacks the intelligence to open it, at least go confused and show me the Import dialog so I can properly import it as a tab-delimited text. But there doesn't even seem to be a setting for this...

I noticed there's a setting in OO that let you select the default program to use. But I don't want to open any document in a "default" program, I want to open a document in the program I'm opening it with!

So right now, I have to go through the looong path of starting Calc stand-alone, File->Open, select the .txt file, pick the .txt file format to be something like "Comma-delimited txt file" somewhere deep in its combo box and then it finally understands "aaah, it's delimited!" and stops forcing me to use another program than I'm trying to open it with.

I really hope I'm missing something here, or this behavior will be fixed in OO 1.1, because I really despise programs that think, no... assumes, they know more than you do. I was also shocked to once again have to disable the paper clip feature in OO! Only difference was that the current incarnation was now a light bulb and not a paper clip. What progress the world is making. :-(

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Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!

Re:OpenOffice 1.0.3 behavior hopefully changed by Cyno · 2003-07-15 02:58 · Score: 2, Informative

I have no problems moving text and data around between Open Office formats and portable text files. But I usually call them *.csv, which brings up the import dialog whenever you double click on it.

Normally a spreadsheet is exported as a list of common separated values. Even Excel can do this, but it has trouble exporting the data in the proper format with the right delimiters for importing into my CGI scripts. For converting *.xls to a comma delimited text file Open Office is the best thing I've ever used.

Re:Did they fix the spell check by Manos+Batsis · 2003-07-15 00:34 · Score: 2, Informative

The support for anything other than United Statesian English is pretty bad.

Actually, I've been using the Greek spellchecking and autocomplete features since the betas and they beat MS Office out of the water as far as my native language goes...

Manos

Re:Nice by wolruf · 2003-07-15 00:40 · Score: 3, Informative

there's one here: http://oootools.free.fr/memoire_cnam/ in french.
Others (still in french): http://bureautiquelibre.org/

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Re:Great for us, not yet for wide deployment... by pillohead · 2003-07-15 00:51 · Score: 2, Informative

OO, or a seperate project also needs a replacement for 'Access'.
There is one it's called mysql, check out the trail of tears article at linuxworld. I find it funny that all his problems are attributable to RedHat's piss-poor package management system (or any Linux distro for that matter). I did it using FreeBSD as the server with no hassles, on a mixed FreeBSD and windows network.

Re:My experience by Captain+Large+Face · 2003-07-15 00:56 · Score: 4, Informative

own proprietary format

Surely you mean it's own open format?

Re:Great for us, not yet for wide deployment... by Alkarismi · 2003-07-15 00:57 · Score: 2, Informative

Hey, thanks for the tip - I'll bamf over and check it out when everyones calmed down ;)

Secretaries are a *real* conservative bunch and likely to p*ss themselves if you so much as mention csv files. For you and me this is a great thing. For them, if it deviates too far from the current (read MS) way, it's a no-no.

Thanks again for the tip, I'll look into it.

Re:PDF support? by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-15 01:00 · Score: 1, Informative

gs supports links and bookmarks. All you have to do is insert pdfmark's in the ps file. Right now this is a big pain in the ass so hopefully oo will make this easy.

Re:new and improved! by flacco · 2003-07-15 01:01 · Score: 1, Informative

*drum hit*

That punch-line drum thing is called a "rimshot".

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pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.

Re:Nice by pacman+on+prozac · 2003-07-15 01:16 · Score: 2, Informative

We didn't really switch to OO, it came down to everyone needing some office software and the options being to spend about 5000$ on ms office for everyone or 0$ on openoffice.

We are not a huge company (20 people in 2 depts) so we're not really an OO posterchild :)

What we are however is a realistic example of IT companies trying to work in a dwindling economy (Germany) with the IT market being pretty messed up anyway. For someone in our position to spend the equivilant of an extra staff member or two on software which does not help our core business would be suicidal.

Support = zero. The only times I ever had to do anything was one bug in file-saving (random bug, didnt happen again) and fixing the font sizes in redhat which is hardly the fault of OO. We don't have an office full of drones cranking out vbs infected spreadsheets. We do have a printing department but they wouldn't use an office package anyway as they need more accuracy. For "normal" office use OpenOffice is perfect for us.

