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

Blah

[grub]

Sure OpenOffice itself may be free but when you add in the $699 SCO fee for the OS it's not that great a deal.</sarcasm>

Re:Blah

[moojuece]

OpenOffice is available on ANY platform not just Linux

Re:Blah

[Kadagan AU]

I know this was a joke (and a good one at that), but OpenOffice.org is also available for Windows and OS X, and others.

Re:Blah

[fermion]

I know this is meant to clarify a joke but...

The basis of the SCO claim is that due to contracts that were signed by, apparently, most player way back in prehistory, SCO, who claim to own Unix, owns everything.

Given that they have moved from the Linux kernel, to the GNU tools, to god knows what, the fact that a tool has been ported to non *nix platform(which OS X certainly does not qualify, and Windows might) would not seem to be barrier for their claims.

Re:Blah

[Lozzer]

Cool, I've just started up my copy of OO for ZX80, I'll report back to you in fifteen years when I get to type in my first character.

Re:Blah

[nocomment]

for the record, use the ISC mirror. I got a sustained spike of over 1M/s I downloaded the entire thing in just about 7 minutes. I'm on a T-1 by the way, so your results may vary.

Re:Blah

[rf600r]

OpenOffice.org is also available for Windows and OS X, and others.

The 1.1 release has not made it to OSX. Sadness.

Re:Blah

[PacketCollision]

Of course if all of /. pounds that mirror we'll all get about 2k/s...if it doesn't get totally /.ed.

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?

[madfgurtbn]

Has the start-up time been reduced for this release?

It looks like their website is groaning under the load right now, so I can't give you a link, but there is a roadmap up somewhere which says startup time is one of the highest priority goals for version 2.0.

Startup is still quite slow even on speedy hardware, but I don't think it has been one of their highest priorities yet.

Re:Start up time?

[MarcQuadra]

I'm running on a hotrod 1466Mhz athlon / 768MB/ 10GB running gentoo. First load takes about 11 seconds (that's a long time) but subsequent loads are pretty zippy. I suggest you either prelink the app (which I don't do) or put a script in your init.d directory to recursively cat the /opt/OpenOffice directory to /dev/null, that would effectively 'precache' the application.

Also, try building from source if you can, you'll be able to set the optimization and several options that you don't see with a binary-only install.

Re:Start up time?

[Anonymous Coward]

Now 9 seconds on my 900MHz PII running Mandrake 8.1 (!). That's about half the time of the 1.0.1 release, so it's better, but still could use improvement.

Re:Start up time?

[nusuth]

As of 1.1rc3, first start time is about half of 1.0.3 which still kind slow. Second and later starts are very fast unlike 1.0.x.

Re:Start up time?

[FuzzyBad-Mofo]

Flamebait? He's asking an honest question.

Re:Start up time?

[n1k0]

Flame-bait? Geez, I just asked a simple, genuine question. Good job, moderators. :-(

-Nick

Re:Start up time?

[BlackBolt]

The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness. *In comparison* to either MSOffice or Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 or 8 on Windows it is abysmal.

Please note: I put "in comparison" in asterisks because the trolls think people should "get faster computers, fool". My friend was given OO.O recently and was immediately disgusted by the startup speed compared to MSOffice. "You get what you pay for", she said. NOT a good showing for open-source software. The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.

Re:Start up time?

[sickmtbnutcase]

$ emerge oooqs
That'll fix your startup times, and the tray icon is pretty handy.

Re:Start up time?

[buttahead]

a 1.0 open office takes 3-60 seconds to load on my hardware. the new version took about 10 on the first load, but succesive loads are very impressive (I only see the splash screen flash briefly, and then the main window opens.

Re:Start up time?

[buttahead]

whoops... 30 to 60 seconds on the old version.

Re:Start up time?

[BrookHarty]

Wouldnt cat'ing a whole directory during bootup take more time and resources? I know there all these stories about speeding up booting for linux, wouldnt you do this after you boot into X? Save the cache for the initial processes and X startup. Then cache all your applications, terminals, office, mozilla, xmms, etc. Thou, seems like overkill for a couple seconds off the application start time, to read the file twice. (My head hurts thinking about it)

Kinda like windows, it boots up into the login screen, the loads the services. And linux, loads all the services, then boots into the login screen.

Re:Start up time?

[kosmosik]

Has the start-up time been reduced for this release?

You always can just preload it on startup of yours X session, it takes ~20MB of RAM but "starting" OOo is just about as fast as opening a new document...

Just try:

$ ooffice -plugin -quickstart &

You may need to create a script to handle that since it gets unloaded of memory in about twenty minutes (thats weird...) so use a loop. :-)

PS. I don't know if it works with 1.1 but it should, i've been doing it sucessfuly with 1.0.x...

Re:Start up time?

[gilgongo]

Huh? Why has that been modded "insightful"?

Re:Start up time?

[arkane1234]

Just to report, this only saves me 2 seconds with the new version of OpenOffice 1.1.

But then again, just starting OpenOffice only takes me 2-3 seconds, now.
(1.8Ghz machine, 512MB ram)

Re:Start up time?

[kevbroch]

Did the following with a Ctrl-Q as soon as it came up (on Redhat 7.3):

prompt> time OpenOffice.org1.0.3/soffice
10.020u 0.410s 0:26.02 40.0% 0+0k 0+0io 12726pf+0w
prompt> time OpenOffice.org1.1.0/soffice
4.910u 0.540s 0:12.78 42.6% 0+0k 0+0io 21837pf+0w
ldt-sj3-135: ~->cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 7
model name : Pentium III (Katmai)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 498.752
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 996.14

processor : 1
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 7
model name : Pentium III (Katmai)
stepping : 3
cpu MHz : 498.752
cache size : 512 KB
fdiv_bug : no
hlt_bug : no
f00f_bug : no
coma_bug : no
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 2
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse
bogomips : 996.14

Re:Start up time?

[b17bmbr]

i am running yellowdog linux 3.0 on an old bondi blue 233mhz/160mb imac. 1.0.3 loads in about 20 seconds. now, that isn't "fast", but it is more than acceptable. running it on comparable PC hardware would be around a 400-500mhz celeron. on my k6-2 300/128mb CTX laptop, running mandrake 9.1, it takes about same time. considereing that this allows me to use older hardware (nice for my kids), which would be worthless trying to run windows. i think the startup time argument is crap. office preloads tons of crap, which makes it appear to be faster. you take that away, and it loads slowly. since cheap hacks like preloads are not the linux way, for the size of the app, the speed is sufficient.

the other option is the load only minimal libraries, and load extras as needed. fo rinstance, don't load the spell/grammar checker, even stuff like print preview libraries. this woul dmake the program lag as new features load, but would increas start up. i personally think 5 extra seconds is worth the wait.

Re:Start up time?

[flacco]

Has the start-up time been reduced for this release?

On my machine, it's down to about *three seconds*.

dual athlon 2000's
1gb ram
escalade ide raid

Re:Start up time?

[MeNeXT]

Do like msoffice. Set it to start on login and minimize it. Then it's very fast...It's how MS does it.

Re:Start up time?

[aardvarkjoe]

since cheap hacks like preloads are not the linux way, for the size of the app, the speed is sufficient.

How is making something faster a "cheap hack?" It sounds like intelligent design to me. When I turn on the computer, the difference between 60 and 80 seconds of boot time is fairly irrelevant -- I'm doing something else anyway. When I start up an application, the difference between 5 and 25 seconds until I can start using it is immense.

If we're reduced to saying, "well, yeah, it's better ... but it's a hack!" we might as well just admit defeat. Productivity can't be subservient to "elegance."

Re:Start up time?

[obotics]

There is an option in the OpenOffice setup program to do just that.

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.

Re:Start up time?

[ekuns]

The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness [snip] "You get what you pay for", she said. [snip] The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.

Wow, do you see the irony there? Someone complains that "You get what you pay for" and then pirates commercial software? I have no sympathy, nor respect, for people who pirate software. You mention that person's complaint like it's someone whose opinion should be taken seriously. Someone who is going to pirate software isn't mature enough to get the difference between free as in "Free Beer" and free is in "Free speech."

If you want start up speeds comparable to Office and to Corel's office suite, then you have to do the exact same thing both of those suites do to speed up their loading -- preload the application. Just because Microsoft has made it non-obvious that they preload the app doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Internet Explorer starts up quickly for the same reason. Once I configured Mozilla to preload under Win2k, it started up exactly as rapidly as IE6.

By way of comparison, someone who will pirate commercial software because what is freely available doesn't immediately meet their approval, well, is sort of like someone who doesn't like the food they are being given freely, so instead they go rob a store to get different food. Is that someone whose opinion you worry about? IMO, no.

Re:Start up time?

[aardvarkjoe]

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

I'm not worried; I finally swore off traditional word processors in favor of LyX anyway :)

The thing I was taking exception to was the OP's statement that "It's OK for OO to take 20 seconds to load, as long as it's not a hack." IMO, a hack that works is far better than an elegant way that doesn't. Given the choice between a hack and a non-hack that both work, however, I certainly agree that a hack is not the way to go.

Re:Start up time?

[antiMStroll]

Startup is not slow! Startup is damn fast on my K7 1333, faster than Word on my work P4 1.7. The Linux version is just as quick on the home hardware. Both are pre-compiled binaries directly from the site. Startup time is no longer an issue in the way of OO's acceptance.

Re:Start up time?

[MarcQuadra]

The whole idea is that the initial cat happens during startup. think:

nice -n15 find /opt/OpenOffice -type f | xargs cat > /dev/null &

(i'm somewhat new to scripting, but you get the idea)

the & at the end will let your other startup scripts run concurrently, i believe (depending on how you call this command). When you launch OpenOffice it's already in the cache, so the only files it has to read are the dependencies/shared libraries.

Re:Start up time?

[b17bmbr]

making office appear faster by loading tons of libs into memory is hardly good design. and yes, it is a cheap hack because it is not improving the design, efficiency, or code, but rather taking a shortcut. it encourages other developers to do the same. and hell, you could do that with any program. then what do you have? 600MB's of libraries preloaded because of lazy developers.

eys, some you ahve to preload, especially system libs. but for an office suite? please.

Re:Start up time?

[aardvarkjoe]

making office appear faster by loading tons of libs into memory...

You're wrong on this count. You're not making it appear faster; you really are making it faster. As I pointed out in my last post, preloading means less wasted time for the user. If you've got a "non-hack" way of making it faster, I'm all ears, but if program design detracts from the experience of the user, the design is flawed. A 30-second startup time is simply unacceptable.

eys, some you ahve to preload, especially system libs. but for an office suite? please.

If you haven't noticed, the word processor is the most-used application on many people's computers, and is certainly among the most complex pieces of software that the average person uses on a regular basis. I really can't think of many better candidates for preloading than office software.

Re:Start up time?

[Malcontent]

Why don't you just turn on the pre-loading? If you do that it loads almost instantly.

Re:Start up time?

[unusdemorsmortis]

Just one question, isn't an office suite a rather simple application? I mean, does installing an office suite really necesitate restarting the OS for the program to work? I didn't think so, especially since OO.o doesn't require a restart after install. However, now onto the whole "its a hack" thing. MS integrated their office suite so heavily into their OS, that they require a restart after install? Now, that sounds to me like someone is trying to really cheat at something, or maybe make it so hard to uninstall that no one will want to, I mean really, who would want to uninstall such a nice product, so we just won't make that option available to the user. 3 years later, they offer an uninstaller bundled with their new office suite, so you have to drop the hundreds of dollars, or reformat to dispose of the piece of crap you've been stuck with. MS, great marketing strategy, mediocre products.

