OpenOffice 2.0 Preview Release

gmuslera writes "A preview release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, which has new features like better MS-Office compatibility, an Access-like program and a more. Here is a review of it with screenshots and how it performs. It's work in progress, maybe not recomended for production sites, but it is a good sample of what is coming."

Comments

The Register?

[dan dan the dna man]

Or The Inquirer! :)

Re:The Register?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's how it used to look... ;-)
---
Posted by CmdrTaco on Monday December 20, @05:16PM
from the do-you-see-what-I-see dept.
gmuslera writes "A preview release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released, which has new features like better MS-Office compatibility, an Access-like program and a more. The Register has a good review of it with screenshots and how it performs. It's work in progress, maybe not recomended for production sites, but it is a good sample of what is coming."

Re:The Register?

[Anonymous Coward]

So they changed gmuslera's words and pretended he said something different to what he did? I'd sue.

Re:The Register?

[northcat]

I dont get it. The article has appeared on The Inquirer, but /. says it appeared on The Register. I thought this was /.'s error, but the only post that points this out has been modded as funny. What am I missing here?

Re:The Register?

[Anonymous Coward]

I really hate it when they change the story without marking it as "updated"

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

OS X

[cratermoon]

But when will they ever have native OS X support?

Re:OS X

[the_2nd_coming]

the OS X support is coming now, but they need help.

Re:OS X

[pbailey]

They are looking for people to help on the project that is going to create the OS X native support. Head on over there if you want to help out. Should be an interesting project.

Re:OS X

[WIAKywbfatw]

But when will they ever have native OS X support?

When the enthalpy of Satan's domain is reduced to the point where dihydrogen oxide becomes solid, perhaps?

Seriously, I don't know. But do you really think that asking a subset of Slashdot is going to be any more informative than the officially maintained FAQs?

Re:OS X

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Has any software project (open source or commercial) ever decided to drop Mac support simply because they were so fucking sick of hearing OS X users whine about the look of the app clashing with their beautiful desktop?

It is true that Mac users often seem ungrateful in open source circles. I have heard them complain about lack of support for freeware open source programs many times, and it seems like beggars should not be so choosy. On the other hand, Open Office really is pretty awful on OS X. It does not integrate well with other programs, and does not support the majority of the features that make using OS X so much nicer than other systems. I do think OS X support should be a priority for the Open Office team since it is important to their cross-platform message for environments with a variety of systems deployed. It makes them a non-starter for any place with a few macs, that want to be consistent, and puts them at a disadvantage in comparisons with MS Office (Which runs as well on OS X as it does on Windows.) Since I can't really help out right now though, I can just make polite requests for improvements and hope for the best.

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

I would love to see OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X, but it probably isn't a small deal. In a project that big, I'm sure there's tons of code that needs to be changed. As someone that has only programed in PHP, Perl, Python and ANSI C, I don't completely understand what needs to be done, but I realise that it isn't a simple matter.

As for now, there is AbiWord for Mac OS X and there is also MSOffice. While MSOffice is obviously not free software, it does run on Mac and so lack of an office suite without OOo isn't as big as it is on a platform like Linux. I think that a lot of the problem is that there isn't the same interest for OOo on OS X as there is on other platforms. We have MSOffice and Mac users aren't as against paying for software as the Linux community. Something like Firefox/Mozilla was ported because, before Safari, there was no good browser on the Mac. There was a huge gap to be filled. Plus, it isn't as daunting a task to port a 10MB application as it is to port a 100MB one. My thoughts are getting a bit disorganized, but I'm sure you get the gist.

Personally, I love AbiWord and was thrilled when it got ported. I don't do anyting major in terms of wordprocessing and AbiWord is so small and fast. I would love OOo to be ported as well - the more options the better - but I have a free word processor I can use for now.

Re:OS X

[RatBastard]

Open Office really is pretty awful on OS X

That is an understatement if I ever heard one. OOo on OS X is terrible! It makes my eyes bleed just to look at, to hell with the lack of ineractivity with other programs. I gave OOo a three-month trial on my Mac (after using it almost exclusively on my Windows systems for almost a year) and gave up in disgust and frustration. I moved to a OS X native word processor that supports RTF files and never looked back. I will not ever use OOo on OS X again until a native version comes out.

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

"When the enthalpy of Satan's domain is reduced to the point where dihydrogen oxide becomes solid"

I hope you don't mind if I borrow this...

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Why should a free software project bother themselves with supporting a non-free OS? And just how are increased sales of Apple's OS and hardware going to benefit Sun, the company sponsoring development of OpenOffice?

Re:OS X

[YellowElf]

For the same reasons they should bother themselves with supporting a non-free OS (Windows), and the same ways increased sales of Microsoft's OS is going to benefit them. Rather orthogonal concerns, I'd say.

--dv

Re:OS X

[Twirlip of the Mists]

I tried it once, long ago. I used it for about ten minutes before learning that it didn't support such revolutionary and leading-edge Mac technologies as cut-and-paste.

Please tell me that they've at least fixed that little omission?

Re:OS X

[IamTheRealMike]

I would love to see OpenOffice.org on Mac OS X, but it probably isn't a small deal. In a project that big, I'm sure there's tons of code that needs to be changed. As someone that has only programed in PHP, Perl, Python and ANSI C, I don't completely understand what needs to be done, but I realise that it isn't a simple matter.

• Rewrite the drawing/windowing layer to use Quartz instead of X
• Either use a native theming engine (but this requires a ton of tweaking, Firefox is the only app I've see that pulls this trick off reliably) or go the AbiWord route and rewrite the whole GUI to use native MacOS widgets (means rewriting almost all the GUI code in OpenOffice)
• Make sure the build system can spit out MacOS binaries
• Make sure it integrates with the host system with things like clipboard support etc
• Redraw all the artwork so it fits the Aqua "blue water" style
• Optimize for the systems graphics/kernel/linker characteristics

and many many more things. All of those tasks are huge. The first wasn't an issue for Linux but the rest were, and the work has been done primarily by Red Hat and Novell working together, as well as volunteers from the Linux community.

It probably helps that on Linux, people just got down to work and started fixing things, with the result that OO now tracks native themes in both GNOME and KDE, has a complete native Industrial icon theme (by the same Ximian artists that did the original GTK+/GNOME artwork), integrates with the native file pickers, gnome-vfs, and starts quickly (prelink and the GCC symbol visibility work was motivated largely by OO).

In contrast, whenever OO is mentioned on Slashdot all I see are comments bitching at the developer team and stupid (wrong) statistics being thrown around in an attempt to convince Sun to do the work even though they have no interest or need for it. Because, you know, Mac users are special so they shouldn't need to do the work themselves. The NeoOffice guys are the only ones I know of that are actually getting serious stuff done, and they seem to be years away from getting something that works well.

Re:OS X

[WIAKywbfatw]

Someone on Slashdot who asks politely before taking someone else's intellectual property? What's the world coming to?

Sure, go ahead and borrow it, but only for non-profit use.

Re:OS X

[Vengie]

Do you mean DHMO? That shit is *NASTY*.....

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

It is true that Mac users often seem ungrateful in open source circles. I have heard them complain about lack of support for freeware open source programs many times, and it seems like beggars should not be so choosy

Also RMS has said that people should not support the MAC because of their attitude of lawsuits over "look and feel".

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.eyejabber.com/modules/coppermine/albums /funny/normal_cupof.jpg

Re:OS X

[obdurate]

NeoOffice/J uses Java to meld OOO with OS X, without using X11. They've even managed to pull off native OS X-like menus in the latest builds. NeoOffice also uses all installed fonts. It works well for me, and the price (free!) can't be beat with a stick. Your mileage may vary.

From the site (neooffice.org): "NeoOffice/J uses a combination of Carbon and Java to make a truly native open source office suite. It has all of the features of OpenOffice.org 1.1 X11 and more! NeoOffice/J features Aqua menus in our alpha release, with more native controls still to come."

Re:OS X

[antiMStroll]

Or 64-bit binaries?

Re:OS X

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

whenever OO is mentioned on Slashdot all I see are comments bitching at the developer team and stupid (wrong) statistics being thrown around in an attempt to convince Sun to do the work even though they have no interest or need for it. Because, you know, Mac users are special so they shouldn't need to do the work themselves.

Sun has done most of the work on Open Office to date. They have a vested interest in making it work on Windows and Linux because they need a windows version for migrations and cross-platform deployments and they need Linux because they are trying to sell it. They have ignored OSX, because they don't think they need it (and they may be right). It would be great if Apple threw some people at this and came out with their own version, but it is not too likely. As for the rest of us, the open source community, well a lot of people here would like to see it because they would like to use the same word processor all the time. Many of us run both Linux and OS X. When you say Mac users are special and have no need to do the work themselves, you are a bit off. Most of them are happy to use MS Office, and won't change because it would be a huge amount of work to port OpenOffice properly. Those that would like to do the port are stymied by too few developers that know both UNIX/X11 and OS X interface design. Also they are hindered by Sun's coding practices that fail to account for portability. Sun makes it very hard because they are not interested in the advantages of portable code, they just want it to work in X11 and windows. This is short-sighted, but a fact nonetheless. And just so you know, there are people working on it, and working hard. But without more help from developers and unless Sun starts to follow better coding practices, the work will be very slow. And MS will benefit from it. If you think the Mac market is insignificant, well that is 5% of the market you have just lost, who would be very likely to support an alternate/open format. It is more than all the Linux desktops combined. It is 5% more market MS can use to keep OpenOffice from gaining ground.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. If MS provides the only functional word processor, Mac users will use it. Open Office will have less leverage. Sun will not write it, but they also make it hard for anyone else to do so and that is a problem.

Re:OS X

[root_42]

or go the AbiWord route and rewrite the whole GUI to use native MacOS widgets (means rewriting almost all the GUI code in OpenOffice)

I wonder how SuSE managed to get OpenOffice to display with the Qt-theme that the user specified. It is very nice, since it lets one to choose an arbitrary theme for Qt, and especially let it look exactly like KDE. Maybe one could use this to get the Aqua Look and Feel on Mac OS, since Qt has got a native Aqua mode on the Mac, as far as I know.

Re:OS X

[NardofDoom]

The only way we'll get a Mac OS X native, MS office compatible office application is if Apple takes KOffice and makes it an Aqua app. Like they did with Konqueror.

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Woohoo, slashdot's Resident Bush Propagandist is also a Mac freak! Will wonders ever cease!

Re:OS X

[fyngyrz]

MS Office (Which runs as well on OS X as it does on Windows.)

I'm sorry to hear that. I was staring at a BSOD that came from Word on one of the work machines about ten minutes ago.

Hmm. OS X is a *nix derivation, right? So does OS X at least survive the numerous MS Office crashes, or does it just turn nipples north, the way my Windows machines do? In a related question, again since the OS is (hopefully) better built, when MS Office quits without cleaning up its memory allocations behind it, does OS X clean up for it?

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Hah! The same site also came to my mind when I read that post.

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

Wouldn't life have been simpler if OOO used XUL from Mozilla.Org? Just wish that there were more easy non-Java cross-platform options.

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

When Apple decides to get off their ass and jump in and help, maybe...

