OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1

sander writes "OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet). The announcement is here, there is a really nice features page and a long list of mirrors carrying the goodies." OO.org releases for languages other than English should be here soon, too.

Comments

My favorite feature

[carl67lp]

My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF. It's one of the reasons why I still use OO even though I almost always have access to Microsoft Office.

That, and there's something to be said for the ability to literally unpack a saved file, look at the raw data, and get exactly what you need. (I had to do this on a spreadsheet before I installed OO again, and was able to retrieve an important CD key. ;-) )

Re:My favorite feature

[mblase]

My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF.

You know, in Mac OS X (or Windows, if you buy Adobe Acrobat), you can export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing.

Come to think of it, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Linux printer driver to do the same thing....

Re:Hello

[Mod Me God]

Although for the home your reasons are good, for the business:

1. My company pays, I do not. They get a huge discount and even if for 1000 users it only costs $100K eacg, that's only $100,000K (the price of a single senior analyst a year). Role that over the three year product lifestyle and $100K is the cost of a junior admin staff over those three years. In anorganisation of 1000 this is hardly a good thing, when all OO can do is all MSOffice can do. If OO did something extra that MSOffice did not that would be different, but it is not. Although OO has suppost for office documents, macros cannot be converted unless weeding the code (this takes time, hence money).

2. My secretary does the PDF writing if I need it, this takes less than 5 seconds for me to do and little longer for her (though she also checks various points of detail in it). If something big needs doing I'll forward to our printing department, who will ensure the layout stc is perfect - they are the best people to do the nitty picky presentational polishing, not me.

3. Business licences have already brought down cost of business software for businesses.

4. It's proprietary, and guess what... I can still change it to my needs! Yes I can write macros etc, and can integrate some VB into it and can seamlessly integrate a MS Access DB with Excel etc... but have you ever used Reuters etc??? Reuters worked with MS to reverse engineer Excel to work with live feeds from Reuters, Bloomberg did a similar thing. OO does not have this feature, and until it does will never be the spreadsheet of choice for front office finance work. In the back of a finance office a spreadsheet which cannot do pivot tables easily or work with the existing implenentation (i.e., existing macros or bespoke software) is not worth having on your hard disk.

5. The licence is cheap for a corporate, see 1.

In the end, unless the OO (or even a change over in proprietary software) offers cost savings over the costs involved in changing bespoke applications and macros AND can do all that the previous software will it be implemented by corporates. However to me, the ONLY SURE WAY FOR NEW SOFTWARE TO SUCCEED (proprietary or open source) is to offer new functionality. This is the only thing that can get over the inertia for companies to move. So come on OO, give me something new... I don't know what I want, you've got to do the development of something new and that is truely hard.

SOrry for rambling.