Re:Start up time?

[shellbeach]

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

Well, compared to 1.0.x the startup is much, much faster (even includes a progess bar :) On my Linux AthlonXP 2000 system it takes about 2-3 seconds to startup first time (and of course quite a bit less once it's cached in memory) ... on the 450 MHz P3 Win2K machine here at work it takes 40secs, but that's using a dog of a hard disk which is really ancient.

But if you tried a 1.1 RC from a few weeks ago, I doubt you'll notice much difference ...

Re:Start up time?

[shellbeach]

I don't think there's much pre-loading of MSOffice, except for the fact that OOo uses a non-MS toolkit and obviously needs to load that on startup ... but then MSOffice often seems to use non-standard toolkits too (they're always modifying the look-and-feel in their releases). Also it's worth comparing how fast MSOffice starts using Wine under Linux - there's cetainly no pre-loading there and it's *still* damn fast.

Personally I think MSOffice is the best thing Microsoft's ever released - it generally seems to be stable, bug free and quite streamlined compared to other office suites. Note that despite this I happen to use OOo rather than MSOffice ... but that's partly because I use Linux and partly because I'm part of a working group seeking to promote OOo to students at my University.

Re:Start up time?

[MWelchUK]

"You're wrong on this count. You're not making it appear faster; you really are making it faster"

Sorry I have to agree with b17bmbr. The preloading in my experience is generally done after the user logs in and generally slows the PC (OK, more noticable on old hardware) to a _crawl_ during first minute or so of computer use as the user tries in vain to launch whatever application they wish to use first whilst a batch of other programs (pre-loading apps and in windows all those startup folder items) load.

I would much prefer to have a responsive computer when I gain control after the desktop loading and allow myself a few seconds to look away from the monitor (as every god computer user should...) and relax a little while the wordprocessor loads.

Re:Start up time?

[Wastl]

Personally I think MSOffice is the best thing Microsoft's ever released

No, the best thing Microsoft has ever released is Age of Empires. In fact, I would be completely satisfied if Microsoft would focus on programming games, they are good at that.:-)

Sebastian

Re:Start up time?

[IamTheRealMike]

No it's not, they get good startup time at least partly by optimising the working set.

Re:Start up time?

[fanpoe]

No, the best thing Microsoft has ever released is Age of Empires. In fact, I would be completely satisfied if Microsoft would focus on programming games, they are good at that

Not even that. They published AoE. It was developed by Ensemble Studios

Re:Start up time?

[TummyX]

That isn't true. If you don't let office startup startup on startup (phew) then apps *still* load up just as fast.

I think they just load up less things initially at startup. That and the smart arrangement of the files on the disk.

Re:Start up time?

[BlackBolt]

D E V I L ' S . . A D V O C A T E . . H E R E . . .

Wow, do you see the irony there?

No.

Someone complains that "You get what you pay for" and then pirates commercial software?

Yeah, they view MSOffice as obviously better because MS charges for it. "People give stuff away for free because it's worthless." My family doesn't understand RMS at all. Would you accept food some hairy unshaven smelly bum in an alley handed you, or would you be more likely to eat the same food from a nice-looking man with a restaurant and glossy menus? We've been exposed, so we're not afraid, but everybody else wonders what the "catch" is.

I have no sympathy, nor respect, for people who pirate software.

They don't want your sympathy or respect. They just want software that works. If OpenOffice is going to win, it has to be better TECHNICALLY, not just "freer", because freedom has been made irrelevant by unhampered piracy. ALL software is effectively free to these people, so they only download the best. Spen an hour to download OpenOffice, which is slow, or MSOffice, which is fast and a standard... hmmmm....

You mention that person's complaint like it's someone whose opinion should be taken seriously. Someone who is going to pirate software isn't mature enough to get the difference between free as in "Free Beer" and free is in "Free speech."

They're more mature than we are, spending our lives worrying and arguing about crap we have no possibility *whatsoever* of changing, no matter HOW good our Slashdot posts are or how much karma we have. Maturity has nothing to do with piracy except here on Slashdot, where programmers seek to push their self-protecting ethics on the rest of the world. The same guys who righteously won't pirate software have kick-ass collections of VHS tapes of Star Trek and Babylon5 lying around, philosophy and physics papers photocopied for classes, love porn (which my friends would think is immature), and often "stretch the truth" on their taxes.

The REST of the world pirates software and doesn't feel guilty - my friends are no exception. They don't care. They don't know what GuhNoo is, they don't care. They just want software that works, and they don't care whether they pay for it or not. They don't care where they get it or who made it. They'd PREFER not to break the law to get it (but only because they don't like getting fined) but if MSWord beats OpenOffice, fine. They download it, because they don't think about licensing, they don't care about licensing.

These are the people we're trying to "save". Everyone who comes to Gnu/Linux started out using proprietary software.

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
Yeah, I didn't think so.

If you want start up speeds comparable to Office and to Corel's office suite, then you have to do the exact same thing both of those suites do to speed up their loading -- preload the application. Just because Microsoft has made it non-obvious that they preload the app doesn't mean it doesn't happen. Internet Explorer starts up quickly for the same reason. Once I configured Mozilla to preload under Win2k, it started up exactly as rapidly as IE6.

Yeah, they have no problem with Mozilla AT ALL. Neither do I. But I have used both MSOffice and OpenOffice WITH PRELOADING FOR MSOFFICE TURNED OFF, and it is still very much snappier in every way than the massively bloated OpenOffice. Not that I'm not thankful for OpenOffice, but it's more feature-laden and bloated than emacs, which is basically its own operating system.

By way of comparison, someone who will pirate commercial software because what is freely available doesn't immediately meet their approval, well, is sort of like someone who doesn't like the food they are being given freely, so instead they go rob a store to get different food. Is that someone whose opinion you worry about? IMO, no.

Cool, enjoy your zero percent marketshare and your slide into obscurity. I was trying to give constructive criticism that would lead to wider adoption. My bad. I've learned my lesson, the bazaar is closed.

Re:Start up time?

[prudek]

Startup time is about 4 times shorter in OO 1.1 than it was in OO 1.0.

It takes 10 seconds to start OO 1.1 on Linux on my poor Celeron 400MHz. Subsequent starts take about 5 seconds maximum.

Word97 takes 2 seconds to start on the same machine in Windows 98.

The lady who rejected OO 1.1 based on slow startup time was biased, or she only runs Office for 3-5 minutes at a time and therefore startup is absolutely crucial for her. Most people work in Office software for at least an hour at a time.

Re:Start up time?

[MeNeXT]

Take a clean system without office, old new it does not matter, install windows. Time the start up. Now install office. Time the startup. Could you please explain why it takes longer?

Now remove office from startup. Is it as fast as before. Not!

Why?

Re:Start up time?

[shellbeach]

Speaking of MS games, does anyone else remember what must have been one of MicroSoft's first games, Olympic Decathalon on the Apple ][, programmed by one Bill Gates?

(IIRC it was really, really crap :)

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.

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

[jlechem]

Yes but can it save word files to crappy html files with propriatary tags?

I didn't think so.

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:My favorite feature

[koali]

Huh, on Windows you can install a postscript printer, print to a file and use ps2pdf :-b The same can be said about Linux.

Re:My favorite feature

[carl67lp]

Sure, but in Windows, you either have to pay for Acrobat (not exactly cheap), or find some sort of convoluted workaround. OO does it very smoothly and easily.

Mind you, it's no substitute for Acrobat (which I use monthly), but it works in a pinch for those short, simple documents.

Re:My favorite feature

[mblase]

Ahh, good: there's a Linux print-to-PDF solution after all.

Of course, OO's button is certainly easier to use, but I think adding it either to the "save as..." dialog or the "print to..." list (or both) is more intuitive.

Re:My favorite feature

[lynnroth]

For PDF Printing in Windows, check out: PDFCreator

Just print to the printer it sets up and a dialog pops up asking for filename.

Works well.

Re:My favorite feature

[aled]

Why would you want a one-click-save-to-pdf when you can install ghostscript and ghostview and configure... ah, never mind.

Re:My favorite feature

[thenightfly42]

Of course, you could always use the open source PDFCreator printer driver in Windows to create PDFs.

Re:My favorite feature

[Jahf]

Ya know, that ability to unpack/repack a file has even better uses. With a little XML editing that presentation that you put off until the last minute, then spent all night working on, can be made to look as if you started it 15 days ago and had been open for nearly 100 hours ;)

Re:My favorite feature

[Bistronaut]

PDF995 is a shareware (free version pops up a web page every time you use it) app that does exactly that. Plus, if you want to register it it's only $9.95 (hence the name). It's great. You can set up the same thing with all free software, but it's a pain. PDF995 takes the pain out of making PDFs for free on Windows. That said, I use OOo. It rocks.

Re:My favorite feature

[generic-man]

In Windows, you can use PDFCreator to export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing. Unlike Adobe Acrobat, PDFCreator is free (GPL).

Re:My favorite feature

[discstickers]

Yea, but on on OS X, it's even easier. There's a "Save as PDF" button right in the print dialog.

Probably helps that the display is actually a pdf ;)

Re:My favorite feature

[johnnyb]

Actually, Linux supports this to. Just print to postscript, and run ps2pdf on it, or better yet, set up a printer to do that for you.

In fact, I have my Linux PDF Printer set up using SAMBA so the whole office can use it. This way noone has to buy Acrobat, and we can all print to PDF without even installing software (it's just a printer install - the drivers are already installed on Windows).

Re:My favorite feature

[AJWM]

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

And if there isn't, it's easy enough to set up a custom print queue to do so. (Just pass the dvi, ps, etc output through the appropriate *2pdf filter). Easy enough with printcap, anyway. I assume the same can be done with CUPS.

Re:My favorite feature

[bconway]

Ghostscript for Windows will do this easily. Print what you want to a postscript file, drag-n-drop it onto the appropriate PS2PDF batch file, and you have a PDF file that took less steps to create than using Acrobat. This does not constitute "some sort of convoluted workaround."

Re:My favorite feature

[inode_buddha]

way cool about the PDF feature, but I don't recall seeing PS support on my (older) version. I don't have the newer version yet, and was considering getting StarOffice7 instead. Can anyone tell me about going direct tp PS? It blows my mind that an app on *nix wouldn't do that almost by default.

Re:My favorite feature

[Alan]

or find some sort of convoluted workaround

You mean like kazaa? :)

Re:My favorite feature

[_Upsilon_]

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

Actually, if you use KDE (or tell other programs to use "kprinter" instead of "lpr") there is a default printer installed called "Print to File (PDF)" that does exactly this.

Re:My favorite feature

[killmenow]

We use PDF995. If you site license it, you get it for less than $9.95 per user.

It works well for us...and it's based on ghostscript, which I find interesting.

Re:My favorite feature

[Ryan_Singer]

Yes, actually, it can. Although it's default XML format is open and of high quality, OOo does support microsofts Office 2003 XML format, so you can import and export "crappy" XML.-Ryan

Re:My favorite feature

[steve_l]

have you also looked at
Alambic?

It is cups based, and has SMTP support too...

Re:My favorite feature

[cK-Gunslinger]

Having to leave the application you're working with, to me, constitutes a "convoluted workaround." That said, I do exactly as you describe (without a batch file) to make the few PDFs I need.

Re:My favorite feature

[lactose99]

There's one called PDFCreator in Windows that emulates a printer and allows you to "print to PDF".

Re:My favorite feature

[PurpleBob]

You mean the print dialog is missing the "Print to file" option?