Seriously, Mac users who want OOO should go bug Apple, not the community. Apple should be the one to invest in a one of their developer to help since I'm pretty sure they would have a deeper knowledge and secrets of OS X and Aqua to get something running quickly. Maybe a petition with a nice long list of names will give them a wake up call.

Re:OS X

[J. Random Luser]

Aaaarrggghh. I've just been thru the pain of compiling yet another set of gtk libs and widgets for a project that refused to use any of the 3 sets already installed on this OS-X box. It's as bad as the old days of DOS when every app had its own interface...

At least that's where Bill Gates & Steve Jobs are light years ahead of the open sauce crowd. The interface is built into the OS, and if your app can't hook in, then you're only a script kiddie.

Well, I do use OOo, and I have only 2 minor quibbles, clipboard portability, and my archive of Word5 files.

Re:OS X

[Fred_A]

Starting with 2.0 *should* now compile cleanly on 64 bit systems...

I've been waiting too (amd64).

Re:OS X

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I'm sorry to hear that. I was staring at a BSOD that came from Word on one of the work machines about ten minutes ago.

It is certainly not ideal and has lots of quirks and bugs that need to be worked around. It has never crashed my OS X box, but I do not use it very often, usually just to test for compatibility. In fact, the only program that has crashed my OS X box was "Giants: Citizen Kabuto" which is a rather fun video game. Later releases were still buggy, but did not result in a kernel panic. As far as MS Office is concerned, it is better (slightly) than the windows version, but still cannot handle large documents, and still has many of the same bugs. You can rely upon OS X for stability. I have had 4 crashes in as many years, two of which were my fault for hacking up some necessary system resources of the OS.

Re:OS X

[JCholewa]

> At least that's where Bill Gates & Steve Jobs are light years ahead of the open sauce crowd. The
> interface is built into the OS, and if your app can't hook in, then you're only a script kiddie.

I'm not sure that I follow you. My web browser is Opera. It uses Qt. My mail client is Mozilla, which is XUL-based. I have a few cmd.exe windows open, which don't even try to emulate any widget set (in XP, the titlebar is even non-standard, which is something that even the most trivial of X11 window managers get right!). MS Office uses a different widget set than the OS itself, even though it's made by the same company. My editor, EditPad (really awesome), also appears to use different widgeting.

Where is this magic world where Win32 third-party apps are guaranteed to have the same interface as built-in apps? I get a slightly better degree of consistency with KDE than with Win2k, but the prevailing opinion is that Win2k should be solidly the same everywhere, and KDE should be confusing at every turn. Huh??

--
-JC

Re:OS X

[fyngyrz]

Then its fair to say that MS Office runs better on OS X than it does under windows -- because it does drop windows to its knees, and regularly. We use it pretty extensively, asian languages, very complex tables and documents, and man is it ever unstable.

We're testing OO now, having finally figured out how to get Korean and Chinese input into the thing, and so far we're having some success. I see that they have at last decided to put an Access-like tool into the suite, if it is capable, maybe we can finally dump MS Office. I can't adequately describe what a pleasure that would be for me. :)

Re:OS X

[Eric S Raymond]

which they lost! What was that like 20 years ago?

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard it runs much nicer under, Surprise! Linux

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

the point where dihydrogen oxide becomes solid

The "di" in "dihydrogen" is unnecessary, as hydrogen can only be in the +1 and -1 oxidation states, and since it comes first, it must be +, so it is +1. Oxygen is -2 in almost all of its compounds, so there needs to be two hydrogens to balance the compound anyway. Since this is unambiguous, no number (or di- or tri-, etc...) is necessary. And even if it was necessary, it would correctly be "hydrogen (I) oxide", not "dihydrogen oxide".

Re:OS X

[fyngyrz]

Linux is where we use OO. :)

If we can dump Access, we'll be able to dump windows entirely for everything but development.

We sell windows graphics software, so there's no 100% way out of using the platform until/unless Linux becomes a viable platform for commercial graphics effects and manipulation.

Re:OS X

[Anonymous Coward]

cool!

Native Widgets?

[user9918277462]

Does this contain the native widget work that Ximian (and others) have been working on?

This is key, IMO, to desktop integration and widespread adoption in at least the corporate desktop sector.

Re:Native Widgets?

[pjrc]

If you follow the link and read the list of new features or just to a search for "native" (yeah, RTFA... I must be new here):

Native System Theme Integration (Native Widget Rendering)

To enhance integration of OpenOffice.org with the underlying operating system, all user interface elements (such as buttons and scrollbars) will have the same look as those used in most other "native" applications for that platform. OpenOffice.org will react on-the-fly to changes of the desktop theme, so that when the user changes the desktop colors or theme, OpenOffice.org will adjust its own appearance to match.

Native system theme integration will be available for Gnome (version 2.4 or higher), Microsoft Windows (including XP and future versions), and KDE (version 3.2 and higher) desktop environments. On Windows XP the "Windows XP Style" must be chosen under Settings->Control Panel->Display->Appearance to achieve the correct look.

Theme integration will be the default for desktop environments that support it (listed above). Systems that do not support it (e.g., Windows 98/ME/2000, CDE) will see no visual change in OpenOffice.org. On supported systems OpenOffice.org will always adopt the theme of the system and cannot choose not to do so.

Re:Native Widgets?

[arkanes]

This is not native widget support. It's native THEME support, which is a different animal. It's too bad, there's been some talk about using native widgets (via wxWidgets, for example), but the OO people don't seem interested.

Re:Native Widgets?

[Wordsmith]

I'm a little surprised at the need to select "windows xp" style - is it that the program can't tell the difference between winxp and win2k (or others) on its own?

what does it look like under winxp when the option isn't selected?

Also - does anyone know how this will play with windowblinds, stylexp or other theming programs? If you have winxp style selected but another theme for the rest of windows, will this be the only app that appears to have the regular xp look?

Re:Native Widgets?

[alex_ware]

What we need is TOTAL intetgration. No more ugly themed apps. URG!!! And maybe done in XML. SHINY!!! A distro that had a XML UI and total integration would move me from XP. All appss would be XML ui based, and would be multiplatform.

Re:Native Widgets?

[davids-world.com]

i don't think what the poster meant with 'Desktop Integration'. Photoshop for example is nicely integrated. It supports all the standard keyboard shortcuts (Apple-H needs a config though), accepts drag&drop, for example from iPhoto. File selectors are standard, and the like. That's what I would expect of my office suite. Can't do it with X11. Also, can't do it with non-native widgets from a UI point of view. This is much more about users who can tell what icons are for, etc etc, feel 'at home' and the like -- it's less about what's "pretty", as some of the people seem to think that criticize Mac users demanding integration.

Re:Native Widgets?

[Elektroschock]

The kdefied OO looks better in my view and I think the icon set of oo.org looks bad.

For desktop integration Crystal icons are better as they both integrate in KDE and XP.

Re:Native Widgets?

[davids-world.com]

it should read: "I don't think you understood what..."

Re:Native Widgets?

[LnxAddct]

Fedora has had OOo with native widgets since Core 2, that was nearly a year ago. I don't see why people are acting like this is something new?
Regards,
Steve

Re:Native Widgets?

[n-baxley]

This may be true, but the fact that UI integration and being able to change the color of your buttons is key to corporate infiltration is a sad statement on the level of the work being done (or the users doing the work) in corporations today. Although if pretty pictures are all it takes to dethrown MS Office then this should be a piece of cake.

Re:Native Widgets?

[happyemoticon]

I find that people from generations who didn't grow up with computers and GUIs are remarkably sensitive to the purely visual aspects of a user interface, (e.g. the placement of the desktop). They become confused and disoriented when things look "all different". I take one look at Firefox and it is completely transparent to me. This might not be true with somebody not as technically adept.

There are also other things, such as antialiased fonts, font size and icon size, that make native widgets attractive. For example, before I started using 1.3-kde, everything was tiny, and if I tried to enlarge it icons fell off the edge of the save dialog. This annoys the shit out of me.

Re:Native Widgets?

[vigilology]

They should make it use the same file dialog windows as the desktop environment uses. HTF is an 'average' computer user supposed to know that the files on his floppy are in /mnt/floppy?

Re:Native Widgets?

[bvankuik]

Native widgets are important but if OOo can't flawlessly import and export MS Office files them all it has is nice looks.

Re:Native Widgets?

[Zorilla]

Well, it makes sense after a while. It's better than what window managers are doing to make things "easier to use". I actually saw icons on my Gnome desktop that didn't have a regular name, but were called something like d786f9786sdf896sd897f6sd897f6s90d86f897as6f-398472 9034.lnk with the real name buried somewhere deep in metadata.

KDE isn't innocent to this either. The menu systems on both KDE and Gnome are so obtuse, I'll never begin to understand it. (Which seems to be pretty important, considering how often it breaks)

Back on topic, I don't think that /mnt/floppy (or /media/floppy in many distros - more intuitive) is anymore confusing than A:\ was before casual computers became familiar with DOS.

Re:Native Widgets?

[Joey7F]

I agree /drives/floppy would be better...
or maybe even /floppy

--Joey

Re:Native Widgets?

[Scudsucker]

Apple-H

*cough* Command-H *cough*

Silly Apple II users....

is it just me

[xyeeyx]

Or does that crossed out '1.1' and scribbled in '2.0' look REALLY cheap?

Re:is it just me

[elid]

Maybe one of those Gimp splash screen contests would help!

Re:is it just me

[Richard_at_work]

It looks worse than cheap, it looks unprofessional.

Re:is it just me

[dg41]

I think that's the point. =)

Re:is it just me

[robbyjo]

No, look at the page title, it's "marketing:". I think that makes the whole thing cheap. ;)

Re:is it just me

[EvanED]

I have a suspicion it will be changed by the time the final release is out. Right now it's just someone's idea of a joke.

Re:is it just me

[sulli]

It's a PRE-RELEASE build, of a FREE package. WTF do you want with it, nuts and a cherry?

Re:is it just me

[dustym]

No, I'm pretty sure the parent is correct. The oo people obviously are horrible UI programmers (being open source programmers and all) and this is really a genuine effort at an updated splash logo. In fact I'd go as far as to say that's probably what we'll being seeing in Feb or Mar. when it goes 2.0.

I commend the parent for catching this fault and letting the world know that all of those millions of lines of code are cheapened by a stupid mspaint splash logo in preview release. The open source world needs more UI experts like him to show us our faults and where we need to focus our attentions to "make it" in the real world.

Re:is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a joke, because it's a pre-release. Jesus.

Re:is it just me

[zanderredux]

If that's the actual bootsplash, someone should fill a bug report ASAP, requesting to have it changed.

You're right, xyeeyx. It looks very, very, very cheap.

Re:is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I quite like it.

Re:is it just me

[technothrasher]

The ugly splash screen is there on purpose. From the latest release notes:

this release will install as OpenOffice.org 1.9.65, it comes with ugly hacked splash screen to make clear, that this is not the final 2.0 build.

Re:is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. You look REALLY cheap too.

Re:is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

Mod parent up. The definitive answer to this thread.

Re:is it just me

[ianezz]

Or does that crossed out '1.1' and scribbled in '2.0' look REALLY cheap?