1.1 snapshots in red-carpet 'ooo-snapshot' channel by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-15 01:18 · Score: 1, Informative

If you use RH9 or SuSE 8.2 you can already get a snapshot of the work in progress wrt. a Ximianized OO.o 1.1 from the 'ooo-snapshot' channel in Red Carpet. It's pretty functional.

No need for CVS to use mail merge by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-15 01:20 · Score: 1, Informative

You don't need CVS. Here's a different tutorial that may help:
http://www.virtualsky.net/daves/2003-08.htm

Re:Great! by dominator · 2003-07-15 01:34 · Score: 3, Informative

Please see http://libwpd.sf.net/ - a couple of AbiWord hackers wrote libwpd, and then wrote an OOWriter plugin for it. Complete with screenshots and downloadable binary plugins.

Dom

dictionary.com definition & jargon file by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-15 01:52 · Score: 1, Informative

proprietary

1. Of, relating to, or suggestive of a proprietor or to proprietors as a group: had proprietary rights; behaved with a proprietary air in his friend's house.
2. Exclusively owned; private: a proprietary hospital.
3. Owned by a private individual or corporation under a trademark or patent: a proprietary drug.

proprietary

adj. 1. In marketroid-speak, superior; implies a
product imbued with exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of
the company's own hardware or software designers. 2. In the
language of hackers and users, inferior; implies a product not
conforming to open-systems standards, and thus one that puts the
customer at the mercy of a vendor able to gouge freely on service
and upgrade charges after the initial sale has locked the customer
in. Often in the phrase "proprietary crap". 3. Synonym for
closed-source, e.g. software issued in binary without source and
under a restructive license.

Since the coining of the term open source, many hackers have
made a conscious effort to distinguish between `proprietary' and
`commercial' software. It is possible for software to be commercial
(that is, intended to make a profit for the producers) without being
proprietary. The reverse is also possible, for example in
binary-only freeware.

Installed last night by Zathrus · 2003-07-15 01:54 · Score: 3, Informative

My wife emailed me her resume (in .doc format, which, like it or not, is the standard nowadays) so I could review it.

OpenOffice.org 1.0.3 crashed upon trying to open it. This is a Word doc that was exported from OO.org 1.0.3... how sad is that? I installed 1.1RC1 and it was just fine though. So I'd guess the import is improved.

Installing RC1 on her system was rather more difficult... since the installer kept bombing about a UNICOWS.DLL error. Yes, the solution was easy to find on the website, but why not have a more useful error message than that in the first place? If it's a FAQ, it should be reasonable to integrate the error message into the installer rather than confuse the user. Most people will get an error like that and say screw it and go back to Word/Works/whatever.

Try Kexi by EarthTone · 2003-07-15 02:00 · Score: 2, Informative

KDE's KOffice is developing a *complete* suite of applications to replace MS Office. In your case, please investigate Kexi (www.koffice.org/kexi/), a true Access replacement.

Eron

Re:My experience by snofla · 2003-07-15 02:02 · Score: 2, Informative

IANAL, but see here: http://groups.google.com/groups?&threadm=a5aa8dd0. 0208271613.3cd18da6%40posting.google.com
Summary:

US, expired last month
Europe, expiring June 19, 2004
Japan, June 20, 2004

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i don't like style guides

Re:Customization by Anonym0us+Cow+Herd · 2003-07-15 02:06 · Score: 3, Informative

So, what kind of developmet does Open Office allow?

Read all about it. api.openoffice.org udk.openoffice.org

Go over to OOoForum.org , go into the Macros and API section and read what people are doing.

Go over to OOoDocs.org , they also have a Macros and devlopment section.

You can write StarBasic code directly into OOo documents. You can write programs in Java to drive a running OOo, even on a different computer. (For example, a Java program on, say, Windows, telling an OOo running on Linux what to do.) You can write components in C++ or Java or Python.

The Python UNO bridge is new. I haven't tried it yet. I believe you can do anything with Python that you could do with Java or C++ in OOo. StarBasic is limited in that you cannot create new components, it lacks sophisticated data structures, and you can only embed it within documents. The other languages cannot be embedded within documents (yet). I'm hoping to someday be able to embed Java classes or Python within an OOo document, just like I can with StarBasic macros.