Re:My favorite feature

[donnz]

or Windows, if you buy Adobe Acrobat

Bin there, done that. Got sick of the crashes and hang ups. Also takes ages to run.

OO have it "just right".

Re:My favorite feature

[keester]

Can you give an example of a proprietary tag?

Re:My favorite feature

[BJH]

PDF995 takes the pain out of making PDFs for free on Windows.

You seem to be using a new definition of free with which I am not familiar...

Re:My favorite feature

[pyros]

The last time I used Acrobat, it installed a print driver, so you go to print the document, you select the pdf printer, and get a pdf file. That saves the step of converting from postscript to pdf. Also, you don't ghostscript, windows has it's own postscript file print drivers. So you print to that driver and get a postscript file.

Re:My favorite feature

[platypus]

Lookee here

Freepdf, if you're not doing prepress stuff, it is actually better than acrobat (I use 4.0) IMO.

Re:My favorite feature

[KillerLoop]

One defined in a non-public DTD.

Re:My favorite feature

[Qube]

Or better still, PDFCreator does all that for nothing with with no ads or nagging - completely GPL. Comes with a proper no-hassle installer, and is as easy to set up and use as PDF995 or similar.

Re:My favorite feature

[nissim]

Also http://www.acrosoftware.com/Download.htm
cutePDF printer driver for windoze

Re:My favorite feature

[schweikert]

A big difference is that PDF printers usually produce documents without
structure such as a table of contents (bookmarks). Acrobat PDF and I think also
OpenOffice can do that because they know the structure (being near the
application and not mere printer drivers).

Re:My favorite feature

[The Madpostal Worker]

There is a redirector which will redirect a printer port to a ghost script process, which is essentially a free version of distiller.

Re:My favorite feature

[inode_buddha]

Well if "print to file" means printing to a PS file, then no, I wasn't aware of that (thanks for the tip!). Obviously I don't use it everyday, just for things like my resume, etc. Gonna have to read a RTFM here...

Re:My favorite feature

[lessgravity]

I've been using OO for about 6 months and absolutely love it. I am a IT Manager and would like to convince my enterprise to switch and save on the enormous office licenses. Having the ability to export to PDFs is huge and I may be able to get a leg in this time. Any other arguments that could help me to convince the big wigs? centrifugalforce

Re:My favorite feature

[mrd_yaddayadda]

"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."

The difference is simple. An integrated feature will be used by more people than having to either pay for Acrobat (it's not cheap) or grabbing freeshare/shareware products and faff about with the integration aspects or printing to PDF.

Clicking the magic PDF button and choosing a path is just plain NICE.

Re:My favorite feature

[wfrp01]

Or without installing anything from Adobe, you can print to postscript, as long as you have a postscript printer driver. And you can view postscript with ghostview, etc.

What's the advantage of PDF? Crappy encryption that isn't necessary 99.99% of the time? I've generated oodles of PDF files. The need for a device independant read-mostly file format that preserves document formatting is obvious. But the need for PDF rather than postscript eludes me. It's all about marketshare, and what you can expect to find on other people's computers as far as I'm concerned.

Re:My favorite feature

[F1re]

Use PDF Creator from SourceForge:

PDF Creator

Re:My favorite feature

[FauxPasIII]

Easy enough to do in a platform-independant way with whatever print queue software you use. Check out the 'pdfwrite' output driver to ghostscript.

Re:My favorite feature

[johvance]

There are 2 more free packages! GhostWord and GS4Word. Both create PDFs reasonably well, but on my machine GhostWord doesn't export bookmarks and GS4Word doesn't export hyperlinks. Seems that you can't have everything after all. That's still better than a RedMon/PDFCreator/whatever solution. GS4Word is lincensed under the GPL. Both solutions also support Excel and Powerpoint and create the necessary links in presentations and sheets...

Still, I don't know about OpenOffice, but the biggest problem with the GhostScript ps2pdf - solution is that it doesn't support pdfmark out of the box. pdfmark is what makes the bookmark menu, clickable hyperlinks and forms in PDFs possible. Does that work reasonably in OpenOffice?

I'd guess that most people buy Acrobat for the sole reason that they need to create the bookmark outline.

Re:My favorite feature

[sootman]

You can also use Samba to create a "virtual" network printer that will make PDFs.

Re:My favorite feature

[jelle]

"In fact, I have my Linux PDF Printer set up using SAMBA so the whole office can use it."

Yeah, I did that too, and the resulting PDF gets emailed to the user that printed the file.

Re:My favorite feature

[Eil]

When I want to output some Windows stuff to a PDF, I just install the postscript printer driver for an HP Color Laserjet. When you print to file, the resulting file is good old level 2 postscript. Which then means it's only one unix command away from being a PDF.

Re:My favorite feature

[vonFinkelstien]

You wrote: 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.

But in Mac OS X, all you have to do is "Print/Save as PDF." You can do it in any application that you can print from, even M$ Office X.

Wait, maybe you are one of the unenlightened ones . . .

Re:My favorite feature

[herberts]

And it can be fully integrated into SAMBA using cupssmbadd, even handles automatic driver download.

Mathias.

Re:My favorite feature

[dublin]

Or better still, PDFCreator does all that for nothing with with no ads or nagging - completely GPL. Comes with a proper no-hassle installer, and is as easy to set up and use as PDF995 or similar.

PDFCreator and PDF995 are both very light duty tools. They're not bad tools, but they're not even close to a real substitute for Acrobat Distiller. (And remember, Acrobat is a LOT more than just the Distiller.)

Both PDFCreator and PDF995 are OK for very simple stuff, but break down badly when you throw anything non-trivial at them. Even moderately complex graphics, or (especially) non-English fonts will blow either of these sky-high, while Acrobat Distiller will plow right through and deliver a perfect rendering with near-100% reliability. You get what you pay for - it's still true, even in today's open source world...

Re:My favorite feature

[dublin]

Freepdf, if you're not doing prepress stuff, it is actually better than acrobat (I use 4.0) IMO.

FreePDF is actually just the destestable GhostScript in a half-assed Windows printer wrapper. (It only simplifies the GhostScript setup by a little bit, go figure...)

GhostScript is not even remotely comparable to Acrobat Distiller for quality, compatibility, and fidelity to the original document. The fonts are atrocious. GS is bad for English and horrible for anything else. (Try using it to produce a PDF including Hebrew, Greek, Chinese or Korean to see what I mean - you'll be lucky to get half of it to show up.)

I wish there was a better alternative to Acrobat Distiller, but so far, I've found nothing else that's even in the same league. (To be honest, I'm really surprised this is still the case more than ten years on, but it shows how difficult it can be to focus open source development even in areas where there is a real demand...)

Re:My favorite feature

[julesh]

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

A what?

Linux (and Unix in general) is substantially let down, IMO, by the lack of a clearly defined printer driver interface. Most systems resort to having each program generate a postscript file (through its own integral method) which is then translated by ghostscript to whatever format is required by your printer.

I believe ghostscript does have a PDF output mode (it certainly has a PDF input mode...), but at a guess it isn't very good.

I tend to use pdf[la]tex, which I find gives good quality results easily.

Re:My favorite feature

[javamutt]

Actually, there's more to it than that. I wish I had a better handle on the internals, but I have some documents in OO (SO actually, but same) which I can only PDF in the newer release. If I use an older release, or ps2pdf, the fonts come out jagged. Tried the same thing on Adobe's test drive on-line converter and they came out the same way - ugly. SO7, OO1.1 both convert nicely though. Very bizzarre.

No idea why some things work and others don't, but all PDF converters are not created equal. It would be interesting if someone who knows about this stuff could explain it.

Re:My favorite feature

[Eric Ass Raymond]

After writing several highly complex research grant applications with intervowen bitmap and vector graphics, several fonts and embedded Excel charts I can vouch for that.

Only Acrobat Distiller was able to create a proper PDF file.

Re:My favorite feature

[Eric Ass Raymond]

That saves the step of converting from postscript to pdf

This particular shortcoming perfectly illustrates the gap between open source developers and the end-users.

To an open source advocate, it's just natural that you first create a postscript file and then use another tool to turn it into a pdf. For most serious users (=people who do this for a living), this is nonsense.

For those that have tried both....

[FreeLinux]

I would be particularly interested in hearing from those that have tried OO1.1 and StarOffice 7.0. Specifically, what are the differences? What does StarOffice 7.0 have that OpenOffice 1.1 does not?

Re:For those that have tried both....

[Anonymous Coward]

StarOffice 7 has a database component (AdabasD) that is not OSS, since its not created by Sun. SO7 also has more clip-art style stuff, a WordPerfect filter (also not OSS due to 3rd party code), and a different spelling checker (same thing again).

And it costs $79 (OpenOffice.org 1.1 is free), but you get Sun support with it.

Dan
fa@ooo

Re:For those that have tried both....

[thorgil]

difference:
A nice Sun logo?

Re:For those that have tried both....

[kosmosik]

StarOffice 7 has a database component (AdabasD) that is not OSS

AdabasD is not native component of SO. It comes as an aditional software also AFAIR version shipped with SO is kinda limited (5 concurent connections or so)... But you can always get the same AdabasD (as shipped with SO) for free:

http://www.softwareag.com/adabasd/

But under limited license...

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!

Re:Excellent!

[Bull999999]

Evolution has MAPI connector as n add-on.

Re:Excellent!

[override11]

You are indeed an ignorent piece of dog doo you AC

A business, for any number of reasons, needs to keep email resident on the server. You really want sales contacts and messages on an end users PC that he takes home, takes flying, lets kids play with, etc?

But then again, how would I expect a 12 year old to understand that. Maybe after you grow a few more pubes and actually start working in a business instead of your mom's basement you will understand.... but most likely you wont.

Re:Excellent!

[t0qer]

what else do most (90% of corp users) need?

An OS compatible with the "Just install this dialer to get access to TONS OF PRON!" software that I so often find on the laptops of company officers?

Re:Excellent!

[override11]

but this only works with Exchange 2000, and its not really MAPI, it just connects to the Outlook Web Access client and submits commands and reads data from there. With Exchange 5.5 we are screwed!

Re:Excellent!

[Nurf]

All ximian does is mark it as 'deleted' and not show it.

I don't use my Evolution with IMAP, but evolution has an "Empty Trash" option that happily truly deletes the files marked deleted. You can also set it up to do this by default on exit.

Have you tried using this? Does it not work properly with IMAP or something?

Re:Excellent!

[cloudmaster]

If it was IMAP, the IMAP server ought to be able to delete messages that are marked as deleted - perhaps after waiting a few days. Nearly every mail client has an "expunge" option that deleted messages tagged for deletion, too...

Re:Excellent!

[allan_q]

Just click on Actions > Expunge to delete these marked messages. You can also hit Ctrl-E. After a while it becomes second nature.

Re:Excellent!

[Neon Spiral Injector]

I use Evolution with Courier IMAP, it "expunges" the deleted messages just fine (at exit or when I push Ctrl-E). Maybe just an Exchange thing?

Re:Excellent!

[override11]

Ohhhhh, sweet!! TY for the tip! It works great too! :-)

Re:Excellent!

[TomorrowPlusX]

Why don't you read the message he was replying to?

Or perhaps do you think people calling others "dumb fuck" deserve respectful responses? I thought his response was pretty level, considering.

But then you called him an asshole for it. What a shame.

Re:Excellent!

[generic-man]

Hit Control-E for "Expunge." That purges all deleted messages from an IMAP folder. I've never used it with Exchange, but it works flawlessly with a regular IMAP server.

Re:Excellent!