To me it looks INTENTIONALLY cheap, to make sure that even oog the caveman can understand it is a prerelease not meant for general use.

Re:is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

this release will install as OpenOffice.org 1.9.65, it comes with ugly hacked splash screen to make clear, that this is not the final 2.0 build.

Because putting "preview release" on it instead was too confusing?

Re:is it just me

[grunthos]

No, it's just you....

Re:is it just me

[Elektroschock]

No, they just did it to indicate that it is a alpha. In Germany many IT newsmagazines published betas of OO 1.0 as "OO 1.0", so that has to be avoided. Users shall not get diapappointed by prereleases.

Re:is it just me

[Bloater]

> The oo people obviously are horrible UI programmers (being open source programmers and all)

Actually they are mostly Sun Microsystems programmers and the UI is predominantly from StarOffice, a commercial program (so it really *is* no suprise that the whole suite has been totally crap for quite some time and is only now starting to improve).

Commercial software is almost all totally shitty, and I rate Open Source much higher - at least the stuff with a user base of programmers since they are willing to join in by making reasonably complete feature suggestions. Whilst non-programmers tend to sit back and say "feed me".

Oh wait, damn, you were taking the piss - bugger. Well I'm not wasting what I've written, so...

Re:is it just me

[eneville]

or "make install" ;)

Re:is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

No, but how about my nuts on your chin?

Re:is it just me

[zarr]

It looks worse than cheap, it looks unprofessional.

I'm not impressed by your professionalism. I make my living working on a product that you can't afford (and nor can your mom*). During the first months of development of each new version, it has all sorts of "unprofessional" splash screens. If it's not a release, nobody cares.

*) no really, she can't.

Re:is it just me

[Richard_at_work]

Youd be surprised what I can afford. And yes, this is a release, every opensource version is a release, by the very nature of opensource. It might not be a stable release, but its a release. Your "unprofessional" splash screens are for internal or limited release viewings, this one isnt.

Re:is it just me

[eoinmadden]

Its just you.

Murphys Law

[doublem]

30 minutes after upgrading to Open Office 1.1.3...

Guess I'll try and update Thunderbird so the next release hits the servers this afternoon.

Re:Murphys Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Just make sure you don't install Duke Nukem 3D, or the universe might collapse in on itself.

Re:Murphys Law

[doublem]

Damn. I was going to install that when I got home this evening.

If I install Doom 2, we should be safe.

Re:Murphys Law

[Anonymous Coward]

Or better Yet, install Duke Nukem 3D so Duke Nukem Forever will be released. ;)

Database crashes a lot for me on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Make sure you have java installed. Looks good, although the new database tool crashed a lot for me.

Re:Database crashes a lot for me on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if they can include the Java applet from Sun in the install package for those who don't already have Java on their systems. Not everyone will know where to get it.

Re:Database crashes a lot for me on Linux

[Xabraxas]

They probably can't. IANAL but even though this is a product predominately engineered by Sun employees, I assume the licensing issues that Linux distributions have encountered with java are most likely issues that the OOo team has also encountered and which prevents them from including java.

Re:Database crashes a lot for me on Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Good point. Then, as an alternative, perhaps the installer, before doing anything else, could check to see if Java is installed. If it isn't, it could display a message informing the user of this and suggesting they exit the installation and get Java first. Perhaps diaplay the http://www.java.com link in the dialog box. This way, they don't actually include the package, but they make the user aware it would be helpful to have it before they get too deep into the installation.

White House switching to OO?

[Anonymous Coward]

Has anyone else heard the rumor that the White House was going to be switching to Open Office? If true, this could be HUGE for OSS!

-Tim

Re:White House switching to OO?

[Anonymous Coward]

whitehouse.com maybe...

Re:Pretty Neat

[davesplace1]

Microsoft needs the help to keep their prices down :)

Outstanding work...

[danigiri]

But using MacOSX here. Seems MS Office is still a keeper for us.

Re:Outstanding work...

[sulli]

Indeed. I tried OpenOffice on X11 and man, was THAT a pain in the ass. Make an OS X version guys!

When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[Gothmolly]

This is great for people who buy a whitebox 2nd computer, but might actually care about not pirating MS Office. Or for people who get some OEM crippled Office, like Works, which comes with Word and not much else. But how best to evangelize? Perhaps an NYT ad would do the trick - let people know that there's a cheap alternative to Office, with builtin PDF support for instance.

Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[aichpvee]

Or maybe people who are sick of using windows and don't want to write a custom frontend to create and use simple databases? While I don't think anyone is really going to say that OSS is going to take down micros~1 this year or next, it's getting the features in place so that when the time comes it can happen that matters. And any addition that bring OpenOffice.org closer to being a full featured replacement for MS Office is a good.

Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[LiENUS]

This is great for people who buy a whitebox 2nd computer, but might actually care about not pirating MS Office

Just a note, ShopNBC sells computers with OpenOffice pre-installed.

Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[harlows_monkeys]

Perhaps an NYT ad would do the trick - let people know that there's a cheap alternative to Office, with builtin PDF support for instance

It's not really the same as the Firefox situation. Firefox is simply a better browser than IE, in almost all ways. Basically, the only reasonably acceptable reason for not using Firefox over IE is that you haven't heard of Firefox. Thus, the NYT ad makes sense.

OpenOffice, on the other hand, while getting very good, is still not as good as Microsoft Office in many ways. If you are on a platform that can run either, and you aren't picking based on philosophy (e.g., you simply hate Microsoft, or insist on open source software) or price, then MS Office is still the better choice.

So, any money that could be spent on an ad would be better spent on development and documentation, to try to close the gap with MS Office.

Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[Anonymous Coward]

I use both and I have to admit that OpenOffice.Org is not quite a slick as Firefox and it is very complex in comparision.
I haven't seen 2.0 yet but I hope they now have a slick way to download dictionaries and stuff.
I'd wait a while before taking out an ad.

Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[Vspiritas]

About the same time when the OO gui is relaunched in XUL in a firefox styled design. That could also bring an end to all the speed performance complaints, although probably not feasible because of Java.

Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[obdurate]

Your points are well taken, however you have not considered that Explorer is effectively free, like Firefox. So, Firefox has to be _much_ better simply to gain any consideration. The fact that OOO is free while MS Office comes at a premium price will eventually be worth shouting from the rooftops. Still, I suspect it's too soon for any one-off ad to have much effect.

Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[Xabraxas]

This is great for people who buy a whitebox 2nd computer, but might actually care about not pirating MS Office. Or for people who get some OEM crippled Office, like Works, which comes with Word and not much else.

Works doesn't come with Word, at least versions 6.0, 7.0, and 8.0 don't/didn't. Works comes with the Microsoft Works Word Processor, which usually does not support the latest .doc format.

Re:When will OO.o take out an NYT ad?

[balazsa]

Well in my opinion the number one argument is to use OOo or SO is by doing so you will be "locked in" to completely open, standardized file formats, that is hands down the best investment protection in the world.

Not much to the review

[archen]

Does Open Office finally install on windows correctly with a multi-user option? I know they were talking about it, but as of 2-3 months ago the developer build still didn't really seem to try during installation. For the average user I suppose it doesn't really matter, but where I work it's holding back deployment a bit.

Re:Not much to the review

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes!

Re:Not much to the review

[Anonymous Coward]

The multi user install has always worked in 1.1.x of OO. I have installed in several multiuser pc's at work

There is a command line switch documented here:
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/instruct ions.ht ml

Re:Not much to the review

[archen]

Well I don't really consider that to be a multiuser install when each user has to run a setup for it to work. As far as I know 1x always installs start menu options into the users menu, not all-users. Unless each user runs the setup, that means that all the file associations are probably also messed up.

Re:Not much to the review

[mopslik]

Well I don't really consider that to be a multiuser install when each user has to run a setup for it to work.

That's strange, because when I install MS Office 2000 on machines here, each user is greeted with a quick "Please wait for Microsoft Office setup" message upon first open. Granted it's only momentary, but it's there.

The only difference is that with MS, you activate the brief setup by clicking the Word/Excel/PP icon. With OO.o, you have to click soffice.exe.

Is this just me?

Re:Not much to the review

[archen]

That's strange, because when I install MS Office 2000 on machines here, each user is greeted with a quick "Please wait for Microsoft Office setup" message upon first open. Granted it's only momentary, but it's there.

Yes, and that only needs to happen once if I recall. Once MSOffice (we use 2000 as well) is installed, you just need to run it as administrator and it's good to go. Using a default domain profile with most of this set up means that there is no user intervention needed. Now I'd like to think that I could ensure that a machine is correctly set up, but the reality is that new users will be comming in to other locations and I will not have control over them actually correctly setting things up. Some will probably install it correctly, some will cancel, some will set the associations up wrong... I've seen it happen more than I'd like to think about.

Basically I just want OpenOffice to set up on a machine for all users at once. Without a complete setup on a per-machine basis, there's no way I can garantee a correct install - and that means headaches for everyone down the road.

wtf

[Anonymous Coward]

It's work in progress, maybe not recomended for production sites,

wtf

Hmmm

[rogabean]

In Soviet Russia only Mac users use MS Office?

Re:Hmmm

[RangerRick98]

In Korea, mixing /. memes is only for rogabean. :)

Re:Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had mod points I'd mod you up for that response to me! :)

quick question

[Janek Kozicki]

how about videos in impress presentations?

torrent

[etaluclac]

I know suprnova won't be hosting it, but does anybody have a torrent?

Re:torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you try Torrentbits.org?

Re:torrent

[LinuxHam]

I was just going to say.. after that entire discussion on legit p2p, here we are again with a 100MB download from 50 different mirrors, and no torrent. Even if I don't want it, I'm willing to kick it off remotely at the house while I'm at work just to help with the distribution. They may not *need* my help, but we need to get people used to thinking this way. We CAN reverse the slashdot effect!

Warning: Unstable build

[VAXGeek]

Don't use this build! I downloaded it, instantly all my programs were segfaulting. I got bus errors all over the place, my RAID arrays are failing, and my ethernet device will only work in half-duplex now. I advise everyone to wait until the final release, unless you want to have ECC errors with your RAM, like I do now.

Re:Warning: Unstable build

[Anonymous Coward]

that's ok , my usb mouse now works backwards, the Cd burner now burns DVD's and the installer overclocked my P-III 500 to a P4 3.6ghz and upgraded my ram from sdram to DDR2 and tripled it to 3 gigabytes.

Oh and it scratched all my CD's and put dirty socks on my table!

the horror!

Re:Warning: Unstable build

[Anonymous Coward]

you're not too bright, or just bad at making a joke.

Re:Warning: Unstable build

[upsidedown_duck]

I've heard that if you stick bad ECC RAM up your ass, the bile acids will clean off the faulty transistors. It sometimes takes four, perhaps five, cleaning attempts before it works. Also, don't come complaining to me if they get stuck!

Re:Warning: Unstable build

[Anonymous Coward]

"Don't use this build! I downloaded it, instantly all my programs were segfaulting."

Seagull at 0xFF402550?, invalid pointer...

Re:Warning: Unstable build

[Alien Being]

That reminds me of an old Dilbert.

Manager: I'm here to fluff up the marketing for that program you've written.

