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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!"
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wooHOO!!! now we just need Ximian to make it purty!
Schrodinger's cat is either dead or really pissed off...
Openoffice has really matured lately. With at least two free (not as in beer) Exchange server substitutes, I reckon OpenOffice is ready for... the office.
What I would like to read is a review of OpenOffice from some non-techie end user from a company that has switched to OO. Did the migration work seemlessly? Did the $ saved in software license measure up to the manhours the IT department had to use for support? Basically, a cost-benefit analysis, because a positive analysis like that is what it takes for the suits to recognize OO.
It seriously needs to be packaged as an MSI installer, preferably with a Transform creator so that the install can be customised as much as possible. To create a custom MS Office install for the entire enterprise takes 15 minutes, OpenOffice can take days to repackage...
Now convince your 60 year old father who runs a home office that he should do this to 3,000+ of his archived documents from projects dating back to the wordperfect 5.1 days, just so you can uninstall a piece of software he already owns, and you'll have an argument.
The only reason he'll even use openoffice at all is if he gets a file in email that corel won't open.
The technical ability do do something does not mean that your wetware will be compatible, especially if your method is tedious and painful. You learn that stuff after college.
Business Guy: I'd love to if you just has [feature] which MS has and makes my life a lot easier.
OSS Community: Create it yourself, lamer.
Business Guy: Hello, Microsoft, I would like to order a 1000 computer site license for MS Office. Thanks.
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
But what's the task? Considering that AbiWord (good though it is) has only a subset of the features of Word and Open Office, you must just be comparing features that they share, which is never going to give the whole picture.
If you really have performed some benchmarks you should publish them properly but I suspect that your numbers are meaningless.
did you miss the part that allows you to export to MS Office format?
This raises an important issue. The main reason Microsoft is able to keep such a good grip on office-suites, is the file formats. Everything is kept in Microsoft Word og Excel-formats. It's all well and good that the alternatives can read and write these formats (though they're not perfect), but what we need, is an alternetive. We need an open format common to all word processors. The only format I know of that Word will read, is RTF. But RTF is rather limited. When I send a document from OO, I want to do it in an open format, readable by all (including Microsoft Word). These days, KOffice won't even read OO-documents.
Nothing can read them because nobody has written software to do this yet! Not because they can't! OOo has such a small market share right now, there's no point in anyone creating coversion filters yet. If it ever had a larger market share than MS Office, MS would be forced to support the format, in order to increase market share. Or they'd be silly not to.
This company saves loads by adopting open source, so did my previous company. Sure we had to spend a little time and effort to investigate but we, the business were the ones who profited from it, and we profited over our rivals.
What exactly do you expect to happen, perhaps something like this:
Business Guy: I'd love to if you just has [feature] which MS has and makes my life a lot easier.
OSS Community: oh yes, no problem, we just spent the last 6 months working in our free time to make this software, let me just take a few days off work to do that for you.
You are missing the entire point of OSS. If enough people wanted that feature then it would already be there. If just that company wants that feature then they can hire a coder to add it. They don't have some mystical right to demand features/upgrades just beacuse the software is open. What if they want a feature that ms office doesnt have?
I was going to moderate on this article, then I saw that, and I was going to mod you down. Then I thought I'd reply, which seems to be the logical thing to do actually, because the rest of the context isn't so bad.
Saying that it doesn't matter how big files get is wrong. Files should become MORE efficient, and filesizes should only increase if the QUALITY of the data increases (here it's mostly file metadata, and AV applications, that I'm thinking about).
Now, saying that a perfectly good format like PDF does not need some kind of efficient compression is wrong. The reason there are variances between Adobe PDF and "free" PDF is that Adobe have a better default compression setup, maybe even a proprietary compression algorithm, and it produces for their reader, not just a generic reader. PDF should make files smaller and smaller, based on common criteria like : format for screen display, format for print, format for archive...
Keep images out of PDFs, just put text, and you'll see it's pretty efficient, and a gain on Postscript. Stick some image in there, and don't think about embedding it as a JPEG or whatever (as you can do with AdobePDF) and downsampling it to 72dpi if it's not a print version, and away ye go. Maybe free versions can do this but I would bet it's not as intuitive.
But please, don't start claiming that documents can just keep getting bloated and it won't matter. This will only serve to further screw the less-well-connected into expensive bandwidth hell.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
I can't believe all the negative comments. You guys are so harsh towards something that is FREE! That is one thing that MS Office can never come close to. For many small companies or schools, free is an obvious choice over M$, and it will do the job. I can't believe how so many people here are very picky about little things. If you don't like it, pay the M$ tax and quit complaining.
