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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.
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
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.
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.
Animoog.org
with the complete illustrated feature list.s /1.1/
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/feature
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...
Hack your mind out of its sandbox.
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
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.
... 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)
yes, we have no bananas
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
Just click on Actions > Expunge to delete these marked messages. You can also hit Ctrl-E. After a while it becomes second nature.
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!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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.
--
FreeNET user? Comfortable with the adverse selection?
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
Doesn't seem like anyone else has.
OOo_1.1.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz.torrent
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)...
.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..
If you use MSIE, it will first download the
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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.
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=71
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!!!
Watch out! I think Amazon has already patented that one.