Engineer: It's not really working properly - we told you we needed 6 months
and you only gave us one month.

Manager: We'll take care of it with a bug fix release.

Engineer: Well, ok, but instead of backing up your hard disk, it erases the
disk. Also, if you have a modem it calls up your friends computers and erases
their disks. And if you have a sound card it swears at you.

Manager: We'll call it 'Quick Protect'.

Re:Warning: Unstable build

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't imagine anyone, especially someone purportedly technical (vaxgeek?), installing beta software on a production system and then complaining when it causes problems. Perhaps I'm just not very imaginative.

Incidentally, I installed it on my notebook (after backing up my sh!t first), and I've had no problems at all. In fact it's faster, cleaner and even more stable than OOo1.1.3. I don't even have to go in search of coffee, donuts, or other adventures after launching the damned thing as with the previous non-beta versions. And that's not even with QuickStart loaded.

For what it's worth, from my standpoint it looks very promising. But then again, I don't use OSX and I back up my data.

Better MS Office Support

[dteichman2]

So does this mean it stops looking like a corrupt file to Office 2003. I'd really like for it to stop doing that (even though it's Microsoft's fault).

Re:Better MS Office Support

[Simon Lyngshede]

What I would like to know is when does Microsoft Office get better OpenOffice support?

Re:Better MS Office Support

[KarmaMB84]

If a file created by another program in MS's proprietary format looks corrupt (incorrect) to MS's products, how is it their fault? Maybe OO.org should try to follow the format they're immitating properly?

Re:Better MS Office Support

[Planesdragon]

Hypothetically...

if the OOo-made document opens in Office 97, 2000, and 2002, but breaks in 2003, then it *IS* MS's deliberate attempt to break compatability.

Re:Better MS Office Support

[gardyloo]

What I would like to know is when does Microsoft Office get better Microsoft Office support?

Re:Better MS Office Support

[dteichman2]

You seem to have forgotten that if they stopped trying to use MS Office formats, it would drive away too many of the end-users. We like it when the end-users start using OO. It reduces the total amount of money they pay to Microsoft. It also limits the ability of Microsoft to do things like- change the format/.

Re:Better MS Office Support

[dteichman2]

Microsoft Office will get OO support when OO converts enough end-users that OO has more users than MS-Office. They will gain OO support at that point because OO will be more powerful and then it will become the "standard." In order for OO to become that powerful, they need to support MS-Office so that people will be able to switch easily.

Re:Better MS Office Support

[MarkLewis]

First of all, I'm sure the OOo developers would LOVE to follow the Word format correctly. That is, if it were a standard format, which it isn't, or if it were documented at all, which it isn't.

Secondly, let's assume just for the sake of argument that you had full access to all required documentation, had direct access to the internal MS code that reads/writes the files, and access to the developers who designed the file spec in the first place. Given that, you should be able to create a pretty good import/export tool, no?

So Microsoft shouldn't have any problems with their own format, right? After all, it can't be that tricky, and they DO have all of the advantages listed above.

Ah, but have you ever tried to import older Word documents into the most recent version of Word? Or even worse, to try to save a newer Word file in an older file format? It doesn't usually crash, but the translation makes OOo's Word export look pretty good.

Now, I realize that I haven't directly answered your question. All that the above is trying to do is convey the underlying complexity of the problem, and the fact that MS itself can't even get it right.

To address the specific issue of broken compatability: Given that MS makes a great deal (most?) of its money from lock-in to its proprietary formats, I would say that they have a vested interest in protecting their monopoly, no?

Of course it isn't proveable (think anti-trust ramifications here), but would it not be convenient, given this vast complexity of code, if some change just so happened to break compatability with a competitor?

Especially when you realize that when MS-Word imports older documents (even from previous versions of MS-Word), they get run through an intermediate converter that changes them to RTF, and then the RTF is imported.

You wouldn't expect the Word 97 -> RTF converter to need to change with each new release of Office, would you?

No, of course not. Not unless they were fixing a bug. And for a company where interoperability itself is a bug ...

Re:Better MS Office Support

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft: "In the next version.. honest!"

(note this applies regardless of the version).

Re:Better MS Office Support

[SoSueMe]

No, of course not. Not unless they were fixing a bug. And for a company where interoperability itself is a bug ...

I don't believe that interoperability is actually a bug. The fact that "some features may not be compatible with the version you are using" is more marketing than interoperability.
When enough of the "early adopters" hits a critical mass, the majority of customers will "upgrade".
This supplies the vendor with a somewhat predictable revenue projection.
I've been support for "Office" for most of a decade and have seen the scenario repeated enough to realize that it is not because of bugs but bucks.

An Access-like program?

[h_jurvanen]

an Access-like program

I remember when those were called "databases."

Re:An Access-like program?

[skiman1979]

Are you trying to say MS Access is a database application?

Re:An Access-like program?

[EvanED]

"Access-like" is more specific. If they had just said "database" it could have been a wider range of applications. "Access-like" specifies that it's used like access.

MySQL is a database, yet I hardly think you'd call it "access-like".

Re:An Access-like program?

[Anonymous Coward]

boy were we silly back then to call Access a database....

Re:An Access-like program?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop being a shitface. You know what's being said. Most database servers don't come with a GUI for creating forms with. A user-friendly database is what's being discussed as you clearly know.

Re:An Access-like program?

[VP]

The most valuable feature of Access is not the database (the database itself is rather pathetic). What Access provides is a simple, user-friendly (dumbed down?) front end. OO.o could be providing such a front end, where the database can be MySQL, PostgreSQL, Firebird, SAP DB, or an ODBC data source on Windows...

Re:An Access-like program?

[mydigitalself]

Access is not a database, it's a visual designer for light-weight database applications.

Re:An Access-like program?

[LurkerXXX]

Access isn't always used as a database. In many places, it just just a front-end GUI which talks to MS SQL, Oracle, or some other Database server. Access makes interfaces to the database fairly quick to put togeather. Usually much faster than writing a web/java based one.

We never use the actual Access database here. We just use it as a front-end. I'm glad to see an 'access-like' program in OpenOffice. We could use a nice free front-end to talk with a 'real' database server. Not just some lightweight database that comes as a part of an office suite.

Re:An Access-like program?

[MadFarmAnimalz]

I disagree with you pretty strongly.

I have worked in fairly high level management for some years now. Where I work, I am the only relatively tech-savvy person, and that includes our IT department (AS/400 without DB2. go figure).

As such, it falls to me to do any form of knowledge generation and decision support based on figures. So, I have been using access for several years now. While I truly hate it, I must admit that it strikes a pretty sweet spot in terms of features.

It is a database. A very poor one, I know. My inventory table reached three million records and access keeled over. I'm in process of migrating to a postrgresql backend.

It does not require knowledge of SQL. This is the killer feature, except no one seems to get it. The query builder is simply superb. I am an ardent FOSS advocate and I helped found the first Egyptian LUG. If I say it is superb know that I do not say so idly.

Lastly, it has been remarked in another comment in reply to yours that it is more than a database since it contains a form designer. I at least do not consider that atrocity in any way usable. Killer feature number two: seamless interoperability with Excel. Ad hoc reporting nirvana.

As such, I'm looking forwards to testing the 2.0 release. A proper access replacement will do wonders.

Now if only they'd fix the autofiltering functionality in the spreadsheet to only show filtering options based on existing filters like Excel... Then my linux migration would be complete.

Re:An Access-like program?

[digime]

I remember when those were called "databases."

I don't. Access is not a database at all. It can look at them and manipulate them, but it isn't one. Access is a database like Firefox is the internet.

Re:An Access-like program?

[iabervon]

Actually, Access is two things, neither of which is the same as, for example, MySQL. The first is a user-friendly front end to a database. The second is a program to manipulate data files, which, unlike in most SQL databases, are self-contained and can be transferred to other people without any particular hassle. OOo 2.0 actually includes one of each (making them one program is a dumb idea): the GUI is the program they're talking about in the article, and the back-end is hsqldb, which is a respectable independant project.

The point of the second thing is to be like how people often use spreadsheets; you can have a lot of similar ones in different files, rather than a single big one as part of your infrastructure. The advantage over a spreadsheet is that you can actually keep it consistant and organized.

Re:An Access-like program?

[skymester]

I remember when those were called "databases."

that was wrong even then, its called "database management system (DBMS)"

Re:An Access-like program?

[passthecrackpipe]

"My inventory table reached three million records and access keeled over"

You should be sacked for that alone. Either you are talking about IT inventory, in which case you should have used a proper tool for the job (and thus you deserve to get sacked), or you are talking about your companies inventory, in which case it should be part of either your erp or your accounting program, and thus you should be sacked.

Save us from "tech-savvy" higher management, please!

Re:An Access-like program?

[learn fast]

Maybe they just called it "Access-like" because it was still unreliable and buggy.

Re:An Access-like program?

[mousse-man]

Hmmm...maybe just have a really usable application builder in OOo would be a boon, but DBs...no.

If you need some sort of embedded DBs, take HSQL or DB4, else give that app access to an ODBC-connected DB so we can build our stuff on real RDBMS.

Re:An Access-like program?

[kpharmer]

> It does not require knowledge of SQL. This is the killer feature, except no one seems to get it. The
> query builder is simply superb. I am an ardent FOSS advocate and I helped found the first Egyptian
> LUG. If I say it is superb know that I do not say so idly.

Man, I don't know how many times I've seen queries constructed by people using that interface - that provided incorrect results. Note to user: when the tool automatically includes 'distinct' in your queries you know it's a piece of shit. You might have better luck with Crystal or Brio, PHP with Chart Director, etc, etc.

> Killer feature number two: seamless interoperability with Excel. Ad hoc reporting nirvana.

Hmmm, interoperability with Excel is a good thing. Ad hoc reporting nirvana, however it is not.

Check out (R)OLAP tools if you want to see actual reporting nirvana...

Re:An Access-like program?

[Zachary Kessin]

a few jobs back Access kept me quite busy. People at our company would write stuff in Access and when they would out grow what it could do they would get us to make it into a web application.

Re:An Access-like program?

[Just Some Guy]

MySQL is a database, yet I hardly think you'd call it "access-like".

True. The people who use Access know that they're newbies using entry-level tools.

Dang. Couldn't resist. Oh, and Abiword and Kword are better than OpenOffice, KDE rocks, and Mozilla is better than Firefox. Did I forget anything?

Re:An Access-like program?

[Anonymous Coward]

> Access is not a database at all. It can look at them and manipulate them, but it isn't one

Technically, Jet is the database. But no one ever calls it that, they call them Access dabases. Here's the coordinates to the next meeting of the International League of Pedants.

Re:An Access-like program?

[digime]

No, technically Jet is not the database. That's a database driver. Wrong again. How about coordinates to the nearest bookstore so I can buy you "Computers for Dummies"?

Re:An Access-like program?

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

Yep, I for one always call pre-alpha software "Access-like"!

Re:An Access-like program?

[MadFarmAnimalz]

Both your points are correct.

i have had my share of trouble with erroneous reports and you end up spending way too much time arm-twisting it into prividing the right figures.

Also, ad hoc reporting is not a good thing; however, I present reports I am asked for. Management can't figure out a set of reports to standardise on. Pity me.