[AstroDrabb]

Did you go into the "Deleted Items" folder and then click "Actions -> Empty Trash"? Works for me. Also, Ximian puts out Ximian Connector that lets you connect to an MS Exchange server and get all of it's features. This is what I use at work and it works great. I have full access to the calander and corporate contacts for meeting requests, etc. With the contacts, when you go to send an email, you click the To button and there you will see a find box. Type in the first few letters of the frist, last name and hit enter, it will return a list of all the corporate contacts. So if you want to find John Doe, you could type in "Jo Do" and hit enter to find all matches, or you could just type Do or Jo, etc. I have been talking with the admins here about using a REAL IMAP server and it is something they plan to do in a year or two. Exchange is proprietary crap, that is why only MS Software can work with it so well. Maybe talk to someone at your company about using a REAL IMAP server that is standards compliant, then you can use any mailer you like.

As far as comming up with a connector that works perfectly with MS Exchange, you will need to talk to MS and ask them to open up the protocol, good luck : )

Re:Excellent!

[mshiltonj]

using IMAP to connect to exchange, I cant REALLY delete anything. All ximian does is mark it as 'deleted' and not show it.

CTRL-E == Expunge == "REALLY delete"

Re:Excellent!

[BESTouff]

using IMAP to connect to exchange, I cant REALLY delete anything

I didn't try Exchange as an IMAP server, but with the Cyrus IMAP server, you have to choose "Expunge" (or "Empty Trash", can't remember) in the "Action" menu of Ximian Evolution to really delete the mails. I imagine you should try that.

Re:Excellent!

[Snoopy77]

As opposed to Outlook connecting using IMAP where delete doesn't REALLY delete anything?

Re:Excellent!

[rsax]

I have been talking with the admins here about using a REAL IMAP server and it is something they plan to do in a year or two. Exchange is proprietary crap, that is why only MS Software can work with it so well. Maybe talk to someone at your company about using a REAL IMAP server that is standards compliant, then you can use any mailer you like.

I've implemented many mail servers using the Cyrus IMAP Server and have nothing but praises for it. It runs on Solaris, Linux, *BSD operating systems and performs amazingly as a standards compliant IMAP server.

Re:Excellent!

[Captain Large Face]

and what else do most (90% of corp users) need?

Me! Me! I know. It's solitaire, isn't it?

Does anyone have a site for templates?

[Yoshitoshi_ABe]

Are there any good sites for templates? Complete with a guide on how to use them?

Re:Does anyone have a site for templates?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, there are templates. Take a look at OOo's "sister site" OOoExtras:

http://ooextras.sourceforge.net/

Re:Does anyone have a site for templates?

[ReelOddeeo]

Someone on OOoForum had posted this link to some nice templates. I don't know if this set has made it over to OOoExtras.org yet.

OS X version?

[VAXGeek]

I hope we get a native OS X port soon. X11 is okay, but I want a native GUI for OOo.

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....

Great news

[Robowally]

This is excellent. I have extensively used rc3 and rc4, both of which were rock solid. Export to PDF! Excellent!

A day too late...

[Kadagan AU]

Yeah, I saw this announcement on newsforge earlier today, and I had to hit myself. Just yesterday I downloaded and installed the winblows version of OOo1.1rc5, and now I've gotta update to the final ;). If I had only been slightly more patient!!

Re:A day too late...

[yerdaddy_777]

I think you just need to work on your procrastination skills.

Re:A day too late...

[swtaarrs]

Actually, rc5 is the same as 1.1. It's not uncommmon with many apps for the final release candidate to be rereleased as a stable version. For those of you who might not believe me, here are the md5sums of the two install zips (ignore any spaces that may get shoved in there..):

4e38b597c1e646d07bb83153b73fe5d3 *OOo_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install.zip
4e38b597c1e646d 07bb83153b73fe5d3 *OOo_1.1rc5_Win32Intel_install.zip

Of course, you have to trust me to believe those md5sums, but life's tough, ain't it? :)

RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Lord Satri]

FYI, received this interesting info from OOO's staff :
In my enthusiasm for OpenOffice.org 1.1, I neglected to clarify a point (see http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ ReadMsg?msgId=848545&listName=announce ).

OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 is *identical* to the recently released OpenOffice.org RC5.

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

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Dysan2k]

Good bit there, but wouldn't/shouldn't the 1.1.0 version have the debugging stripped out to lean it up a bit? Just my opinion. OO's been perfect for an Office replacement for me. Granted, these days I do very little word-processing and even less with a spreadsheet, but when I needed to type up something, it's done me right. I'm using the beta still where my roomie is using rc1. Time to upgrade when I get home.

Let the sucking of the bandwidth BEGIN!

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.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[jguevin]

Well, if that's true, they should have a few days (while their server recovers) to fix it.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[cbiltcliffe]

actually 3 rc5 release attempts, the latest one even being called rc5b.

Huh? Are the filenames for these different? I just downloaded RC5 this morning, apparently only hours before they decided that it was good enough for the final release, and it doesn't say anything about rc5b in the filename.

OOo_1.1rc5_Win32intel_install.zip

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[pmz]

Good bit there, but wouldn't/shouldn't the 1.1.0 version have the debugging stripped out to lean it up a bit?

I've been bitten by leaving debugging symbols out of open-source software I've compiled. On the occasions that something crashes a program, being able to get something other than gibberish out of a core file is very helpful. It also allows people to e-mail a stack trace along with bug reports. Even though debugging symbols add bloat, I'm almost in favor of distributions leaving them in by default to aid the more-eyes-make-bugs-shallow theory.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Zathrus]

There's also the issue that under some compilers there are different things that occur when you compile in debug mode and when you compile in "release" mode.

The most common one I've seen is that debug mode will automatically initialize variables to a known value (usually 0), while that's not done in release mode. This makes finding bugs that are exposed by this particularly fun to find (the most common issues are counters or pointers that are never initialized -- in debug they'll be nicely set to 0 or NULL, while in release they're filled with random values).

I don't know that this is an issue with OO.o... just more of a generalized issue that affects many programs. Realistically, I blame the compiler for doing too much when in debug mode.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[TheVidiot]

But it's worth downloading just so Help.. About.. shows 1.1!
:)

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Nucleon500]

Won't -Wall catch most uninitialized variables? Always use -Wall.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Zathrus]

Believe so. I've most often experienced this with MS VC++ though, and it's a PITA to setup to issue all warnings (not to mention that doing so causes a few bazillion to issue from MSFC). Yet another reason I prefer coding for Unix.

Of course, now I'm in a different position... AIX is so fucked up that we can't even use a debugger (at least not dbx or gdb -- they both core), and we can't compile with optimizations on because our hardware is so slow (a P3-400 running RH7.3 compiles the codebase in roughly half the time in debug mode). Yes, we're fighting to get some cheap Linux hardware in to do development on. Blech.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[pmz]

There's also the issue that under some compilers there are different things that occur when you compile in debug mode and when you compile in "release" mode.

Ahh, bugs that appear only with optimization...that brings back some not-so-fond memories. Bugs like this really are compiler bugs, because the compiler is no longer deterministic from the programmer's point of view. Actually, things like not initializing pointers because of performance is pretty dumb, where there should be a flag forcing the programmer to consciencously disable it. I'd take a segfault due to a null pointer over randomly overwriting data structures any day.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[julesh]

If gcc does this, I think it uses 0xDEADBEEF as the value to initialise stuff to, which generally stands out like a sore thumb. But I don't think it does, I think its actually gdb that does that (god knows how, though).

Ooh

[Sir Haxalot]

I recently switched to Open Office, it's great :D

Re:Ooh

[Sir Haxalot]

Yeah I thought some smartarse would say something like that. I just wanted to give my opinion and couldn't be bothered giving all the ways in which it's better than other word processing programs, such as Microsoft Word. Oh, and there's only one 'l' in 'insightful'.

Here's a nice page

[zr-rifle]

with the complete illustrated feature list.
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features /1.1/

Loading times seem to have been improved, that's great news since that's what's keeping me using Abiword for common word processing jobs at uni. Let's see if there's already an ebuild for it...

Spanish numeric keyboard bug?

[stm2]

Does anybody know if they corrected that numeric keyboard bug for Spanish version? When you press the dot "." key on the numeric pad and you have your locale setted to Spanish, it should be translated to ",". At least that happends in Excel. This should be corrected for people to change from Excel in Spain and Latin America countries.

1.1 final is the same as RC5

[kg4eyf]

The zip file is identical to the RC5 release. If you got it already, then there's no need to download it again.

Microsoft Lock-in

[thedillybar]

Let's just hope that OpenOffice can show the world what it's made of while it still has a chance. I get this feeling that if Microsoft imposes it's monopolistic lock-in policies soon, few people will ever even see or hear of OpenOffice. If it's into the public view (because of its wonderful features) before Microsoft takes over, we can hope that more people will support OpenOffice in any battle with Microsoft, since people suddenly can't use the new product that they've already grown to love.

Welcome features

[mopslik]

Macro recorder, native PDF, and Flash? If I wasn't so grumpy about downloading OO.o 1.0 just a few weeks ago, I'd jump right on it.

Apart from the sluggish startup, I've been nothing but impressed by OpenOffice.

Re:Welcome features

[sander]

Not having sluggish startup time is another reason you should grab 1.1.0

Re:OS X version? Not there yet...

[Lord Satri]

Nope, no native OSX port soon. See

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/timeline.html

If it helps...

[Sir Haxalot]

Here's the Google Cache for the Openoffice Homepage

What a great office suite

[Kadagan AU]

Hey, for those who haven't read all the details of 1.1, I thought I'd point out that this really looks to me like it's far better than MS Office. Not only does it have 99% of the standard functionality that MS gives, at a much much smaller (read: free) pricetag, but it gives some great bonuses! OOo Draw seems like it's got most of Visio's functionality (a $400 app for the pro version, from MS), it also has built in PDF writing capabilities ($450 from Adobe)! Also, as far as I know, the last version (1.0.1) couldn't actually write .ppt (powerpoint) files, it could only view them. 1.1 is supposed to support writing them as well. Overall this looks ultra-damn-sweet!

Re:What a great office suite

[Papineau]

The precedent version was 1.0.3.1, not 1.0.1. And it could save .ppt files (at least on Linux, but there's no reason it couldn't on all supported platforms).

Re:What a great office suite

[Kadagan AU]

oops. it appears I'm out of date. I was running 1.0.1, and it didn't save them. Not that I ever create them, but I'm sure that some people do.

Re:Get a faster computer fool!

[Chicane-UK]

Thats the Microsoft way!

Ahem :)

Re:Hello

[judmarc]

Umm - because it costs $270 less than the competing product, Counsel?

Jud Fink, Esquimo

Re:Hello

[stroustrup]

1. this software is free.
2. Comes with a pdf writer
3. If used by many people, will help bring down costs of commercial software
4. Its opensource, so you can change it to suit your needs
5. You can install it on all the machines in this world if you want. There is no machine limitation like only 2 machines or 2 and a half machines.

The ultimate crime!

[ctid]

Aaaargh!! Even the list of mirrors is slashdotted! How unspeakably evil...

w00t!!!!

[An Onerous Coward]

I've been playing with the earlier release candidates, and so far it's been sweet. Much faster than 1.0, better conversion from Office formats, the whole .pdf exporter.

In other wondrous news, KOffice plans on switching to the StarOffice file formats. That should save the filter writers a whole bunch of work on both sides.

