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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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Simplicity, like AbiWord.
Less bloat, like Gnumeric (which yet scores over Excel)
Performance - It's a lot slower than MS Office, specially on Linux.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Does it do wordperfect files yet?
That is what stops my household from using 1.0.x Instead we're still using Corel 7
Neat features include built in PDF and Flash export, better MS Office document filters and more
;)
So now it filters out MS Office documents better?
*drum hit*
Thank you, thank you, I'll be here all week
http://bike.stu.ph/rides - free GPS routes available for Garmin, Magellan, GPX and Google Earth
So, how well do the MS Office document filters work with procmail and spamassassin?
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.
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!
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.
Remember the year 2000? They promised us flying cars. They delivered the PT Cruiser...
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...
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
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
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.
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
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!
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
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.