Fortunately, I am moving to a new FOSS startup within a month. I'll have a look at (R)OLAP tools as you suggested. Thanks for the tip, kpharmer.

Re:An Access-like program?

[MadFarmAnimalz]

You're jumping to conclusions.

The inventory (finished goods inventory, not It inventory) is maintained on the AS/400 (running an ERP), except our IT persons are not capable of producing proper reports. I am still not sure if this is a hardware or staffing problem. My database is a mirror of this data.

I do not regard myself as a linux guru. I do, however, take pride in being the only assistant marketing director I know of who also admins the company's exim server.

The fact is, I am upper management where I work, and I am the only person who knows Linux well enough to keep a debian mail server up for 245 days and counting (I'm about to ruin that uptime though; compiling LFS on the poor machine).

I understand you are most likely frustrated by management types (I've seen some pretty bad ones myself), passthecrackpipe, but I'd like to suggest in as friendly a manner as possible that you would do well to give more benefit of doubt to people.

(note to mods: offtopic, I know. Apologies.)

Re:An Access-like program?

[MightyMartian]

I only use it as a front end to our MySQL server. The query writer is alright as well, though I've found of late that some of my queries are getting sufficiently complex and odd that I actually have to analyze the sql log. I think it's time to look at some of the stuff out there specifically for MySQL.

Re:An Access-like program?

[Exatron]

... And Microsoft calls it production software.

Re:An Access-like program?

[Daengbo]

Well, apparently 2.0 includes HSQL, so that should satisfy you.

Re:An Access-like program?

[julesh]

Actually, Access is two things, neither of which is the same as, for example, MySQL. The first is a user-friendly front end to a database. The second is a program to manipulate data files, which, unlike in most SQL databases, are self-contained and can be transferred to other people without any particular hassle.

Actually, most people seem not to have noticed that Access is only the first of these. The second is called "Jet", which is a component of Windows, not MS Office. Look in your windows\system32 directory. Even if you've never installed Access, you should have "msjet40.dll", which is the database storage engine used by Access.

Re:An Access-like program?

[julesh]

Technically, Jet is the database. But no one ever calls it that, they call them Access dabases. Here's the coordinates to the next meeting of the International League of Pedants.

There's a very important reason for realising that they're two separate components. That is that Jet is _not_ packaged as part of Access, it's installed along with Windows. This means that any Windows software can use an "Access" database (if you insist on calling them that), whether or not you actually have Access installed.

That's not what I'd call "pedantic".

Re:An Access-like program?

[WuphonsReach]

Yep, I tend to find that the MS bashers have never spent time working with MSAccess long enough to understand its strengths and weaknesses. Instead, they have a knee jerk reaction and dismiss it out of hand.

Key strengths:

1) MSAccess files are self-contained. Which means that all of the queries, tables, forms, reports and other doodads are all in a single file which is easy for the user to keep track of.

2) Backups are easy for the user. They just drag a copy to another folder or another drive or removable media. Just like every other file that they're used to working with like documents or spreadsheets.

We keep our production database running on a real SQL server product. But all of the end-job analysis often gets done in Excel or Access (each job is usually quite different then the previous jobs, very little shareable).

I'll take a look at OO v2 when it comes out. The question is whether they've managed to package it all into an easy to use format like MSAccess.

In XP theme ?...

[Gopal.V]

Couldn't they pick a less Window'ish theme for this thing ?. After all I don't use XP or any MSFT Os at home... How's performance on linux-x86 (redraw stuff) and what will it show if I'm running fluxbox (instead of gnome/kde interfaces).

And YTF is "StarOffice 8" == "OpenOffice 2.0" .. Managers do have this version madness you know (guess which sounds better ;)

The Writer screenshot looks better than MS word but how about editing. I've had problems with fonts in RTF output (which is what I use by choice).

That's it I'm switching this weekend !! :)

Re:In XP theme ?...

[EvanED]

It looks like they took the screenshots in Windows, so maybe in Linux they will look different.

Frankly, at least if they change it for Linux, I think a more Windowsish theme will help it's acceptance; it's closer to what people know and use now.

Re:In XP theme ?...

[Anonymous Coward]

"its" is used for possession.

Re:In XP theme ?...

[pjrc]

Yes

Re:In XP theme ?...

[aj50]

From the OOo site:

Native System Theme Integration (Native Widget Rendering)

To enhance integration of OpenOffice.org with the underlying operating system, all user interface elements (such as buttons and scrollbars) will have the same look as those used in most other "native" applications for that platform. OpenOffice.org will react on-the-fly to changes of the desktop theme, so that when the user changes the desktop colors or theme, OpenOffice.org will adjust its own appearance to match.

It also states that this is available in Gnome 2.4 and above, KDE 3.2 and above and WinXP so it would appear to be in. On other platforms, it should just look the same as before.

info from this page

Native MacOS X support?

[tji]

I don't see any MacOS X packages on their site, or any mention of improvements in that area.

Anyone have news on this? Or is Open Office effectively dead on the Mac?

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[SuperBanana]

I don't see any MacOS X packages on their site, or any mention of improvements in that area. Anyone have news on this?

Also curious....because the OpenOffice team said OS X support was "never going to happen" in 1.x, not worth their time, wasted effort since 2.0 is around the corner, blah blah..."wait until 2.0".

MacOS X has been the most prevalent Unix desktop for a while now, and Apple's developer documentation is first class. Can we please get support for OS X? Pretty please?

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[HeghmoH]

OS X is the only mainstream OS where cruddy, flat, Win95-style UI won't fly at all. Having seen OO on Windows and on various Unixen, it looks like they're doing all of the UI elements themselves, and I'd bet this is a huge sticking point for a native OS X version.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[Wordsmith]

FRom what I've seen poking around the site, native Aqua/OSX support didn't quite pan out for 2.0 the way it was supposed to. It looks like it still requires an X server, and still uses its own toolkit instead of aqua or a smart approximation.

Neooffice/J was the proof of concept to bring OO 1.x to the Aqua system. It looks like they made some progress - using Aqua widgets and controls in some places, but only a few, and doing away with the need for an X server. But it doesn't look like they've gotten much farther than that, or readied 2.0 to be aqua-native. That's a shame.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[Em Adespoton]

Here's your answer: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[soullessbastard]

Disclaimer: I am one of the members of the Mac OS X OOo team and a founder of the NeoOffice project

OpenOffice.org X11 on the mac is effectively dead because it is horrendously understaffed. There are less then 5 people actively working on it. Not good for an 8 million line + application.

While Apple's developer documentation may be first class, OpenOffice.org X11 is not built using Apple-specific technologies. It is built from the command line and is using X11 with its own internal widget toolkit. Oh yeah, and takes 9 hours to compile on a dual G5 2GHz. That hurdle is a bit too high for just someone to stroll on in and casually check out the project.

OpenOffice.org is a large and thorny Unix application. There are very few Mac OS X programmers that actually have X11 and Unix skills and the patience to deal with something of its size. Most developers come to the project and are like "can I build it in XCode" or "can I use InterfaceBuilder", find out they can't and then leave. The lack of a sufficiently large pool of skilled volunteer programming experts effectively killed OOo on the Mac from the start.

The native work has effectively moved to the NeoOffice/J project, which is 95% code identical to OpenOffice.org and uses Carbon and Java instead of X11. It still doesn't use Apple development tools directly, but it does have two of the original developers of OOo Mac OS X working on it continuously.

ed

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[jeif1k]

OS X is the only mainstream OS where cruddy, flat, Win95-style UI won't fly at all.

First of all, what you call "Win95-style" came from UNIX toolkits; and those GUIs were distinguished by using 3D elements. For a decade, Apple's toolkits were completely flat-chested black-and-white until Apple came around to copying to Motif look as well. Then, eventually, Apple went overboard in their quest for a distinctive look and gave us gumdrops; lots of people don't like that look.

Having seen OO on Windows and on various Unixen, it looks like they're doing all of the UI elements themselves, and I'd bet this is a huge sticking point for a native OS X version.

That isn't a problem with OOo: OOo can use Gnome and KDE's style engines and have an appearance that is indistinguishable from other OS X applications.

The "huge sticking point" is that OOo developers probably don't see much point in porting to Apple's native APIs when doing so takes a lot of work and actually gives them less functionality than they already have.

Of course, OOo under X11 on Macintosh sucks, but that's because X11 on Macintosh is poorly integrated. Apple should improve X11 integration on OS X, rather than trying to force everybody to write "native" Cocoa applications.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[Suffering Bastard]

I'm amazed at all the complaints about the lack of an OS X version of OpenOffice, when NeoOffice has been in development for a while:
http://www.neooffice.org/

I've been using it for about a month and even though it's still in alpha, it's terrific. Runs a bit slow and occasionally crashes on quit (that always amuses me), but I've had no compatibility issues so far. Development on the project is strong, as evidenced by the frequency of quality patches made available.

I would not be at all surprised to see NeoOffice become the de facto OS X version of OO. Check it out, and contribute if you can!

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[HeghmoH]

OS X is the only mainstream OS where cruddy, flat, Win95-style UI won't fly at all.

First of all, what you call "Win95-style" came from UNIX toolkits; and those GUIs were distinguished by using 3D elements. For a decade, Apple's toolkits were completely flat-chested black-and-white until Apple came around to copying to Motif look as well. Then, eventually, Apple went overboard in their quest for a distinctive look and gave us gumdrops; lots of people don't like that look.

What's your point? I'm aware of all of this, but it is completely irrelevant with the question at hand: OO looks extremely ugly and out of place on OS X, whereas it fits in with typical Linux and Windows GUIs.

Of course, OOo under X11 on Macintosh sucks, but that's because X11 on Macintosh is poorly integrated. Apple should improve X11 integration on OS X, rather than trying to force everybody to write "native" Cocoa applications.

How could this be done? I don't see how you could improve X11 integration to make the apps look native. X11 is a very small protocol that doesn't cover widgets or anything else like that. Apple couldn't magically make OO use native Aqua widgets, standard file dialogs, etc.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[jeif1k]

How could this be done? I don't see how you could improve X11 integration to make the apps look native. X11 is a very small protocol that doesn't cover widgets or anything else like that. Apple couldn't magically make OO use native Aqua widgets, standard file dialogs, etc.

OOo doesn't have to use native Aqua widgets in order to look and feel like a native Macintosh application--many other Macintosh apps don't use native widgets either and their users don't even notice. And Carbon and Cocoa applications differ significantly in their look and feel as well.

OOo (as well as standard Gnome and KDE apps) already has most of the facilities built in to look and behave like native Macintosh apps, with little extra work. What Apple would need to provide is (1) X11 starting up automatically when needed on out-of-the-box OS X installs, with no user intervention, and (2) a small X11 extension for OS X-specific desktop integration. The features in (2) could then be used by Gnome and KDE ports to Macintosh to provide better desktop integration.

Apple would get a lot of nice software for very little effort if they improved X11 integration into the Aqua desktop. The reason they don't is probably politics and branding: having Macintosh run lots of open source apps probably just isn't in their interest.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[jeif1k]

Sorry, that should have been:

"having Macintosh run lots of open source apps based only on open source APIs probably just isn't in their interest."