Be sure to download the SDK. Read the documentation, especially the developer's guide. The first big learning curve is to understand UNO. This is pretty much a prerequisite for everything else. Once you do though, you're on your way.

Oh yeah, on languages that can access OOo. If you're on Windows, you can use Windows Automation. This means you can access it from, say, Visual Basic. I have seen OpenOffice.org programmed from Visual FoxPro.

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The price of freedom is eternal litigation.

Download links, features list by MagicFab · 2003-07-15 02:10 · Score: 3, Informative

Windows Downloads:
http://www.binarycode.org/openoffice/s table/1.1rc/ OOo_1.1rc_Win32Intel_install.zip
http://www.ibibl io.org/pub/packages/openoffice/sta ble/1.1rc/OOo_1.1rc_Win32Intel_install.zip
ftp:// ftp.ussg.iu.edu/pub/openoffice/stable/1.1rc/ OOo_1.1rc_Win32Intel_install.zip
http://openoffic e.mirrors.pair.com/stable/1.1rc/OO o_1.1rc_Win32Intel_install.zip
ftp://openofficeor g.secsup.org/pub/software/openof fice/stable/1.1rc/OOo_1.1rc_Win32Intel_install.zip
ftp://mirrors.umbc.edu/pub/editors/openoffice/st ab le/1.1rc/OOo_1.1rc_Win32Intel_install.zip

Linux Downloads:
http://www.binarycode.org/openoffice/s table/1.1rc/ OOo_1.1rc_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
http://www.ib iblio.org/pub/packages/openoffice/sta ble/1.1rc/OOo_1.1rc_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
ftp ://ftp.ussg.iu.edu/pub/openoffice/stable/1.1rc/ OOo_1.1rc_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
http://openof fice.mirrors.pair.com/stable/1.1rc/OO o_1.1rc_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
ftp://openoffic eorg.secsup.org/pub/software/openof fice/stable/1.1rc/OOo_1.1rc_LinuxIntel_install.tar .gz
ftp://mirrors.umbc.edu/pub/editors/openoffice /stab le/1.1rc/OOo_1.1rc_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz

MacOSX Downloads:
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/ooo- osx_download s.html#download

New features in OpenOffice.org 1.1rc over OpenOffice.org beta2 release
* a "talkback" style crash reporter to collect stacktrace and error information
* new command line parameter -start to automatically start a presentation after the document is loaded
* ability to update existing OpenOffice.org 1.0.x single user installations
* support for drawing objects in headers and footers
* an example XSLT filter for Office 2003 XML format
* support for MS Excel 95 and older form controls
* UNO python bridge - python is now a first class language for creating UNO components for OpenOffice.org
* built in spell checking dictionaries for English (UK) and Italian
* built in hyphenation support for Danish, English (UK), German and Russian
* integrated Bitstream Vera fonts
* improved spelling suggestions using n-gram scoring

OpenOffice.org 1.1 RC Features
2003-07-11
Enhanced file format support

* PDF (Portable Document Format) export
* Support for mailing a document as PDF.
* DocBook/XML import/export.
* XHTML export.
* Support for exporting as a flat XML file.
* Support for Macromedia Flash (SWF) export.
* Support for mobile device formats like AportisDoc (Palm), Pocket Word and Pocket Excel.
* Example xslt based filter for Office 2003 XML documents

Accessibility

* Support for full keyboard navigation and control
* Support for tracking system colour scheme and theme settings
* Support for accessibility in the help system and documents
* Initial support for Assistive Technologies via Java accessibility APIs

Internationalization
CTL, vertical and bidirectional writing

* Support for vertical writing within text documents, text frames and graphic objects
* Support for vertical writing in spreadsheet cells (the direction is individualy selectable)
* Support for input, display and editing of scripts using Complex Text Layout (CTL)
* Support for RTL layout and text in the OpenOffice.org GUI
* Support for BiDi-writing in OpenOffice.org documents
* Support for using either Arabic or Hindi numerals
* The RTL vs. LTR default text direction is automaticly selected based on locale

Other Internationalization enhancements

* Support for various 8-bit Arabic and Hebrew text encodings / code pages.
* Support for the KOI8_U encoding.
* New CTL options tab in language options dialog.
* Rescue mode support for BiDi/CTL with X11 fonts.
* S

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Notepad specialist & FAT administrator, group training available

Re:word count... by labratuk · 2003-07-15 02:25 · Score: 2, Informative

Have you ever tried going to File > Properties ?