I would say, "I'm going to install this on the machines of all my friends and relatives," but rampant piracy has led them to think of Microsoft Office as "free," and the power of brand naming has led them to think of any replacement as inferior. So I'll be installing it on the machines of all friends and neighbors who aren't computer savvy enough to notice the difference. :)

Re:w00t!!!!

[UrgleHoth]

the power of brand naming has led them to think of any replacement as inferior. So I'll be installing it on the machines of all friends and neighbors who aren't computer savvy enough to notice the difference

So it sounds like they know just enough to be familiar with MS Office, but not enough about the "world of software" (simply as a user, mind you, not as a geek), so that they have closed their minds to alternatives. I suppose it just goes to show that a little knowledge is dangerous.

Re:w00t!!!!

[An Onerous Coward]

If they need to write a 30 page report, I recommend LATEX. Why? Because I'm evil, dammit!

"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.

Cool!

[the bluebrain]

... only 1998.9 versions to go (plus a couple of arbitrary letters), and we'll have caught up with Microsoft!

(hey - there are "industry analysts" out there that count this way)

Re:Cool!

[sharkey]

only 1998.9 versions to go...hey - there are "industry analysts" out there that count this way

Wow. That's a lot of fingers and toes.

Re:Cool!

[proj_2501]

Don't ask about what happens to that last 0.1 of a finger/toe.

Re:Cool!

[SonicBurst]

actually, Office 2003 is out. Better tack on a few more.

Open in one taskbar item??

[WankersRevenge]

The most irritating thing open OO is when you open new documents, it opens up a new taskbar slot. Is there are a way to open documents in one app as opposed to a gazillion of them?

Re:Open in one taskbar item??

[Tin Foil Hat]

Get a window manager that can group similar tasks on the taskbar. KDE and Gnome can both do this. I think WinXP can as well.

Re:Yea!

[Anonymous Coward]

you will get modded down as troll, but well spake. But, to be fair, it does not mess up your MS-word document unless you save it. I can't understand why many MS-Word documents with tables or a little complex formating can't be viewed properly in OO.
But, who asked you to use such complexity? Simplify.

Online View

[Second Vampyre]

Does anyone know how to make it remember what view you used last? I prefer "online view" and I have to set it every time I start OpenOffice Writer

Re:Online View

[ReelOddeeo]

You could try recording a macro to do this. Then bind the macro to a key. At least you would only have to hit one key instead of picking a menu command.

For those who run into trouble looking for mirrors

[ErrorBase]

Now at a station near you !
Windows : Linorg Projeto Brasil ISC | IndianaU | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | PAIR | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT

Linux : IndianaU | ISC | BehrSolutions | BinaryCode | ibiblio.org | pair | SecsUp | Telentente | Umbc Vienna UT Belnet | KULeuvenNet CVUT Sunsite FUNET

No torrents

[Aza Kendt]

This is downloading at .8KB/s on my cable connection. Where's the bittorrent files?

Re:No torrents

[Trigun]

57KB/s sustained from ibiblio.

Re:No torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

OOo_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install-zip.torrent

They're out there, you just need to know where to look :)

Re:No torrents

[inburito]

Uh. try a different mirror. Mine did it at 300KB/s just 5 min ago.. Took a whole 3 minutes to download too.

Torrent anyone?

[carlmenezes]

Server's slashdotted.

Anyone got a torrent file?

Thanks.

Re:Torrent anyone?

[carlmenezes]

Windows install torrent link :

http://www.emptylogic.com/suprnova/torrents/378/ OO o_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install-zip.torrent

Linux torrent anyone?

Re:Torrent anyone?

[bulletman]

Thanks! Maxing my download bandwidth at 80 kB/s.

Stephen

My impressions..

[adeyadey]

Have been running OpenOffice 1.1 under Windows a little while - only just scratching the surface. Looks like a great prog, but a bit slow to start up. But heck, so is Word..

Also doesnt seem to load old .WRI (windows write) files, a bit of an odd ommision, considering how much else it does..

PDF export is extremely useful, worth it for that feature alone.

If all goes well I think I will be trashing Word soon..

Re:My impressions..

[madfgurtbn]

If all goes well I think I will be trashing Word soon..

It's a glorious day when you do. I trashed Office a half a year or so ago and haven't missed it once. I look forward to the day when people send .sxw files the way they mindlessly send .doc files.

Gentoo

[captainclever]

Someone give me the nod when it's in Portage :)

Re:Gentoo

[Doobian Coedifier]

Bah, still openoffice-1.1_rc3 as the latest. Compiling.....compiling....man this takes forever!!!

I don't get it...

[EvilSporkMan]

Obviously I'm not l33t enough, but evidently this program writes 0 to the very first location in memory. Is this a joke on how much OO crashes? (supposedly)

Re:BUSH = LOUSE

[bmyers]

Got any sources for that info?

Also, there is a big difference between publishing someone's name and publishing the fact that they work for the CIA. Duh.

suck

[mnemonic_]

if you had omitted the closing tag, this could've been a great troll.

you have failed by declaring what was already obvious.

Start up time is the least of my problems...

[Dimensio]

I recently installed the last release candidate, and the startup time was nothing compared to the sluggish feel of the app itself versus the relatively responsive 1.0.x releases (though the startup time there was bad too). I'm wondering if this has been improved.

TROLL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hehe, just kidding. Thanks for the links :)

Bit Torrent link

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a Bit Torrent for this at Suprnova.org:
OpenOffice 1.1 Win32 English

Re:Bit Torrent link

[jguevin]

And 4 seconds later I'm downloading at 1Mbps. I like bittorrent!

Re:Bit Torrent link

[jguevin]

Mod up the parent. It's a good link!

Re:Bit Torrent link

[JCholewa]

> What makes bit torrent different from something
> like Kazaa or Gnutella, just out of curiousity?

A .torrent file is directly associated with the location of an existing downloadable file (movie/app/whatever). Anybody who connects to the .torrent file basically creates a P2P that is specifically dedicated towards that one file. So it's typically faster than doing a search for the file on Kazaa and *praying* that the people holding the file you're looking for are (A) online until you're done downloading and (B) not playing a joke on you by renaming GOATSE.MPG to "OpenOffice-1.1.0_Installer.EXE".

Re:Bit Torrent link

[julesh]

What makes bit torrent different from something like Kazaa or Gnutella, just out of curiousity?

BitTorrent was implemented in Python, so everyone around here thinks its kewl ;-)

[actually, its just a file transfer mechansim, as opposed to those two which are file transfer + search. The file transfer is *much* better than the above because a substantial amount of effort has gone into optimising the process so that each person uploads copies up to their capacity, and nobody gets overloaded, etc. But that doesn't sound as funny]

Redhat 9 RPMs?

[endoftheroadmatt]

Anyone know if Redhat RPMs are available?

w00t

[Dan Farina]

We must crush the word/excel/* format!

At last...we shall have our revenge.

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.

Re:Great program but missing MUST HAVE feature

[OYAHHH]

I'll,

Vote for your issue if you will vote for mine

OOo 1.1, and 1.0 for that matter to a lesser extent, loses graphics, such as GIF files, after a couple of edits (cut/copy/paste) and they never come back.

It really stinks to say the least.

Re:Great program but missing MUST HAVE feature

[javamutt]

Maybe I'm missing something but it sounds like something that could be remedied by using page styles. Set up a page style with the numbering you want and assign it as needed.

I had different numbering formats I needed to use and just about pulled out my hair trying to find a Microsoft way to do it. Once I found a good book on SO/OO I fifugred out page styles and problem was solved.

Might be a different issue, but sure sounds the same.

Re:Damn...

[prandal]

Google has a list here.

Amazing what searching for "Openoffice mirrors" turns up.

Phil

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).

Re:Neat!

[i.r.id10t]

http://www.linuxgazette.com/issue72/bright.html

Shouldn't be too hard to play with the script to get it to name files with the user's name, date, time, and then email it to them as an attachment.

Re:Neat!

[JediTrainer]

I'm sorry. Perhaps I wasn't clear enough.

I was looking for an automated solution. Assume a server, where a file is uploaded by other means (be it email, ftp, HTTP POST, whatever).

I'm not talking about printing as a user action. I'm trying to automate document conversion. Assume the document is already on the machine (a headless box without X).

Re:Neat!

[ReelOddeeo]

There are two issues here.

The headless box. Run soffice -help to get a list of command line options. Or go here to see a list of command line options. On Windows running soffice -help brings up a window showing command line options.

OOo can be programmed from Basic, Java, and Python. I have done all three. On Windows, you can use any Windows Automatation language, such as Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual FoxPro, Delphi. I personally have used Visual FoxPro to script OOo. Someone on OOoForum has used Ruby on Windows to script OOo.

The API has a steep learning curve, but it is very powerful and capable. I have run a java program that can be run on one computer, and connect to an OOo running on another computer to create drawings of mazes. The two computers don't have to be running the same OS. Or you can run both the java program and OOo on the same computer.

If you download the SDK, there is a Java example called DocumentConverter.java. There is also a document converter Servlet in the SDK examples.

Here are a few places to start.

Deloper's Guide

Online API reference

OOo Developer

api.openoffice.org

udk.openoffice.org

Software Developer's Kit

Finally, go hang out on OOoForum.org in the Macro's and API section. I frequent that and answer a lot of questioons and post code fragments and examples there.

Re:Neat!

[ReelOddeeo]

The headless box question has come up several times on OOoForum.org and I've answered it there. (Macros and API section.) In short, you can either try launching OOo with a -headless option. Or use an X server that draws to a bitmap in memory. VNC server is such an X server. It has the additional property that you can connect to it using a remote VNC viewer to see what the pixels currently look like. This type of X server requires no particular physical display hardware.

Re:Neat!

[JediTrainer]

Thanks! That's very helpful!

High transfer rate

[josquin00]

It looks like I'm getting ~115KB/sec off of the PAIR site, for those having trouble finding a good mirror.

And I didn't even wait until my dl was finished to post. So there.

Re:High transfer rate

[Isaac-Lew]

From ibiblio:

18:24:54 (198.56 KB/s) - `OOo_1.1.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz' saved [78347712/78347712]

Does it still use GPC?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does OpenOffice still use the non-free GPC library? If so, any plans to eventually make a free version of OpenOffice?

Those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about please search groups.google.com for these keywords: openoffice gpc license

You'll quickly realize that OpenOffice isn't free, that the developers know it has a non-free dependency, and that a lot of people are looking the other way and pretending there's no problem. I'd _really_ like to see this addressed so that my business can use OpenOffice legally. As it is, we might as well use warez versions of Microsoft Office, since it's no more illegal than a default build of OpenOffice (if you haven't paid your gpc license fee, that is)

Re:Does it still use GPC?

[Bondolo]

Appears to have been long since resolved. See:

discuss@openoffice.org

obligatory...

[3ryon]

I won't buy it until it plays ogg vorbis files.

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!

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.

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

Re:Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO

[Graymalkin]

In Jaguar (10.2) the Print to PDF feature doesn't use any compression. OO's print to PDF feature supports image compression. In Panther (10.3) Apple is finally adding compression support to their Print to PDF feature so the files ought to be a whole lot smaller than the ones produced in jaguar. Granted they might not be as small as a dedicated PDF generation utility might output but they are much better than Jaguar's PDFs.

Regardless, the ability to print anything to a PDF is a very cool feature. Want to send an AppleWorks document to a Windows user? Print to PDF and you're pretty much set.

Re:Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO

[zuralin]

actually OOo v1.0.99+1.1rc3-1 has been in debian 'sid' for some time (and still currently is)...