Of course, Apple loves it when you develop open source apps to their proprietary APIs.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[mrscorpio]

OpenOffice.org X11 on the mac is effectively dead because it is horrendously understaffed. There are less then 5 people actively working on it. Not good for an 8 million line + application.

Come on, EA Games works with worse code-to-human ratios than that, and I don't hear THEM complaining!

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[DunbarTheInept]

I never understood this complaint. It might be kinda nice to get a little bit more similar look between apps, but it's not the end of the world (now, not having a similar cut & paste model, that is a big problem, and is one of the failings of X - there never should have been four kinds of clipboard, but I digress). After all, there are oodles of programs out there with COMPLETELY different interfaces totally unique to each program and they sell rather well. They're called games. Real time strategies, first person shooters, each one sold has its own unique look and feel to its interface, and people *like* this.

Why is it so different for non-game applications? I've got up on my X screen right now, mozilla, kterm, xterm, xlock, evolution, gimp, and and grip. That's something like three different GUI toolkits represented there. Why do people on Mac have such a problem with this?

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[DunbarTheInept]

xlock,

that was supposed to be xclock. xlock doesn't have much of an interface at all, obviously.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey ed, I'm interested in helping out. I can't find your contact details here, so please email me at seede at linuxmail dot org. Cheers

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[HeghmoH]

Actually, old-school Mac games used to use the standard interface elements, and I appreciated that. I am not a fan of how every game does its own interface; it tends to produce a result that's ugly, slow, and less functional than what the OS provides.

This whole interface consistency thing is one of those subtle things about the Mac that makes Mac people wonder how the rest of the world lives without it, while the rest of the world wonders what the big deal is.

Having a consistent interface between applications helps tremendously. If I want to close a window, the widget is always in the same place. To copy text, I always press command-C no matter what program I'm in. Every program uses the exact same file chooser, which I can customize and have the changes show up in all apps, and use the same keyboard shortcuts for each, etc.

Now I open OpenOffice and open a file. Command-O doesn't work, small but important. So I hit control-O and, doh, here is this incredibly ugly, nonfunctional file chooser. It gives me a very different view of my filesystem with none of the amenities I expect, like a preview of selected files. I go to look through the menus, but the menus are in the wrong place! The menus also act strange, since the delays and hot regions are totally different. And so it continues. Basically, this application is different from every other app on my system. The different looks are more of a symptom than a cause, but it would be hard to fix one without fixing the other. I've never seen an app that didn't look like a Mac app but acted exactly like one, so looking like a reject from the Motif world is a good indication that it's going to behave badly.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[DunbarTheInept]

And, oddly, I never liked the Mac OS interface despite everyone saying it was awesome. It just felt clunky. Which is why, for me, I get annoyed at every program on Mac having the same interface - in my case that mentality results in a system that feels wrong to me 100% of the time as opposed to one that feels wrong only some of the time.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[NardofDoom]

That's funny, I could have sworn more people were working on OpenOffice. NeoOffice/J is unstable and slow, though not as bad as AbiWord.

Re:Native MacOS X support?

[J. Random Luser]

OpenOffice.org X11 on the mac is effectively dead because it is horrendously understaffed. There are less then 5 people actively working on it. Not good for an 8 million line + application.

But someone managed to do it in Swahili
P'raps some Mac users should be put out in the sun & starved....

Does it start any faster?

[winkydink]

A look at the new features page doesn't mention it. This is my major criticism of OO. It's frustratingly slow to open documents. With email attachments, it's a major PITA. I'll stick with abiword and gnumeric.

Re:Does it start any faster?

[winkydink]

Goodness has nothing to do with it. MS Office is a de facto standard, whether one likes it or not. If one wants to interoperate with the majority of the civilized world, OO has to act like MS Office.

Further, if one ever hopes to convert the great, unwashed masses from MS to OS, they will expect to have an office automation suite that acts just like it did on their Windows box.

Re:Does it start any faster?

[rgsmith]

From the article:

Load speed is one area worth noting because of the improvements over previous releases. Launching the Office Suite installed on winXP Home SP2, with the program's "Quick Starter" feature disabled, produced the following results: OpenOffice Writer loaded in 10 seconds. The Spreadsheet (OO Calc) in 11 seconds. The Powerpoint-like presentations module (Impress): 9 seconds. OO Base (a new database program): 5 seconds. With Quick Starter enabled: OO Write: 3 seconds. OO Calc: 7.5 seconds. OO Impress: 6 seconds. OO Base: 2 seconds.

Re:Does it start any faster?

[winkydink]

Is there a Free Memory Foundation that hands out the RAM required to support the Quick Starter feature?

My complaint was geared more to my Linux machine. My Wintel machine already has Office 2k3 installed.

Re:Does it start any faster?

[Azureflare]

In linux, once you initially start OpenOffice.org, load times significantly decrease; on my amd 2400+, initially OOo 1.1.3 takes about 10 seconds to load, then, if I close that down, and later start up OO.org, it takes about 3 seconds to load. IMO that's not too shabby. Sure it doesn't beat abiword, which starts up almost instantly. AbiWord is one fine piece of software.

I'd say stick with OO.org when you need compatibility with MS Office users, but otherwise, you can't go wrong with AbiWord. I really love that little word processor :)

There's nothing wrong with that, that's what so much of OSS is about: increasing our freedom of choice.

Re:Does it start any faster?

[Bloater]

Yeah, it's a lot faster to start and to preload.

The Base app is faulty for me. Haven't figured out whats causing it yet. I suspect a UI flaw since the Tables button renders wrong. I can't help thinking they've pissed about misusing the GUI APIs there.

Re:A more?

[syrinx]

When fins brush by your heel
That's not just an eel..

That's a moray.

I tried it...

[DamienMcKenna]

I tried and and really, really..

* Liked the new installer, much easier to use and less klunky (on Winders).

* Loved the new interface, it is very clean and much more pleasant to use than v1.

* Loved the new features - the media gallery, etc.

* Hated how it wouldn't save embedded images. I spend half an hour working on documentation with embedded images, saved, reloaded, no images. Back to v1 for me.

I do plan on testing the heck out of the pre-releases (and sending it on CDs to all my friends), but once burned, twice shy for me.

One thing I would personally really like to see is a command line utility to automatically resave v1 files (or indeed any other format) in the v2 format. Run that over a directory of your files and never (in theory) have file problems again.

Damien

Re:I tried it...

[brunogirin]

Considering the file format is XML, I suppose the filter that imports v1 files into v2 is an XSL style sheet that you could use with any command line XSL transformer. It's just a matter of finding said style sheet.

Re:I tried it...

[teg]

Liked the new installer, much easier to use and less klunky (on Winders).

Being able to install for everyone in one operation, instead of running one with /net and then a separate install for all separate users is a great improvement.

If there was a site documenting how to install those automatically (as well as thunderbird/firefox/a couple of standard extensions and jdk) when someone logged onto a machine, or update if present (with UNIX experience and samba servers), I'd have gotten an early Christmas present :).

Compatibility

[Wordsmith]

Here's my completely subjective, indicitive-of-nothing compatibility test.

I have an old version of my resume I drafted in Word some time ago. It's not very complicated - just a few boxes of text and a table for the main content. It's been edited, exported to different formats, reimported and mucked up all over the place a few times over. The last version of it opens just fine in any version of Word, and looks good, but I can only imagine the leftover crud from several edits and imports/exports sitting around in the file.

So far, I've yet to come across another office suite that renders the documents the same way word does - although late builds of OO 1.x have come close. I downloaded the 1.91 preview version, on a FC3 system with the msfonts installed, did an almost-perfect import. One line that sits at the bottom of the document in word gets pushed to the next page in OO 1.91. Other than that, it's a faithful reproductoin of the special characters (bullets and a few accent marks) and hand-adjusted spacing in the table. The fonts all match and the lines break in the same place.

I think "opens Lou's resume pretty well" should be an advertised feature in any Word competitor.

Re:Compatibility

[BagOBones]

I would say its more important that My resume created in OO renders exactly that same in word.

Since you as the the resume author are the one with OO and your potential employer is the one most likely running MS office.

I haven't grabbed the latest version of OO but I do know that all older versions do not render my resume the same way that MS Word does.

Re:Compatibility

[Wordsmith]

There's a modded-0 (not mine, but not sure why the low mod) comment that recomends using PDFs to avoid that problem - which is a useful way to address the issue. I like to keep MSWord, plain text, rtf and PDF versions of my resume handy. Unfortunately, different employers want different types of files submitted.

Re:Compatibility

[Mr. Slippery]

I would say its more important that My resume created in OO renders exactly that same in word.

Why are you sending resumes in Word format instead of PDF or RTF?

I have never had my resume available in Word format - and it's never caused me any problem.

If they want it for printing or viewing, send a PDF; if a recruiter needs to massage it to their own format, they get the RTF or HTML version that they can import. (Send an RTF and most people won't even understand that it's not "Microsoft Word format".)

This not only avoids promoting the use of software and proprietary data formats from a criminal corporation notorious for poor quality, it has the very real practical advantages of reducing version incompatibilities ("Office XP? Sorry, I only have Office 97...") and the risk of spreading viruses.

It's the right thing to do, and the tasty way to do it.

Re:Compatibility

[pr0c]

Funny you mention that! The first thing I tested with this OO snapshot was my resume (several versions of it). They looked the exact same as on Word for the first time, even the extra blank page that I can't get rid of.

Re:Compatibility

[alex_ware]

Virus free?
1: Make macro virus word .doc file.
2: Rename to RTF.
3: Be suprised that the macros still exist.
This happens because Word opens the RTF and sees its a .doc so it opens as a .doc file.

Re:Compatibility

[Ichijo]

Wasn't 100% compatibility a goal of the 1.0 line? What happened to that?

It's annoying when you have to install an entirely new version just because they have no plans to complete the previous one.

You get what you pay for, I guess.
</rant>

Re:Compatibility

[failedlogic]

I've had an opposite experience to yours. When looking for a job last year, I forwarded my resume in PDF format to many different companies: high-tech, government, employment agencies, other businesses.

Several HR people called and said "Sorry, I can't read your resume in that format. Please forward it as a Microsoft Word document." (Yes, they specifically "required" Microsoft Word. Having Word on my computer, I obliged. I was lucky they actually called. Several never called (I wonder if they were able to "read" it). The problem of course is what if you save the document in OO and don't have Word? How can you be sure it will be formatted properly?

Funny thing to me is that since (AFAIK), there are no viruses for PDF files. With the risk of macro viruses in Word, I would have thought PDF more widely accepted - at least for security reasons.

Re:Compatibility

[ChowyChow]

There is a free Microsoft Word viewer which is pretty tiny. I wish open office would have an equivilent app.

Re:Compatibility

[ae]

Wasn't 100% compatibility a goal of the 1.0 line?

I'm not sure where you've seen this, but how do you propose one test for 100 % compatibility with a closed, undocumented file format that isn't even portable throughout the range of Word versions?

Re:Compatibility

[Mr. McGibby]

Many companies use a resume system that includes search capabilities. Said systems should support PDF but often do not. That's why they require Word. In a company that doesn't use such a system, then if the secretary can double click and it opens and they can print, then it works. PDF or whatever.

