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

Start up time?

[n1k0]

Has the start-up time been reduced for this release? When last I tried (a few weeks ago), it was rediculously slow.

Here's hoping,

-Nick

Re:Start up time?

[timeOday]

Well, don't worry because I installed Openoffice 1.1 rc5 yesterday (oops) and IIRC it offers preload.

Why are hacks bad? Because the same thing might be done in a better way.

I think it would be cool if the linux kernel would collect statistics on which pages tend to be resident in memory. Then after bootup, it could use idle disk time to read those pages so they'd be in the cache. The advantage is that this would benefit ALL apps without any application-specific coding.

Just tried it

[KrackHouse]

IBM should help out with the marketing of this, it's really great. Get better icons, etc. here -> http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7 131 It seems faster than 1.0, more polished.

Excellent!

[Chuck Bucket]

I've been using the 1.1 beta, and this is exactly what Linux needs to show it's "ready" for the corp desktop. Combine OO with Evolution, and what else do most (90% of corp users) need?

CB

Re:Excellent!

[override11]

I use RedHat9 with Ximian Desktop 2, and Ximian Evolution as my primary desktop at work now. My only beef is that, using IMAP to connect to exchange, I cant REALLY delete anything. All ximian does is mark it as 'deleted' and not show it. It leaves the actual email message on the exchange server (very bad when I want the entire company to use this, and they CANT delete anything). Please someone come up with a TRUE MAPI connector so I can see my contacts properly, and connect JUST LIKE outlook lets me, and I will throw MS completely to the curb!

uprgradeable thu?

[cyrax777]

I just wish there was a simple patch to upgrade the old one instead of having to download the whole thing all over agien. But hey its FREE and alot better then MS OFFICE imho so ill take what I can get.

Bill is besiged on all sides!

[TerryAtWork]

And since he metamorphoses in a glittering blue-steel engine of destruction when threatened, I wonder how he's going to handle this one....

"release candidate" != "feature freeze", sadly

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet)

Don't read too much into the word "release candidate", which is a Sun marketing tool rather than anything like a feature freeze. As someone working on OpenOffice translation, it has been somewhat difficult when "release candidates" come out containing whole new modules like crashrep and officecfg. Also, there is nothing like a timeline or a release plan like the mozilla project uses - as a contributor, the first you hear about an OpenOffice release is when it appears on the website. This makes it very difficult when you're trying to convince organisations in your country to switch - you're working in the dark and have no timescale to plan against.

Don't get me wrong - I think OpenOffice is a brilliant product and will be pushing it very hard in my country. But if they'd open up the development process half as much as they've opened up the licence, it'd make advocacy a lot easier.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Delirium Tremens]

Therefore, if you have downloaded RC5, there is no need to download 1.1.

That is not exactly true because there was actually 3 rc5 release attempts, the latest one even being called rc5b.
So your RC5 being the same as the final version really depends on which RC5 you actually downloaded.

Great program but missing MUST HAVE feature

[jbs0902]

I think OpenOffice (OO) and StarOffice are great programs, but until they allow me to use different line numbering schemes for each section/style, I can't use them.

I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majority of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.

While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.

I need OO bug #5131 fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.

Neat!

[JediTrainer]

Now I'm curious... I've always been looking for a 'better' way to convert Word or Excel files to PDF.

Is there a way that OO can be scripted to convert a file from the command line on a headless box? (assume we're NOT running X)

Such a thing would be a lifesaver. I've been using Doc2PDF (and I've contributed to the source a bit too), but I find it annoying to need a dedicated box to run the conversion. I'd much prefer having my Linux server do this (along with everything else).

Personal Star/OpenOffice timeline

[swordgeek]

Ah, how far we've come.

I got one of the very first copies of StarOffice 5.0b when Sun bought and released it for free. It very quickly got renamed 5.1, and I tentatively recommended it to a client as a means to solving their office-suite-on-xterm problem. Ended up having to support the evil bastard package as a result. Horrible, horrible thing it was. 5.2 was identical, except with slightly fewer bugs.

OpenOffice.org was born, and I ran screaming. Occasionally I'd drop in and check out the current release (around the 0.300 to 0.500 mark), and find that they had gone light years beyond SO5.2, but still had at least that far to go.

When Sun announced that SO6.0 was coming out, I started to check out the OO releases again, and found a passable package. Slow slow slow (still), but actually usable and convenient.

SO-6.0/OO-1.0.1 was a decent product. I used it regularly, learned to deal with its quirks (no anti-aliased fonts on Solaris--ugh!), and was relatively happy.

Then came the StarOffice 6.1 beta program, which I was a part of. That's when I fell in love, or at least like. StarOffice 7.0 (formerly 6.1) or OpenOffice 1.1.0 are GREAT packages, at long last! Slow to start up, but fast to use once they're running, and really well designed. It's professional quality software, available for multiple platforms, for free. My sole Windows machine is now no more than a games console.

This is a happy day folks! We finally have a complete non-MS desktop!

Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO

[Tor]

You know, in Mac OS X [...] you can export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing.