(it's something like that, i dont have it infront of me)

You could even insert a wordcount field and hit F9 every now and then.

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Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.

Re:word count... by Anonymous Coward · 2003-07-15 02:31 · Score: 1, Informative

File/Properties/Statistics. Certainly not the best implimentation but it's there.

Just downloaded and tested OO1.1 RC1 by McNihil · 2003-07-15 03:16 · Score: 1, Informative

It is way way faster than the previous version at startup. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

Aqua version is NeoOffice...No OS X 1.1 by soullessbastard · 2003-07-15 04:33 · Score: 2, Informative

A few notes:

OpenOffice.org 1.1 RCs are not available for OS X. We just got it compiling a few days ago. And it'll require much more work then simply compiling it, such as testing, integration with the asian fonts and input methods, etc.
Want it faster? Well, there's only so much two guys can do. We just finished our first full Gold Master release just two weeks ago and man, we need a vacation!
Our OpenOffice.org Mac version is X11 based. It looks identical to using the Win32 version. It's functional, not pretty.
Its installer will help a Mac X11 neophyte through the process of setting up an X11 environment. It's also got the Start OpenOffice.org project to allow you to launch it like a normal Mac application and do document associations (e.g. double clicking an OOo doc opens it up!).
The Aquanative porting work is being undertaken in the NeoOffice project, not within OpenOffice.org. NeoOffice is a free software GPL version of OpenOffice.org.
Two native versions are in the works, NeoOffice (Cocoa) and NeoOffice/J (Java2D...only for UI, it's still 99% C++! It's the shoddy C++ that's slow, not Java!).
Because of political issues of submitting patches and difficulty modifying code owned by the gsl project, it's difficult to do this work within OpenOffice.org. We're also trying to take the project in directions that Sun doesn't want to take StarOffice, and OpenOffice.org really is just the StarOffice development team with its own motivations needed to keep their jobs...and helping a bunch of free software dudes isn't one of them. As sucn, there may unfortunately never be an official OpenOffice.org Aqua port with a true Mac UI.
We're moving NeoOffice up to 1.1, but have to get OOo compiling first. Not enough people are helping out to allow us to focus on the fun stuff, so we've got to do the grunt work as well.
We're working as hard as we can (c'mon, we're not paid!), and you should keep your pantyhose on. OpenOffice.org 1.1 Developer Preview for MacOS X shall be coming soon (e.g. we've had time to stop committing patches and make a really rough really untested binary). And also coming down the pike is another binary of NeoOffice/J with full Japanese support, both for input as well as localization!

Re:My experience by Chester+K · 2003-07-15 05:07 · Score: 2, Informative

Surely you mean it's own open format?

No, it's own proprietary format, as in "designed by them, and only used by them".

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NO CARRIER

Re:xooo by soullessbastard · 2003-07-15 05:36 · Score: 2, Informative

Their code has been released only under the LGPL license.

To commit code back into OpenOffice.org, three things must happen:

The code must be released under both LGPL and SISSL (the "closed source is fine as long as you use the same XML schemas" license). Right now Ximian's source is available under LGPL only.
A Joint Copyright Assignment form must be on file giving copyright to your changes to Sun Microsystems.
You need to go through the fun patch submission process and politics of forcing your patches down Sun's throat.

As an example, all y'all linux, *bsd dudes could have had three-modifier (e.g. use Alt, Control, and Meta for keyboard shortcuts) but project politics kept these patches from being accepted into the source base. Silly that such a simple community-contributed feature wasn't accepted, no?

This patch submission difficulty is one of the reasons why Ximian icons and patches are not within OpenOffice.org. It's also one of the reasons the Tru64 patches never made it back into OpenOffice.org. The Tru64 team got 1.0.0 compiling, but the patch submission/approval process was so daunting they just didn't bother.

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