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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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Does it do wordperfect files yet?
That is what stops my household from using 1.0.x Instead we're still using Corel 7
In RC1 is also a talkback style crash reporter to collect stacktrace and error information. I hope this will help OOo team to get rid of the bugs faster.
Ive tried the betas, and yes, they ARE FASTER, but there is still some problems. First it still struggles with the fonts. It dosen't have Font config support So about 50% of my fonts don't work (including my MSTTF fonts).
.doc format and tries to make you use its own proprietary format.
Secondly its annoying that it naggs you if you save in
Finaly That lightbulb has got to go. It's a horrible paperclip clone. Other than that, it's great, and that PDF export is REALLY helpful.
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
We're not exactly "non-techie," but we have been happy with OpenOffice in a Web design/development workgroup as a crossplatform substitute for MS tools. Our designers and developers aren't heavy users of word processing and spreadsheet documents, but they do have to correspond with the outside world, and OpenOffice has allowed us to save quite a bit on licensing fees.
IT support manhours: Zero.
I still can't see a lot of big companies switching because of embedded scripts/macros. The embedded vb stuff is pretty handy and makes up a lot of dynamic spreadsheets and stuff.
I wonder if ooo.org will work in perl or some other handy dandy scripting tool. For what I do at home, it's good enough now, though.
-t
http://unmoldable.com W:"No one of consequence" I:"I must know" W:"Get used to disappointment"
We have tried rolling this out at a number of sites. YMMV but this is our experience:
;)
OO is *perfect* for a large range of users, it handles all the bases and it's interoperability with the rest of the world (i.e. MS Office) is 'good enough'.
A significant proportion of users like it better than "the real thing" - heh, heh
When a user comes down to the IT department asking for a copy of 'Office' for home it is the perfect opportunity for evangelism ("We can't let you have office, it's £500, but you can have this for free - it's almost as good, so you won't even see much difference").
Management/Bean Counters *love* it - if you can lose £200-£500 *per desktop* every 3 years they'll think you can walk on water - especially if you've just lost them a few £100k off the cost of their back-end systems
HOWEVER...
Much a I have unbridled enthusiasm for OO, and I believe it is an essential part of Open Source's killer nature, it is *not yet* a no brainer for the enterprise.
Try giving it to a secretary. Worse yet, give it to a whole department of them. You will not get our ALIVE.
OO needs much stronger mailmerge capabilities. Then it will be awesome from the secretarial point of view. Until then they would rather die than give up MS Office.
OO, or a seperate project also needs a replacement for 'Access'. Yes I know we should be moving them to LAMP (and in fact we do a lot of this ourselves), but the honest truth is there are sh*t loads of companies out there with hundreds of little access applications. This is our market too.
Anyway, as I said, YMMV
I have to disagree, at least a little. ;)
AbiWord - It has the simplicity of Works. While that his not a bad thing, it is not the same as comparing to office.
Bloat - Integrated packages will always suffer from this more than stand alone products (Wordpad versus Office). And Gnumeric is limited in it does not support all the similar functions of Excel.
Performance - This is an old complaint that beyond opening I don't see. The MS Word application opens about twice as fast (I just tested it on Windows at 4 seconds versus 9 seconds), but once it is open the speed is not any different. As for the open, MS has the advantage of being able to give priority to their own applications at the base code level or taking advantage of "undocumented features."
See http://newsforge.com/newsforge/03/07/07/1516238.sh tml:
"For example, the latest patch that I worked on myself (as opposed to working on merging other people's stuff) was to get X11 and Mozilla to load faster by improving the read-ahead heuristics for page faulting in the executable images"
I hope this could also improve OO startup perf.
wolruf@gmail.com
LaTeX is there for physics papers. I wrote up my notes in LaTeX after getting fed up with writing my reports in OpenOffice
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
Well, here goes your review (not an extensive one, but it'll do)...
We're using it to train people in basic computer usage and word processing, and to display a powerpoint XP presentation for the course, because we don't have the funds to buy new Office licenses for the latest batch of laptops we got for off-site courses.
MS Office "likeness" can be easily implemented by customising the toolbars (~1 hour to get it right), and is close enough that we've had few complaints from the people who (having looked terrified at the prospect of using a computer) started on OOo, and then moved to using Office XP at our main centre (where we already have licenses).
Speed wise, it's a little sluggish starting up on the salvaged P233/64mb laptops we use, but once it's started (15-30 seconds), there's no noticeable speed difference.
As ever there's the odd niggle, clipart works differently to MS Office (it would be nice to have a compatibility mode... I prefer the OOo way of using folders. Clients disagree, and prefer clear categories, and search function), and a few of the keys need re-mapping to work the same as the MS offerings, but overall, it's been a very successful trial, and saved us a couple of thousand in new Office licenses (even at charitable rates).
My wife is illiterate in a pc world and because of my profession, uses me gratuitously for support. She is also a college student at 37 and must type many papers. Up until this summer she has only used MS Word for her work and has no knowledge of any other processing apps that are out there. I have a Win2k domain at home and I created an OO.org MSI install so that deployments are hands free, and simple. The results of the test? She did NOT realize that Word wasn't installed for two weeks. It's true that some of the menu items aren't there or are different but it didn't matter because she would call me any way. It turns out that there are features that she prefers now such as a much cleaner auto complete. I think we would all be making mistake by comparing OO.org to MS Office too directly. They are different apps with a different feature-set even though ostensibly they are both used for the same tasks. Sure there are bugs in OO.org, but ahem.... when was the last time you commented on a bug free MS Office? Besides that it would be worth three months of torture in hell to do away with that freakin paper clip!
My wife wanted me to install Word, but I sneakily installed Open Office instead.
So far, she has been able to do whatever she needed in OO, and has not come across any limitations in terms of it's capabilities.
My first impression of it was that it seems to be up to the task, but I didn't like how it started to prompt for Data sources when I first started it.
Cool feature, maybe.. but let me find that stuff when I want it, not when I want to play with the tool and see what it does.
Other than that small gripe, it's probably gonna go on any new boxes I build, unless a customer asks otherwise