OpenOffice 1.1 RC 1 Released

Heartz writes "OpenOffice has released OpenOffice 1.1 RC 1. Get details here. Neat features include built in PDF and Flash export, better MS Office document filters and more!"

Comments

Missing features still...

[jkrise]

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

Re:Missing features still...

[jkrise]

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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Re:Missing features still...

[jkrise]

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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Re:Missing features still...

[mj01nir]

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.

Showstopper #1820 still open.

[deragon]

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.

Changes since 1.1 beta 2

[ChrisRijk]

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

[Jugalator]

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. :-(

Re:Nice

[wolruf]

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

Re:My experience

[Captain Large Face]

own proprietary format

Surely you mean it's own open format?

Re:Great!

[dominator]

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

Installed last night

[Zathrus]

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.

Re:Customization

[Anonym0us Cow Herd]

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.

Download links, features list

[MagicFab]

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