Re:Compatibility

[mandreiana]

Send it as PDF. I automatically deleted resumes which I get as .doc

Re:Compatibility

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Why are you sending resumes in Word format instead of PDF or RTF?

I was unemployeed for a while, and sent out over 100 resumes. I usually sent my resume out as PDF, but about 5% of the employeers emailed back and said they needed MS Word, or their Job Website would only accept Word Documents. I wonder how many potential employeers never opened my PDF and never emailed me requesting a Word document.

This sounds fucking stupid, but remember-- we're talking about HR people for the most part. They are very un-technical, to the point where some HR people constantly send out important emails as MS Word attachments, instead of just typing the text in the email body.

Now that I am employeed, if I send a document as an RTF, I get a bunch of replys from people who say they have never heard of an RTF.

Re:Compatibility

[Stefan Fredriksson]

If you really need it to render exactly the same as xxx then don't use .doc, .sxw (or the new .oot) or whatever format. Export as PDF.
Its available for free in OO.

Re:Compatibility

[YrWrstNtmr]

(AFAIK), there are no viruses for PDF files

Read on, grasshopper:
Yourde and Peachy

Re:Compatibility

[failedlogic]

Thanks for the info. I knew there was a virus or 2 with PDF. Not nearly as many as Word has. But interesting, nonetheless. Thanks.

Re:Compatibility

[fbg111]

I would say its more important that My resume created in OO renders exactly that same in word. Since you as the the resume author are the one with OO and your potential employer is the one most likely running MS office.

In addition to Word, most employers also have Adobe Reader. Just export your OO resume to PDF and email it them that way. I love OO's built-in export to PDF function for this reason.

Re:Compatibility

[iantri]

Now that I am employeed, if I send a document as an RTF, I get a bunch of replys from people who say they have never heard of an RTF.

Rename it to whatever.doc. If they are using Microsoft Word, it will import it just fine without them ever knowing the difference.

Re:Compatibility

[Creamsickle]

Had a similar experience at school. For one particular assignment, the professor required us to email a paper to him. He gave no indication as to what format he would prefer it be in, so after thinking a second I saved my paper as a PDF and emailed it, figuring that no matter what he should be able to read it (and would be safer, etc, etc). Later the same day I got a reply - he asked me to resend my paper as a Word or WordPerfect document because "they are easier to work with". I don't know what he was going to be doing with the paper that made it easier to "work with" in these formats, but I just gritted my teeth and resent it as a .doc.

Another class, same semester. The professor sent out a piece of required reading through email. The format? A .wpd WordPerfect document of all things. Unfortunately OpenOffice.org couldn't convert it (or maybe it could, but I couldn't figure out how to do it) and I had to take the WordPerfect file to a Windows PC in order to read it, all the while mentally cursing my professor for forcing me to rely on Microsoft in any way.

I think this reliance on proprietary formats can be attributed almost completely to ignorance. I am working to institute some kind of computer policy at my university in which professors receive some small training in dealing with different formats, and calls for them to use standard and open formats when giving out and asking for assignments electronically. Hopefully we'll see a little progress at least in my neck of the woods.

Re:Compatibility

[bvankuik]

I know it's just one line that was pushed to the next page, but doesn't anyone else find it funny that it's so easy to find a bug in the word in- and exports, even just a minor one?

Re:Compatibility

[DunbarTheInept]

OO's export as PDF ability doesn't render a file formatted the same as it was in OO. I've verified this by re-opening them in Acrobat and finding that the fonts are slightly different sizes sometimes, which makes words wrap in different places and thus can really screw with the formatting.

Re:Compatibility

[jimjim_the_monkeyboy]

"they are easier to work with" probably translates to "it makes it easier for me to use your work in some future piece of academice writing I am going to do." :)

Re:Compatibility

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but I've had problems with the same versions of word on different machines coming up with different renderings

Re:Compatibility

[bigbigbison]

I'm not sure what your prof was going to do with it, but I have my students submit their papers online and then I just type my comments in the paper in 14 point red font and send it back to them which is a lot easier to do with a text file than a pdf.

Of course I recommend they send it to me in rtf format, but more than 90% send it in doc format. I grade it, save it as a rtf and send it back to them...

(I don't think OO.o can open wordperfect files, at least not in the typical install. I think I remember there is a beta converter, but i might be wrong)

Re:Compatibility

[yuri benjamin]

Let a typesetter worry about the formatting while you concentrate on the content: LyX.

Re:Compatibility

[Daengbo]

I have solved this problem by making my resume and all necessary documents available online. Simply supplying a link in an email to the necessary pages assures that everyone who needs to will be able to read them. Haven't had a complaint yet...

Then, they can copy / paste into whatever format they use internally.

Re:Compatibility

[whovian]

True story. I sent a resume printed to PDF from OO. I had previewed the PDF with PageDown, not noticing that the document was one continuous piece of paper. I sent the resume.

When I followed up with the employer, they told me they had problems printing the document and were trying to cut and paste together a printable version. (!!!) Why they just didn't ask for a new document or simply reject my application, I don't know.

Anyhoo, I still didn't get the job.

Re:Compatibility

[g0at]

Send your resume in PDF, if the rendering (vs. simply-formatted content) is of such utmost importance?

-b

Re:Compatibility

[Creamsickle]

I can understand the commenting thing, that makes sense and seems like a good way to give feedback. In this case though I never got feedback. I'm not as cynical as the fellow who replied above you, partially because the content of my assignment wouldn't really serve any purpose outside of that paper and that class, as far as I can see. And I know the professor and he seems to be generally a good guy, just maybe not all that tech savvy.

On the WordPerfect converter thing, thanks for the heads up. I did a little more researching and Googling on the subject and found that there is indeed a WordPerfect filter for OO.o that can be found here. Actually that site is the Sourceforge page for a multipurpose WP-converter library, and they happened to make plugin for OO.o out of it. Just wanted to relay that for anyone in a similar situtation as me, who happens to read this deep into the discussion :).

Re:Compatibility

[Creamsickle]

Thanks, I got a good laugh from that =D. In all seriousness though, the paper was pretty worthless outside of the class so I don't have any reason to suspect foul play :)

Re:Compatibility

[DunbarTheInept]

I agree with this philosophy.
Unfortunately, most of the world does not, and they are who I have to communicate with.

Is it faster?

[ajs]

Site's a bit slow right now. Does anyone know if the new release is trimmed down at all? Initial startup times for me can range from 10 to 30 seconds, and perhaps I'm just spoiled, but even celestia (a program that plots the locations of millions of stars, galaxies and other celestial bodies and displays them using OpenGL) starts up faster than that!

I like the feature-set of OOo, but I keep using Gnumeric and AbiWord for performance reasons. :-(

Re:Is it faster?

[tom1974]

from TheInquirer:

Launching the Office Suite installed on winXP Home SP2, with the program's "Quick Starter" feature disabled, produced the following results: OpenOffice Writer loaded in 10 seconds. The Spreadsheet (OO Calc) in 11 seconds. The Powerpoint-like presentations module (Impress): 9 seconds. OO Base (a new database program): 5 seconds. With Quick Starter enabled: OO Write: 3 seconds. OO Calc: 7.5 seconds. OO Impress: 6 seconds. OO Base: 2 seconds.

Re:Is it faster?

[ajs]

Those are times for Windows. I believe that OOo is using some library emulation for their port to Linux, so I would not be surprised to see longer (or maybe even shorter, though I doubt it) startup times under Linux.

If anyone has run the new code and cares to comment....

Re:Pretty Neat

[Socrates Demise]

I've been using m45 for about three months now It runs pretty good I have had some Word documents crash the program My Resume for one :(

Gonna Download this now and see if it will open yet.

Very glad!

[erroneus]

For those who follow my own line of comments, you already know that I've been pressing for the use of OSS in my company from day 1... well more like from month 2 or 3 but my sentiments were knowns since day 1. :) In any case, so far I have experienced little to no resistance and a lot of welcome applause for it. In this office, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla/Firefox and The GIMP have been deployed with good reception. We're not yet at 100% but that change is just around the corner.

A little background: My company is REALLY unhappy with Microsoft after a BSA audit started after a disgruntled employee left here. We didn't have much in the way of compliance problems, but the nazi-like BSA left a really bad taste in their mouths.

Re:Very glad!

[killjoe]

We really should encourage all ex employees to contact the BSA. I have never worked anywhere that didn't have at least one or two desktops with much stolen software.

People who steal software must be punished. It's good for everybody. It's good for open source, it good for makers of proprietary software.

Re:Very glad!

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only is it good for software in general, but if you leave on less-than-good terms, getting your former employer in trouble can feel very good.

Re:Very glad!

[Lumpy]

the BSA is the friend of disgruntled employees... just like OSHA.

Re:Very glad!

[samantha]

I'm sorry. Calling out the BSA is MUCH worse than the old rattlesnakes in the mail box. Please DO NOT FEED THE BSA.

Re:Very glad!

[Politburo]

What about when your former employer has done nothing wrong?

Re:Very glad!

[Lumpy]

We had a really pissed employee call the BSA and OSHA.

both of those groups will not leave without issuing a fine, even if you are 100% perfect they will find a way to extort money out of your company.

we would intentionally pull lamps out of an Exit sign, or take one down so that it was easy for OSHA to find a fine for us.

trick for that, NEVER do the same thing twice, they will fine you hard for that.

so if you think you are squeaky clean and looking at a possible BSA audit? set up something cheap for them to find and fine you on... it makes them happy and makes them go away fast.

Re:Very glad!

[spagetti_code]

As an employer, I have a problem in that I am liable for the misdeeds of my staff. If they install 3rd party apps then I get to wear the cost when the BSA jackboots come knocking.

My choices seem to be:

• Lock down the PC's tighter than a ducks bottom under water. Makes life pretty hard for developers.
• Close my eyes and hope it goes away.
• Discourage the use as best I can.

I have opted to discourage, but I know illegal s/w is out there. The BSA have contacted us but haven't yet come onsite to do an audit. Its only a matter of time...

I know of another business owner who was given a big fine. He was only out 'by a few percent', meaning a few desktops in a hundred or so. I can understand why he got out of whack - its a lot of work keeping all licensing up to date with a busy business to run.

Re:Very glad!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hopefully that means they won't end up in trouble with the BSA. Although if they really haven't done anything wrong, you're likely not upset with them enough to call the BSA anyway.

But for those who do finally get to leave a crappy job in which you've taken lots of unfair absuse, slipping a tip to the BSA may be the only way to "get back at" your former employer.

Re:Very glad!

[Anonymous Coward]

Doh,

We actually hired a guy to come in and help us with license compliance (older company, not current). I didn't want to take the time to sort through all of the licenses and figure out the best way to bring us into compliance where we were not (e.g. bulk licensing may be cheaper, etc.). We were generally in compliance but I knew that there were probably a few Office licenses that we may have missed somewhere.

So this guy shows up late (in shorts no less), does a generally cruddy relationship job and then doesn't finish. A little while later, he has a job at Microsoft and we are being investigated!