-Scott
Ah, scaling. I do believe that was Chapter 2 of How To Lie With Statistics. (And thank you, Dr. Schlossnagel, for making that book required reading in your Statistics class.) How about some raw numbers? For all we know, the unscaled difference between MSO and OOo is as marginal as a Q3A benchmark between a GF FX 5900 Ultra and a Radeon 9800 Pro.
And were both MSO and OOo "quick loaders" used on Windows? (And do please note the spelling. You do want to be cited as a credible source, don't you?)
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They are still ignoring a really big, important feature: BIBLIOGRAPHY. The built-in bibliography "manager" SUCKS large rocks through capillary tubes. It is NOT useful in any way, shape, or form.
If you are a high school or college student, or a professional who actually gives proper attribution rather than flat-out plaigerizes, or write scientific papers (biology, for instance - physics and math people use latex/lyx, end of story) you MUST provide references in your papers Research papers for class, papers for submission to professional journals, publications for dissemination online...all require references and a properly formatted reference list.
I am a biochemist. I recently gave an Impress presentation to my colleagues on my research. Afterwards, a few had questions on what I was using...they noted that I was using linux on my laptop. I told them about OO/StarOffice. They were interested but ultimately I had to disabuse them of the idea of using it to replace Office because OO/SO cannot do references properly. These people use Office with EndNote so they can create a properly formatted and REFERENCED document for publication. Without reference management (ala EndNote-like capability) OO/SO is useless to them. A non-starter. I myself never use OO/SO for writing. I use Lyx plus pybliographer because between the two, I can relatively easily create a proper document with properly formatted references with ease. Can OO/SO do this? Not. Even. Close.
OO/SO is nifty for doing "powerpoint-like" presentations and the Calc function is minimally useful (for real work I have to use gnumeric because it has some nice, handy scientifically relevant functions and capabilities that Calc lacks). For writing a letter or some similarly low-power document, OO/SO is fine. For real writing, Lyx/latex...because it is the only thing in the linux world up to the task.
For god's sake! SOMEONE in the wordprocessing world (Textmaker, Gobe, OO/SO, etc) add the ability to manage references! This includes a SIMPLE means of inserting a citation or citations into a doc AND auto-generate configurable reference pages to go with it - not all journals or departments, etc, use the same citation and reference page formatting. Quit with the crap like adding a progress bar during startup (what the fuh?!) and do something worthwhile and actually useful. Add a real functional improvement rather than just more window dressing.
In Bushworld, they struggle to keep church and state separate in Iraq as they increasingly merge the two in America.
If I have to hire a programmer to write a reader, then I may as well just stay with MS office.
I know this isn't the point you're making and that you don't want to hire a programmer to write a reader (and you're right that you should be able to get plug-ins from the OpenOffice website), but I just want to say that it an open format is better for human society than a closed format. The fact that you could hire a programmer to do what you want to do, thus retaining the exercise of your free will, is important (or even that I could and you might benefit). It is much better than a world in which you are constrained in more and more of your daily activities by what is possible with mass-produced products that the marketplace has decided are the winners.
A couple of posts below someone stated that Microsoft is winning the war, which is true, but the importance of choosing applications like OpenOffice and/or AbiWord, is not so that they might win the war over Microsoft, but so that our lives stop being treated like a battlefield by people we don't know and have nothing to do with!
It will be a major victory (for us, not over Microsoft) when Microsoft realizes that what people want are open formats and interoperability, and that they'll make their software choices based on fearutes and quality. Of course people have to want that. I want it enough that I sacrifice a little convenience to use not-quite-ready but more open software. And I want you to want that. I don't think it takes very much courage to make that choice.
Also, I'm a firm beleiver that it's better to hire people than to buy from corporations. I'd much rather transact my business one on one with a human being who gets the full benefit of what I pay him or her than be one of a million blips in the bank account of a corporation that milks every ounce of "productivity" from its workers.
This reminds me of the people who used to bash Mozilla in its early days. Interesting how you don't see too much of that around here anymore. The last valid complaint about Mozilla is "I don't need an IRC/Mail/HTML Editor in my Browser!", and the Mozilla project is fixing that as we speak.
OpenOffice IS relatively new, even though its code is based on StarOffice. Give it some time and I'm sure they'll work out the speed issues. As for simplicity, well, if Abiword already fills the niche for a simple word processor, why do you want another? Why have yet another simple word processor when the world lacks one that is compatible with Microsoft Word, which has become the defacto standard?
Why do I keep typing pythong?