Re:Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO

[KrazzeeKooter]

Having the single button "print to PDF" technology fully integrated and standard in OSX is all most people will ever need. In fact I'm a professional designer and outside of needing the full version of Acrobat for Quark Express and using the built in PDF technology in Illustrator and Indesign, which I use for print jobs" I have never needed anything more than the pure beutiful and simple "print to PDF" functionality built into the OSX system. I use it for invoices, PDF'ing and sharing website articles of interest, resume's, bios or most any collateral with clients and have NEVER had a complaint or compatibility issue. I'm still leary of such have support for a proprietary standard, but Adobe seems to be doing right by PDF, as long as they don't impliment some sort of DRM I don't see any problem.

I will say though that if you're going to PDF a 30 page and heavily graphical Powerpoint presentation you're really going to need the feature rich and configurable Acrobat. I can't believe that OO has such a good implimentation, I'll have to check it out as soon as I upgrade OO. I'm really stoked that it's included in Open Office because it solves and problems I might have ensuring that clients get my documents without corruption in formating. The sooner I can get the last microsoft apps off my computer the happier I'll be, and the less suseptible to viruses.

Furthermore, office for Mac OSX is seriously behind the ball, it's 2 years old, 2 versions behind Windows, and beginning to suffers some SERIOUS compatibility issues with windows word docs. I was trying to show a client how to do a mail merge with a new label and i had to show up and show him on HIS MS Word because not only were the mac and latest Win office NOTHING alike in interface, but we couldn't even open each other's word docs because the layout templates were shifting all over the place.

My point here is that I expect Open Office will be the savior for the mac just the same as mozilla saved us from the poor IE for OSX. (Yeah Safari rocks too) Open Office should rapidly surpase MS Office in full mac support and finally most of us will any longer have to put up with being penalized on compatibility for not paying the MS tax and not running Windows. Although I'll always have to run it to make sure my web projects are compatible on Win.

Side note, I've moved virtual pc (which I have to run ONLY for compatibility issues) to an issolated box that I VNC into and have had to limit all file shares between it and the OS since running VirtPC on my mac has become a serious achiles heal.

Side note two, I'm really hoping this year will be the year of the Outlook killers. IBM and the Lotus people are working on an "outlook" killer, but I haven't seen anything more, but Mac Entourage certainly is a stale attempt by Microsoft to support Outlook Exchange functionality on the mac.

In summary there may be some small compatibility issues and performance issues yet with OO on OSX, but it rocks and has arrived! Especially when you consider cost savings over MS Office.

Re:Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO

[KrazzeeKooter]

Well put. Simply put.

Enough with the startup time complaints!

[BuddhaDude]

This seems to be the single most commonly voiced criticism of Open/Star Office. How often do you really need to open your wp or ss during the day? I've been using OpenOffice every day at work this year, and here's how I get around this "problem":

1. Fire it up at the beginning of the day.
2. Work.
3. Shut it down at the end of the day.

And if you're the type who leaves the computer on overnight, you don't even have to re-open it the next day. Let's get real, folks.

Re:Enough with the startup time complaints!

[Isaac-Lew]

Are thre any memory leak issues that you've noticed by doing that?

Compatibility with MS Office?

[angle_slam]

I can't access their site, so I can't read the FAQ, so I would appreciate it if someone can answer some compatibility questions.

How compatible is it with MS Word? Can it open and save in .DOC format? I would assume that compatibility is dependent on complexity (i.e., a letter to mom will open in both applications, but a 300 footnote .DOC article may not be formatted correctly in Open Office), is this true and how complex of a document can be opened?

Re:Compatibility with MS Office?

[Hal The Computer]

I've found it to be quite useful for even most semi-complex documents that I had in .doc format. If it's not extreamly it complicated should be fine. If this is something which you're REALLY worried about however, ther is no substitute for downloading the program and trying it yourself.

Re:Compatibility with MS Office?

[ColaMan]

I've found that its Excel filter is sometimes better than Excel's if the file is corrupted. There's been a few occasions now where Excel has told me the file is unreadable, but OpenOffice can open the bulk (90+%) of it, and save back as an Excel file again.

*very* handy.

(and on re-reading your post, yes , it does the same for Word docs as well ;-)

Re:Spanish numeric keyboard bug?

[deragon]

This is bug #1820 . Since Open Office website is slashdoted, I cannot access it, but from what I remember, this critical bug will only be fixed in 2.0.

In the mean time, use MS-Excel is you have alot of data to enter. :(

Re:Tommy Chong deserves to rot under the jail

[Doobian Coedifier]

Chone was hit by "Operation Pipe Dreams" run by Ashcroft's own AGO. Try using google.

PDF... underwhelmed.

[repetty]

"OpenOffice.org 1.1 introduces the one-click PDF export feature that enables you to easily create PDF files without the need for any additional third party software. This feature makes exchanging documents in a standard "read-only" file format a trivial task. The creation of PDF files normally requires relatively expensive third party add-on tools. With OpenOffice.org this feature comes for free."

I like "one-click" convenience as much as the next guy but they must be pitching this announcement to the Microsoft Windows crowd.

I've been producing PDFs with OpenOffice 1.0 on Mac OS X and Linux for a long time.

I'm very interested in this new version, though. I'm hoping that they fixed the rat-bastard auto-numbering functionality... the one that makes me want to kill myself (after I take out everyone else within sight.)

--Richard

Re:PDF... underwhelmed.

[jamesangel]

I'm hoping that they fixed the rat-bastard auto-numbering functionality

That was put in in order to make Word users feel more comfortable.

If you have a PS printer

[k98sven]

You can always print to file and then use ps2pdf, you know?
(comes with ghostview)

Re:BUSH = LOUSE

[fyrie]

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/robertnovak/rn2 0031001.shtml

Re:Step in the right direction.

[thedillybar]

Long day at work? Time to bitch about everything?

Hotmail is the best email? It Has No Client!

Shall we define the rating of an IM network as s+f
s = # of smilies
f = # of frames allowed in a buddy icon

Seriously, if you're that worried about it, explore some clients like Trillian that are bound to have all the smilies you could possibly imagine plus 1.

Re:Just tried it [KDE LOOK ICON SET URL]

[tyrione]

In case someone tried and the url linked for the Alternative Icon Set, and couldn't get it to resolve. Ignore the space between 7 and 131.

www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7131

The lack of the header protocol is due to Slashdot
clipping the url during form wrapping of the text width.

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.

Re:Double ditto for me, and why Word stinks

[WuphonsReach]

Is the .SXW file the one that is actually a compressed file containing the bits and pieces that make up the document? If so, a 2x savings may just be because the result is a compressed file.

I vaguely remember that the native OOo file format is a compressed archive, but I don't remember if it's a ZIP file or not.

And if it is a compressed file... something tells me that it's going to be more difficult to do full text searches unless your search tool knows how to open up the OOo files.

Re:Double ditto for me, and why Word stinks

[juhaz]

Most of the savings probably are from compressiong, but that doesn't make them any less real. How often you see compressed docs? Never, people won't bother compressing those themselves, it has to be small straight from the app.

Just tried OOo-ifying largest doc file I happened to have at hand (12.5M, part of vs.net documentation), and it shrank to 366k. 2x? Ha! Try 34x saving :)

And yes, it's a zip file. No weird uncompression knowledge required for opening and searching. But the content file itself is not really human readable, unless you strip all the xml tags.

Anyway, it's an open format all the way, not only the zip part, so your search tool is bazillion times more likely to know how to open up the OOo files than .docs...

for company?

[bumbleboy]

I havent used Star Office since 5.1, as a hopeless mathmatican I do every thing in latex... But, I also manage a smaller companys computer. They use Office 97, and are discussing an upgrade. Can I throw Star Office at them? (guess open source would be to much hippie... ) Have many of you done this, what where the problems?

Re:for company?

[SonicBurst]

as a hopeless mathmatican

Good thing you're not an English professor.

Here, I'll start a Linux torrent

[tugrul]

Doesn't seem like anyone else has.

OOo_1.1.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz.torrent

Re:Here, I'll start a Linux torrent

[jonabbey]

No such file or directory, says BitTorrent when I try to visit that link.

Re:Here, I'll start a Linux torrent

[jonabbey]

Gah, never mind. I had to wget the torrent file before using btdownloadcurses.py. I just assumed that it would work with a URL.

Downloading/seeding it now, thanks.

however...

[Anonymous Coward]

For non-geeks it'll be a while: Projected OS X native availability of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is currently Q1 2006.

figures...

[Spetiam]

...since i just installed rc5 yesterday...

no links

[Spetiam]

but when you export to PDF, hyperlinks are lost. it'd be nice to see that feature come along soon.

faster startup

[ChristTrekker]

This is wonderful news. At work, my employer sprung for a 3 GHz Windows box, and I've been using OOo exclusively as my office suite. But at home, my main machine is a 300 MHz Mac which has been running YDL 2.3 and OOo on the desktop exclusively for almost 6 months now, and the speed boost will be greatly appreciated! I don't know why it can't be as fast as MS Word 5.1 though.

Re:Just tried it [KDE LOOK ICON SET URL]

[ShadeARG]

Hyperlinking the URL would fix the problem and make access convenient. Why not try it?

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..

is there any way...

[sydlexic]

...to leverage pdf export to do command-line conversion of doc to pdf? that would rock for handling those nettlesome .doc files that people insist on emailing me.

MOD PARENT OFFTOPIC

[Anonymous Coward]

HOw the Hell did this get modded +3 Interesting . . this story is about OPENOFFICE not Ximian Desktiop/Evoloution or getting IMAP to work with exchange . .

pdf in linux

[rwa2]

Most apps can print to file as postscript. Then just run ps2pdf on it.

Re:Hello

[stroustrup]

Sad that you had to mix up some insightful comments with some troll.
1)The turd floating in a pay toilet when I forget to flush is free too. That doesn't mean you want it
Agreed
2) PDF sucks.
you musk be kidding
did you mean the pdf export in OO sucks?
3) You obviously didn't major in economics.
100% true. But, isn't what I said true?
4) Have you ever compiled it yourself? There's a reason that gentoo, the linux for people that like to waste time compiling everything, only offers OO as a binary install. Regardless, My time is valuable and it's more economical for me to pay for software that works than spend a month trying to understand the OO code design, recompile, and do regression testing.
You can do it, does not mean you have to do it. The guys making the software are putting all necessary features so that you don't have to write code. But, if you come up with a brilliant idea to improve the software, you can atleast do it with OO. That's not allowed with commercial software.
5) MS Office doesn't have those limits either.
This is troll
You obviously have not upgraded to OfficeXp.

I want diff on documents

[iabervon]

It would be really nice to be able to take the documents in the OOo format and compare them with something like diff, and merge changes back. Ideally, it would be supported in CVS as well.

This would be great for distributed groups working on the same document at the same time, or even people tracking a document as it is changed by someone else.

For that matter, a lot of companies do negotiation by sending documents back and forth. It would be really useful when you got the next version to be able to determine exactly what had changed (and an embedded history isn't necessarily trustworthy; they could have changed it).

Re:I want diff on documents

[Get Behind the Mule]

It would be really nice to be able to take the documents in the OOo format and compare them with something like diff, and merge changes back. Ideally, it would be supported in CVS as well.

You can do this by unpacking the file -- an .sxw file is just a ZIP archive containing some XML documents -- and then running your diff, merges and CVS on the files from the archive.

The drawback is that you're dealing with several files at once, not just one, but then you're probably only interested in content.xml. And of course you have to convert back and forth from the archived and unarchived versions. But it can be done.

Re:I want diff on documents

[iabervon]

Actually, what would be really neat would be if CVS treated ZIP files like directories (except better than CVS actually treats real directories).