True, however those PDFs are HUGE compared to those that OpenOffice creates -- with no seeming improvement in quality. Indeed, the OO seems a bit better at detailed pictures etc.

I printed a 3.2MB MS PowerPoint presentation to PDF from a Mac, and the resulting file was 22MB. I exported the same file from OO v1.1 (which, by the way, has been in Debian 'sid' since Sep 25), and the resulting size was 2.3MB.

Indeed, the PDF created from OO seemed smoother (despite having to import a foreign document format) than the one created via the "Print to PDF..." option in the Mac OS X print dialogue.

-tor

Double ditto for me, and why Word stinks

[Schwartzboy]

I've already pretty much thrown MS Office to the curb. Right now, I have to do a lot of Access VBA stuff and have had to develop bits and pieces for other Office apps, so I can't purge it completely from my life, but when I'm actually using a word processor or a spreadsheet application, it's OOo. I switched a couple of months ago and have never regretted it. One example of why? 3-page report, saved as a Word doc: 24.1 K. Same report, saved as SXW: 12.0K. Minor savings with the hideous HD resources I have, yes, and I can't prove that it's an across-the-board guarantee of 50% smaller files, but...wow. Just wow.

Fix The Installer..

[wfberg]

Why a .zip file that contains compressed installer files? Couldn't there be one big executable that's the installer and contains the compressed files? Or even an installer that looks around whether the compressed installation files are on the disk itself, or whether it should download them (if the user chooses to install components which are not available)...

If you use MSIE, it will first download the .zip in a temporary directory, then COPY the .zip to your download directory (not an atomic MOVE!), then you have to unzip, then the installer has to decompress files.. Quite a lot of disk activity and space being wasted there..

Re:Print to PDF from Mac is inefficient

[Alderete]

I love the capability of Mac OS X to print anything to a PDF file, it's a great feature to use in a pinch. But it's no substitute for a real PDF generation tool, like Acrobat, or functionality built into OpenOffice.

The file size different noted here (22MB vs 2.3MB) is hardly unusual; indeed, it's the rule, not the exception. In dozens of attempts, I never made a PDF file remotely close to what Acrobat Distiller was capable of doing, size-wise.

If your job doesn't depend on being able to send people PDF files, the built-in version is fine. But if you share your PDFs regularly, spend the time or the bucks to get a real PDF solution.

Yay!

[achacha]

I for one am very happy they released version 1.1. I am a happy user of version 1.0 on Windows ME. I had a choice of installing OpenOffice and buying MS Office.

I thought about what I wanted to do, and came up with a small list:
1. Read .doc files that people use at work (don't really care about formatting or power features, just want to read the content)
2. Read Excel files and generate simple spreadsheets

That is all.

For email I use emacs, for a database I use mySQL.

Microsoft Office offered nothing for me.

I do NOT want VB script (as most MS bugs are rooted in that god awful script).
I do NOT want Outlook, while it may be nice at work to schedule meetings and manage internal email, it is not suited as an email reader in the age of viruses and worms. Pine is just fine. (no rhyme intended).
I do NOT want power point (as it is equivalent to brain rot and no one pays attention to those presentations anyways, easier to just give handouts and a URL).
I sure as hell do NOT want Access database as it is inferior in every way to mySQL.

So after much thought, I decided that MS office is not worth the money and installed OpenOffice and to this day I am happy with my decision.

Do you know if you can import pdf?

[Martin Marvinski]

That would be a really cool OpenOffice feature. I can already create pdf files in my earlier verision of OpenOffice by clicking print and selecting the output to a file (pdf).

I'd really love it if I could import pdf files and change them. Also on my wishlist is the ability to be able to password protect pdf files created in OpenOffice for the later versions of Acrobat that support it (5.0 or higher).

The Flash export is excellent, and I thank the OpenOffice team for that. AFAIK, not even Microsoft Office has this feature. Looks like Open Source is starting to really kick some but!

Question (mainly for Gentoo users)

[dotgod]

Is it worth the time for me to emerge openoffice from source, or will openoffice-bin run just as quickly?

Re:other missing features

[nyseal]

I know this will sound like a troll and you're making a funny, but outside of the 'security' features in Office I like the extended functionality (not the help features you describe, but you can turn those off). In a less than perfect world, I've found the format features in Word and the expanded capabilities of Excel to be quite useful both at home and at work. Just my $.02

Sill can't embed a chart properly in Publishing Pr

[aaron_pet]

Arg!

This has lots of nice new features... and it is WAY faster than Oo1.0 and they changed the names of their programs to Draw, Writer and the like, dropping hte OpenOffice1.0.3.1 that made my start menu be messed up in 1.0..

This is very nice, and I stopped using MS Office products for most things... because Draw Rocks as a publishing program...

But what ticks me off the most is the inability to insert a chart into Draw based off a Calc worksheet. You must manually enter all of the data... Not even copy and pasting works!
This is the only reason why I keep MS Publisher arround...

Also thier bug submitting website kinda sucks...

Also new in this release is a talk back type product.. I used OpenOffice1.1RC1 and it crashed on exit because we were using it on windows 2000 terminal server with multiple users... I allowed it to report the bug... and the crash didn't occur on the next release!

-AP