The other piece, of course, is an XML-aware diff and a OOo viewer for XML diffs of content.xml files, since looking at content.xml isn't the nicest thing, let alone diffs of it.

16-bit icons still?

[gad_zuki!]

Have they gotten rid of those ugly 16-bit icons and moved towards something a bit more modern? First impressions might not mean much to geeks but when the app looks like it fell out of 1995 it really is a liability when the non-tech set see something that looks like a very cheap rip-off.

A decent re-skining would produce more "wows" and thus more of an incentive to think of it as a "professional" alternative to MSOffice. Yes, its all very subjective, but in the end I think it hurts the project.

My thoughts after 3 days of use

[fluor2]

I know most functions in MS word very well, and I must say that working with OpenOffice is like moving back to Word v4.0 on DOS or something. It's stupid, non-logic, and it really get on my nerves when I try to write complex documents.

However, I think I will still try to use it more, since it IS free, and that it may save my company for some bills. But currently, I would NEVER (YOU HEAR ME? NEVER!) put this software out to my workers yet. It needs many features, and a lot better logic behind the GUI.

Generally:
PRO
It works for writing small letters and small documents.

CONS
Pasting pictures SUX.
Rotating pictures SUX.
Drawing SUX.
Zooming SUX.
The autofill words SUX.

The write to PDF is nice, but I hate PDF's as they are really lame to view at screen anyway. The reason for using PDF is that it can be read elsewhere, now we should atleast use the OpenOffice format instead, since it is even more free than Adobe Reader. Maybe the open-office team should make a OpenOffice Reader?

Re:My thoughts after 3 days of use

[pHDNgell]

The write to PDF is nice, but I hate PDF's as they are really lame to view at screen anyway. The reason for using PDF is that it can be read elsewhere, now we should atleast use the OpenOffice format instead, since it is even more free than Adobe Reader. Maybe the open-office team should make a OpenOffice Reader?

How is OO format more free than PDF?

PDF is smaller, is viewable on more platforms, will open and be on the screen quicker, is not likely to pass information you don't want along, is not likely to help spread virus type things once someone finds a hole in a macro, is not likely to become unreadable as new versions come out, etc...

I use PDF whenever I can. When I can't, it's HTML or plain text (sometimes RTF).

Re:My thoughts after 3 days of use

[twistedcubic]

How is OO format more free than PDF?

If you mean free as in freedom, then the OO format is definitely more free-- just read the restrictions at the beginning of Adobe's latest PDF specification.

other missing features

[commodoresloat]

I can't get any work done with a word processor that doesn't interrupt every fucking letter I try to write with unhelpful advice. Until OO gets this kind of functionality it will be useless to the majority of MS Office users.

Re:other missing features

[Dave2 Wickham]

Does it popping up what it thinks the next word you're going to type count? If so, just leave that option on and untuned and you'll be fine :). (Yes, I do all my word processing and spreadsheet work in OOo)

Re:other missing features

[Chucow]

A feature I actually found somewhat irritating at first but have grown to love. Half of everything i type now is enter.

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

Re:other missing features

[jlechem]

I agree, Word can be a complete whore but it's what everyone uses. Excel kicks ass and I use it all the time. It's probably the program I use most out of the Office suite.

Re:other missing features

[vee-dub.net]

I, on the other hand, hate the stupid autoformatting crap so much that I write my docs in VI first. I then import into Word or OO and format. It saves me from battling all those "features."

English?

[Rogerborg]

No such language. Try en-us, en-gb, en-ca. Some of the most frustrating meetings of my career have involved trying to convince the terminally clueless of this. Let's not spread the misery.

Wasted opportunities

[pixelgeek]

Why does "Office Compatibilty" appear to mean that you need to reduplicated the same horrid Office UI and build the same sort of bloated functionality?

Why could OS developers not take the opportunity to write a series of applications that work better, are more streamlined, have a better UI and just happen to open and save files in Office formats?

Why make people have to suffer with the same usability and UI gaffs that MS has foisted on Windows users?

Re:Wasted opportunities

[Paddyish]

Why make people have to suffer with the same usability and UI gaffs that MS has foisted on Windows users?

Because that's what people are used to. The lower the learning curve, the more people you will be able to sign on to the bandwagon. It isn't about making anything better - it's about providing an alternative with zero strings attached.

Re:Wasted opportunities

[pixelgeek]

-- Because that's what people are used to.

The fact that people are used to an inferior product isn't, to my mind, a good enough reason to be copying it.

-- It isn't about making anything better - it's about providing an alternative with zero strings attached.

I don't see the point behind this then. You are saying that the developers are choosing to write bad software so they can give people an OS option?

Why not give people an OS option that isn't a copy of unusable bloatware?

This really does seem to segue nicely into the discussion or user inferiority and UI design in an earlier topic.

Is it that developers think that users are too stupid to see that a superior product is a better alternative or is it that they don't have the UI chops to actually provide users with that better experience?

AdabasD - who cares?

[dolson]

Why not just use MySQL or one of the other database formats?

Re:AdabasD - who cares?

[exhilaration]

Is there something that can make MySQL look like Access?

Just curious.

Re:AdabasD - who cares?

[dolson]

Sure. How about OpenOffice.org?

wow...

[buttahead]

it loads erally quick. And I'm loving the connectors... finally I don't need visio anymore!

PDF Writing Functionality

[Anonymous Coward]

Great to see OO include this feature but there's been an open source project that does the same for sometime now. PDFCreator installs a special Printer (named PDFCreator) on your system. Anything you can print, you can convert into PDF format! I believe it's basically just adding some logic between the print spooler and the Win32 port of GhostScript but it's been a lifesaver at our school since all Profs now need to publish all syllabi and documents to the website in PDF format. The website is:

http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator

Re:Hello

[ReelOddeeo]

You can do everything you want in MS Office. You don't have to pay for it. So keep using it, and I hope it makes you happy. I'll go on using OOo and be very happy with it.

There are plenty of business users who do not buy a Bazillion or even merely a Jillion copies to obtain steep discounts and get to be best buddies with Microsoft.

OOo is not only for the home user. There are plenty of small businesses and schools that can use OOo. Have you seen the Star Office for Kids site?

I just discovered, last night in fact, that a pet grooming shop in my area gives out a 2004 calendar. I noticed that the calendar is produced by an OOo macro that I wrote (and LGPL'ed). I was pleased to say the least (to see OOo being used).


However to me, the ONLY SURE WAY FOR NEW SOFTWARE TO SUCCEED (proprietary or open source) is to offer new functionality.

I disagree with this statement. If you see the world only in terms of 10,000 unit deployments, then this may color your perception of things. One way that new software can succeed over proprietary software is by being open source and having open document formats, and a large powerful open API.

Re:Yea!

[ReelOddeeo]

Have you tried OOo 1.1 or only 1.0.x for opening Word documents?

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.

Re:Yay!

[exhilaration]

I do NOT want VB script

You don't have a choice - VB Script is integrated in Windows. Specifically, it's tied to Internet Explorer.

Re:Yay!

[achacha]

Use Mozilla Firebird as browser.
Pine for email.
OpenOffice for "productivity".
mySQL ad database.
UltraEdit / Eclipse / WebSphere for development.
g++ to compile with make.
Sun's J2EE / J2SE to compile with ant.

Where in that setup am I required to deal with VB script?

If you don't use microsoft products, you don't have to deal with VB script.

Re:Yay!

[msh104]

If you don't use microsoft products, you don't have to deal with VB script. if *this* is your WINDOWS setup, the only thing that might be stopping you from using full-time linux might be your games, since you are naming only opensource programms that are in general more optimized for linux. so if you are not a big fan of games and *this* is your windows setup, please move over to linux and your office experience will be much better.

Re:Yay!

[achacha]

That is exactly what has kept my main machine from being linux. I play games, and wish Warcraft 3, Everquest and Neverwinter Nights were available for Linux, then there would be no reason for me to use windows.

Re:11sec time? Try 3 pal!

[q2a]

I have a super duper HotRod PII 300mhz clunker running Redhat9 and Ximian Desktop (fully patched via Redcarpet) and OOo_1.1 loads in 4-5 seconds WITH NO OPTIMIZATION yet... With some tweaking I'll get that down to three, hehe..

"hotrod" indeed..old school RuleZ ;)

Better Page Numbering?

[jak163]

Can you start page numbering on a number other than one (or another number that would appear later in the document) yet? As in for continuously numbered chapters?

Also, OT, can MySql substitute for Lotus Notes as a kind of research database? I can run Notes under Wine, but I can't seem to paste in large clipboards as I like to do to enter the data. I.e. I take notes on a word processor and then just paste in the data.

Heck no but...

[rune2]

It can save to 'standard' XML files using really obfuscated schemas... oh wait no...

Let's see the "$time soffice" kiddies!

[q2a]

On a PII300; [q@borg Q]$ time soffice real 0m11.488s user 0m6.420s sys 0m1.880s [q@borg Q]$

They still ignore the need for a decent word count

[zed2]

It's a pity they still ignore their users and haven't put in a usable word count yet. It's amazing that they continue to ignore such a basic feature, which basically makes openoffice unusable to many people who write professionally.

They need to let people count selections and include and exclude footnotes, at the very least, before it can ever be considered a decent wordprocessor.

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!

Re:Do you know if you can import pdf?

[JohnFluxx]

Wasn't the password protection on pdf's shown to be useless?

Re:Do you know if you can import pdf?

[shellbeach]

Do you know if you can import pdf?

Sadly, no - I think part of the problem is that once something becomes a pdf there's no longer any information as to how one horizontal line of text links up with any other (e.g. - same paragraph? same column? different column? figure heading? etc) - so recreating the formatting information becomes impossible.

But there are some pdf -> text utilities which you can use to extract the text (all based on xpdf, I think, so no bypassing of password protection :)

master documents

[buttahead]

master documents let you write large projects... such as a book. you only need to maintain the chapters in individual files and include them into a master document. then all the footnotes and page number, etc. are kept reletive to the whole, rather than the single chaper that you were writing.

very handy.

DocBook is broken

[axxackall]

Finally I saw DocBook filter and thought it's time to be happy with OOo. Not so fast - it's broken. OOo is freezing each time it tries to use that form. Too bad :(

Why Mac is PDF bigger than OO

[grantsellis]

Mac default PDFs are bigger because their graphics aren't compressed. I read leaving the feature out was a favor to Adobe (to give Acrobat on Mac a raison d'etre).

more specifically...

[ChristTrekker]

The relevant bit, from the bottom of the aforementioned page...

All further development of the Quartz and Aqua tracks has been postponed until OpenOffice.org 2.0 due to gsl timeline. Initial delivery of 2.0 for Win32, Solaris, and Linux x86 expected in Q1 2005. Projected OS X X11 port availability expected to be Q2 2005. Projected OS X native availability of OpenOffice.org 2.0 is currently Q1 2006.

So don't hold your breath. If you want it sooner, go over and contribute your mad skillz! Surely there are some unemployed Mac geeks out there looking to bolster their resumes?

Re:Hello

[Mod Me God]

Appologies, succeed only applied to overall success. Yes I agree OO is a better solution for home users, SOHO or even medium sized companies that don't need the extra 5% functionality.

I like OO, encourage others to give it a go. But I think to create sufficient critical demand for software allowing it to become the industry standard is to create demand at the top of the business chain (who MS bend over backward to serve), so something that MS don't have is the only thing that can break them.

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:Question (mainly for Gentoo users)

[incom]

I'd like to know this too. I've been strictly using the bin versions to save the compile time.

Re:Question (mainly for Gentoo users)

[acidtripp101]

Well, you could always start the emerge before you go to bed, and when you wake up, it should be done (if not... go to school/work and come back). You don't have to have 100% attendance at your box at all times during comile times. AND, if you're really anal about compiling asap, drop out of x and do it on the command line... should speed it up a bit (especially on such a large program).

Re:Question (mainly for Gentoo users)

[Lord Ender]

First of all, openoffice-bin is only version 1.0.2 while source openoffice is 1.0.3. I have tried both, and personall, I think running openoffice optimized for my AthlonXP is worth having to wait a couple hours for it to compile. Linux is multi-tasking, it is no problem minimizing a kterm that is compiling. Alternatively, you can just start the compile before you go to bed. But OO 1.1 is not in portage yet :(

Re:Question (mainly for Gentoo users)

[dotgod]

Actually both openoffice-bin and openoffice have ebuilds for the release candidates.

Re:Open Office is great so far

[exhilaration]

I want to get a template for APA or MLA

What does that mean? It sounds interesting.

Linux based desktop is finally here!

[getnuked]

I was just about to write a long rant about how well OO has evolved from the days of star-office 5.x, yet it appears you have summarized my thoughts on this subject *completely*!

Thank you OpenOffice.org dudes for making it 10x easier to convince my family, friends, colleagues and clients that a Linux based desktop is finally ready for the masses!

Dont forget to checkout the OpenOffice themes!

[-unta]

I really like OpenOffice but gawd it's ugly! If your running it under *nix make sure you check out the Toolbar themes addon.

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=713 1

You can replace the normal toolbar icons with ones to match your desktop environment, but pretty-much any of the included ones are FAR better than the OOo ones. Please, someone at OO merge this into the main tree!!!

Quick Note on speed

[JayBlalock]

I'm on an old 1ghz Windows box. I don't know about everyone else, but the speed (without the Autoloader enabled) on startup is a *vast* improvement over 1.0 and\or whatever RC I had been using. About 2-3 seconds versus the 15ish it used to take. Enough speedup that it's finally become my default application for reading document files.

But, of course, YMMV.

Now to go see how well the new features work.

Cut and Paste?

[planckscale]

Does anyone know if this version will support simple cut and paste functions in Linux? I was having a hell of a time just copying an image from a web page, or copying even a URL from a browser into a document....

How does it compare?

[edxwelch]

How does it compare with the other free offerings out there, RagTime Solo and AbiWord?

Debian sid still at RC3

[DeeKayWon]

(which, by the way, has been in Debian 'sid' since Sep 25)

You must be using a non-official source. Official mirrors are still at RC3.

invalid tarballs

[undertow3886]

I've tried downloading tarballs (gz and bz2 compressed) from four of the mirrors, and each time I try to uncompress/untar it, I get errors about invalid compressed data, file formats, etc. Has anyone else had this kind of problem?

latex/lyx filters

[sewagemaster]

any news on import/export latex filters? i've read somewhere that this was on their to-do list...

Really fast startup times with preliink

[AstroDrabb]

I just used prelink on OpenOffice 1.1 and get a 4 second startup time the first time I start it and 2 second startup times after that. I don't think you can get much better then that. This is on a P4 1.7GHz, 512MB laptop, so it is not the fastest box around. To prelink OOo-1.1 try this:

#cd to where you installed OOo
prelink -vm --ld-library-path=/opt/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/program soffice.bin

Replace the --ld-library-path= part with the directory where soffice.bin is installed. You need to do this as root unless you installed OOo as a normal user.

Good stuff

[soloport]

Just put a new installation through it's paces. Nice work! It is faster. Actually (just started it again to check), it's DAMN faster! In fact it seems everything's sped up a bit -- e.g. menus.

Also tried the PDF exporter and brought the copy up in Mozilla (using the Adobe's reader for Linux). Yep. Looks like a real PDF to me. Haven't tried the MySQL interface, yet, but am excited to get away from the proprietary one.

FWIW, YMMV

Important feature for developers generating XML

[jonadab]

End users won't care, but this release carries a feature that will
be VERY important for anyone who writes software that generates
OpenOffice.org documents: if your XML is invalid in some way,
OO.o will now tell you exactly where the problem was, instead of
just bombing. I discovered this when testing the betas, and I
was elated. (I write Perl scripts, including some CGI scripts,
that generate SXW for printing. This makes debugging MUCH easier.)

So, umm, when's the database component coming? I heard rumours that
they were starting on one...

It might be a MUST HAVE feature for YOU...

[Kjella]

...but pardon me if I say I think your needs aren't that very average. I don't think I've ever seen any document written in the style you require.

I'm sure that to you, that specific feature is very important but when I read your comment I got the "This OSS program won't ever replace Excel because it doesn't do multivariable logarithmic polynomial recursion (read:I use them all the time) and it's a MUST HAVE feature." feeling.

That being said, I can't quite figure out why this isn't in. Doesn't sound like a very difficult feature to implement, applying styles on a per-paragraph basis should be quite common and this is one more of the sort...

Kjella

1.1 RC5 is the same as 1.1 final

[Compact Dick]

Those who downloaded 1.1 RC5 for win32 can save themselves a 63.5 MB download and simply rename OOo_1.1rc5_Win32Intel_install.zip to OOo_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install.zip as they share the same checksum "4e38b597c1e646d07bb83153b73fe5d3".

I am not sure about the other platforms but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same. Find out by checking out the OpenOffice 1.1 final MD5sums list.

Riding the first post to save bandwidth and unnecessary downloads.

Presentation, not just slow to start ...

[fygment]

... but slow to run. I have a 1 Ghz machine. I don't expect big delays in graphic movement while editing a Presentation. Import was pretty decent but with enough flaws to add work to a pretty simple project.

Since presentations are a big part of my life anything that increases the work load is not acceptable. Good effort though and miles from where it was in 5.2. But still miles to go.

1.1 still has issues

[siskbc]

Have you tried OOo 1.1 or only 1.0.x for opening Word documents?

I will say OO is much improved now, but I *just* installed 1.1, and saved a document as a word doc under OO. I opened it in word, and subscripts and quotes were still a bit fucked up.

I'd say it's better, and for most people good enough, and even for me, close enough that I can tweak a few things. But I cannot save something as Word under OO, send it to my boss, and have confidence that it won't make me look like an ass.

I'm not sure why such simple problems still exist, honestly.

Re:1.1 still has issues

[ReelOddeeo]

I'm not sure why such simple problems still exist, honestly.

Here's why.

Because Word is a closed, secret, proprietary, and especially undocumented format.

Microsoft is free to play games with the format on every new release.

The only software that will ever have perfect compatibility with Word documents is: Word. (Unless the above stated conditions change.)

Re:1.1 still has issues

[siskbc]

Because Word is a closed, secret, proprietary, and especially undocumented format.

Yes, yes, yes, that's the stock answer and I know it's not easy to do - however, fixing subscripts seems like it should be one of the easier things to reverse engineer, and easier than many of the things they've already accomplished.

If the above URL fails its because ...

[linuxguy]

There is a space in it when there should not be. The correct URL is:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/1 .1/

re: OOo 1.1 released

[mforbes]

If you'll pardon the pun....

Oh suite!

Make OOo look pretty and match your desktop...

[dotgod]

Download this to make OpenOffice match your icon theme. Then use this guide to get your fonts looking good. In Gentoo you can get Microsoft's fonts by emerging corefonts

Re:Yay! umm Open Office DOES MS Office Macros

[aaron_pet]

quote:
I do NOT want VB script (as most MS bugs are rooted in that god awful script).

reply: it supports the macros.. I think you can turn it off though.

Re:Hello

[ReelOddeeo]

I think to create sufficient critical demand for software allowing it to become the industry standard is to create demand at the top of the business chain (who MS bend over backward to serve), so something that MS don't have is the only thing that can break them.

I understand your argument. I just don't agree with it.

Look at Apache. Look at how Internet mail is handled. The growth of Linux is not slowing down, if anything, accellerating.

On the very day that some open source announces a cool feature that MS doesn't have is the same day that MS announces the vaporware feature in MS products. Just wait! It will be so cool! MS will have it bigger, better, faster, and for more money! So why not wait? And MS will release the new feature in their software. And it will be slickly integrated.

So I think that merely being open source is enough. I belive that open source can succeed simply on its merits -- which is more than just a feature list, or even steeply discounted software in volume. It is about something called freedom.

I believe that Governments will eventually adopt open standards for public data. It is inevitible. This gives open source software a fair chance to compete. Perhaps even an advantage.

So again, I disagree with the proposition that open source can only succeed if it has more features.

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

Feature: One-click Export to PDF

[Radical Rad]

Watch out! I think Amazon has already patented that one.

Re:MS Office Hits 2003

[unusdemorsmortis]

Wow, look, someone who thinks that if you change the format you save a document into and adding 5 new features (which no one uses anyways) is worthy of a whole new release! OO.o actually works on IMPROVING their code, rather than continually making it so older versions are completely incompatible to force people to upgrade. The MS office suite has had NO significant updates, other than obsoleting "older, worse" versions which are still fully functional, and quite frankly faster running than the new crap. I personally would like an optimized code, OO.o is actually working on theirs, MS is making theirs look pretty, and less stable. I could take a crap in a box, sell it, and then eat some corn, and take another crap in a newer box, and call it a newer better version, but that doesn't make it so. If I had to use MS office, I would go back to 97, from when it was fast and stable enough to actually be usable for a good part of the day. Note: OO.o (1.0) and Office XP take almost exactly the same time to start up on my comp., and OO.o doesn't have that long ass waiting time but the first time. However, my personal choice is the *.rtf format, it allows the basic text with different fonts, colors, and other basics, which is ALL YOU REALLY NEED. Anything more than that is just a distraction from the info on the page.

PDFCreator is good!

[WoTG]

I was just going to suggest this too. I started using it a couple weeks ago, with no problems.

Re:11sec time? Try 3 pal!

[shellbeach]

Is that using Ximian's OOo release? And is that first startup or restarting after the app's been cached?? Your value seems unbelievably low - it'd be interesting to know if Ximian's done some pre-loading of the OOo libs or something ...

Bloatware

[XiticiX]

Can you say Bloatware? I installed Openoffice (previous ver.) on my 2k pro machine, and it was like my computer lost a nut. Moaning and gagging like it couldn't perform as well as it used to. I got rid of it right away. WAY too memory hungry or something.

Re:They still ignore the need for a decent word co

[maverickbna]

File -> Properties -> Statistics tab There's a perfectly functional word count.

lol

[Worminater]

I can be free as a bird now...

Uninstall?

[Xpilot]

Does anyone know how to [b]uninstall[/b] the damn thing? Deleting the directory is not an option.

Re:Hello

[dunstan]

Yes, OO does do something that MSOffice doesn't: it saves your documents in a published format. If you're concerned about the future useability of your documents, this ought to matter to you.

For organisations which have to be accountable this ought to be the overriding concern - it doesn't have to be OpenOffice, it doesn't even have to be free software, but it absolutely must be an open file format.

Dunstan

Actually...

[Tuckdogg]

I believe the Amazon patent was for "One-click Transfer to an Alternate HTML Document."

Re:Hello

[mhifoe]

One feature that has made a significant difference to my company is file size.

We have a number of current projects, all with their own suite of documentation. All these documents are under version control, resulting in large databases of changes.

One of my colleagues works from home on dial-up. Enormous file sizes obviously cause him problems. The open office files are 10 times smaller than the Word 97 documents they replaced.