Considering we had no disgruntled employees (we were a pretty tight knit family), I would give odds that the guy who we hired to bring us into compliance, ratted us out to Microsoft.

I'm a pretty patient and understanding guy but that seems to be about as scummy as one can get. The guy who was responsible for bringing us into compliance, fails, then tells.

Note: Do not hire a compliance consultant!

Re:Very glad!

[yuri benjamin]

I never understood this. Is the BSA a legally recognised law enforcement agency in the US? I can understand OSHA having the right to check out your business premises, but what law says you have to let the BSA in?
If so, who bought that law? I sure hope my government doesn't pass the same law in order to get free trade with the US.

Re:Very glad!

[killjoe]

"its a lot of work keeping all licensing up to date with a busy business to run."

Yes it is. You must add that cost when you are evaluating your software choices. It should be a part of your TCO and risk assessment.

Just another cost of doing business there is no reason to be resentful about it. You could always choose not to use proprietary software and then you would not need to worry about it.

Re:Very glad!

[killjoe]

" What about when your former employer has done nothing wrong?"

Then they have nothing to worry about. The BSA comes, does an audit, finds nothing, leaves. No harm, no foul.

Well maybe a little harm but certainly not enough for the business owner to switch to open source or anything.

Re:Very glad!

[netsureity]

The BSA is little more than a neo-fascist private entity with governmental power. I could go on about them for hours, but will instead get to the bottom line here. It is solely because of the BSA, their tactics and the enormous risk I encounter by using their members' commercial software in my company that I made the decision 18 months ago to use exclusively OSS/GPL software.

I started my company in 2001 after being laid off like many in our field then, with my own scarce capital and hard work. I managed to land a couple of large contracts within the first 8 months and began hiring staff as well as contractors. One employee, who came highly recommended with excellent references by the way, screwed up royally (over the course of several weeks) and nearly cost us our largest customer. I gave him a second chance and hoped after a long talk that it would work out. It didn't. A few weeks later he marched in and quit without giving notice and in less than a week the BSA came knocking on my door. This guy evidently decided when I nearly fired him to use his reprieve to find other work and to install as many pirated copies of various pieces of software as he could on his machine and actually on another as he somehow gained access to it. I didn't do it. My company didn't do it. The disgruntled employee himself did it, then snitched to the IRS - err, I mean, BSA and they came in with federal marshalls. It nearly wiped my business, and the 35 jobs we had by then created, completely out. Fortunately, I took out a 2nd on my house and we were able to weather the storm. I had to pay these crooks over $300,000 in extortion money to get them out of my office!

That was it for me. The next day I called in my CTO and told him to do whatever had to be done to get all proprietary software out of my company. Three months later we were exclusively in the world of OSS/GPL and we haven't looked back. Also, every employee and contractor that works for us now must sign a waiver, taking full responsibility for the software that exists on their system that is outside of our standard build. I may not be able to say that I know I'll never hear from them again, but I certainly feel that we have mitigated that risk quite substantially.

I have no problem with the notion of paying for software, i.e. - fulfilling the terms of an agreed-to two-party contract. I do have a problem with the risk associated with commercial software and the draconian practices of the BSA. The potential for sabotage is real, and the price tag can be staggering - even devastating - to a small business. This is without question the most compelling argument in favor of OSS in a business environment. I'll not be burned in such a way ever again.

Re:Very glad!

[Anonymous Coward]

The BSA comes, does an audit, finds nothing, leaves. No harm

Eh?

Re:Very glad!

[netsureity]

No, they are a private organization who manifestly acts as the government's surrogate enforcement agency in the realm of software IP. One could easily be fooled because of their clearly governmental-sounding name. They chose the word "alliance" over "association" for a reason. They chose to be known by a 3 letter acronym for a reason (IRS, FBI, CIA, FAA, FDA, you get the idea). There is no law per se, allowing them to come in and "raid" a company but they take a complaint and run to the nearest friendly federal judge, get a warrant, pick up a couple of federal marshalls along the way and they're in business. Effectively, the government tags along because they share in the bounty. As I posted a moment ago, they are the reason I decided my company would eliminate all commercial software and go with OSS/GPL.

Apple where art thou?

[tentimestwenty]

Hopefully Apple will adopt this lost child and popularize the world's first open standard for office documents a la USB, FireWire, Rendezvous

Re:Apple where art thou?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Hopefully Apple will adopt this lost child

This is something I would love to see. There is real room for improvements in both word processing and publishing and I think an Apple easy to use package could turn a lot of heads. Imagine a word processor that was easy and compatible and provided spelling and grammar checking services for the whole OS. Both of these are available now, but both could be a whole lot better if Apple would run with them. A sticking point is that Apple probably can't get a perfect .doc file importer (nor can MS) and Apple really really likes to have everything work flawlessly or not at all. I still think a $150 Apple word processor with some real support for layout and long-documents could give both Word and Framemaker a run for their money. Please please please can we have some competition here.

Re:Apple where art thou?

[tentimestwenty]

I'm with you for the most part, but it should be free like Safari. Just a straight port of OpenOffice with OS X widgets would be fine for me. Then the formats get out there and the whole community benefits from Apple's polishing.

Re:Apple where art thou?

[ViolentGreen]

A sticking point is that Apple probably can't get a perfect .doc file importer (nor can MS) and Apple really really likes to have everything work flawlessly or not at all.

I believe that TextEdit will open .doc files as it is now. I haven't tried to open anything complicated in it so I can't say for sure how well it handles it. They would at least have a starting place.

Re:Apple where art thou?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

believe that TextEdit will open .doc files as it is now.

Yeah, it is built in the OS, and can be enabled for text anywhere. It is still pretty basic (last time I looked). The problem is that there are just too many problems with all the different .doc versions. Apple can certainly make a good run at it, perhaps as good or better than MS, but unlike Windows users, Apple users will have a problem with the bugs in the reader. They are used to things just working and Apple really wants to make products that do that. I fear they will can it before they release something that is not close to perfect. I'm keeping fingers crossed though.

Video Professor would not approve

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure John Scherer wouldn't appreciate having to make another set of "product" to accomodate OO.o users.

OS X Auqa

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used OpenOffice for over 2 years, on both Windows and Linix, writing over 100,000 words. I have found it to be very stable and reliable.

I hope they come out with a OS X Auqa version.

Access clone..

[EightBitHustler]

The Access clone doesn't appear to open access mdb files. Hats off to OO for making the clone, but it's useless to companies that already have bunch of access stuff already.

I'm in the process of rewriting an Access DB that grew out of control for a few years. Remodeling the database has been a nightmare. The new app will use MySQL or Oracle instead using all SQL92 syntax. We're using a java web MVC framework for the interface.

Re:Access clone..

[bstadil]

The idea is not to bail out the fools that decided to use Access for more that a little scratch pad DB.

The idea is to get a useful DB interface that can be used with the Java DB provided or you can use other DBs as you wish.

Keep on chasing MS is a mistake. It's time to start faulting MS for not supporting the XML office standard not play to their tune

Re:Access clone..

[Anonymous Coward]

The Access clone doesn't appear to open access mdb files.

Give them time. They will get it done. Meanwhile, if a company wants to convert from Office, they could hire someone to manually create OOo 2 database front end, even if they can't just directly import th MDB files. It's still an improvement, even if it's not perfect yet.

Give them time.

Re:Access clone..

[YrWrstNtmr]

The Access clone doesn't appear to open access mdb files.

No, it doesn't open an mdb natively with all the forms & reports. But you can ODBC in, and CRUD all the tables, data, and queries.

useless to companies that already have bunch of access stuff already.

Those wishing to move their inhouse apps off Access can use this to create new OOo front ends, using their current data, in its current location in the MDB.
Then, later, move the data out of Access, and retain the new, OOo based, frontend.

Remodeling/rebuilding a database is only a nightmare if the first one was built shoddily. Neither OOo, Access, Oracle, MySQL, or any other db tool can prevent that.

Re:Access clone..

[EightBitHustler]

Yes, I gathered that was the idea, but there's little chance the existing base of Access users will migrate.

The more savvy users will probably migrate to something like a web fronted (php, java, or whatever) mysql database.

I really would like to see OO succeed. Lately, I'm finding myself writing more and more tools to fill in the MS Office gaps. Integrating Java and MS Office has always been a pain in the duff.

Re:Access clone..

[Glen Ponda]

Hats off to OO for making the clone, but it's useless to companies that already have bunch of access stuff already.

Perhaps those companies will have people smart enought to use JDBC or ODBC. Obviously, these won't be the same people who use Access.

Re:Access clone..

[hey!]

The Access clone doesn't appear to open access mdb files. Hats off to OO for making the clone, but it's useless to companies that already have bunch of access stuff already.

Ahh, but 90% of those applications are crap, and the 10% that are not crap is dirt simple.

I'm not saying Acceess doesn't have its place. I use it myself (for things of no lasting importance like data conversion projects). But it pretends to be a lot more capable than it is, and to make things a lot more simple than they are. A real pro could make some reasonable applications in Access, provided they don't have to scale much in size or complexity, but the promise that Access is going to take some non-technical person and turn him into a part-time DBA and application developer for your department is horseshit. However it is useful to be able to do simple data entry forms and reports, especially if you can combine data with information from your enterprise systems.

A tool like Access would be very useful within its scope, especially if it had a very high quality database engine as its back end. Microsoft is clearly going to sit up and take notice here. Already the writing is on the wall for the jet engine, because developers can now redistribute the SQL server engine for free under certain restrictions.

Re:Access clone..

[EightBitHustler]

Yep, giving MS Access to a non db-designer is like giving nail guns to little kids. Sure they can build a tree house quickly, but how long before little Johnny comes running into the house screaming with a 2" nail in his head

Re:Access clone..

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

Speaking of Microsoft Access....

I've got a .mdb file for a small website that I'd like to edit and run SELECT queries on from a Macintosh (or X Window) laptop. Is there any (preferably Free) software I can use to edit the files -- other than MS Access:mac or a homebuilt interface on the website's ASP itself? ...would it be worth the effort to build such an ASP interface seeing as not much exists in the way of Free .mdb editors?

Re:Access clone..

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are re-writing the whole thing, consider using Hibernate. Using it with Spring works very well (hopefully that's the MVC framework you've got in mind, they integrate well... recommended over Struts, any day).

Getting better but...

[SimURL]

The work being done with OpenOffice is very much appreciated. However, there is still a great deal to be done. For example, the article reports of a load time of 10 seconds for Writer. On my laptop with a slow 4200 rpm hard drive AbiWord takes about 2 seconds and MS Word takes about the same.

The bundling of all the Office components into one mega-app appears to make for a sluggish suite and that is going to take time to fix.

Re:Getting better but...

[MikeCapone]

On my laptop with a slow 4200 rpm hard drive AbiWord takes about 2 seconds and MS Word takes about the same.

Abiword is very lightweight and far from being as feature-full as OO.o . If it does everything you want, you might as well stick with it, though.

As for MS Office, it loads that fast because it pre-loads in RAM at startup. You can do the same trick with OO.o and it'll load in a second. The loading times in the original article were WITHOUT the pre-load.

Re:Getting better but...

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Office still loads faster on my Inspiron 2600 running Slackware Current using CrossoverOffice than OpenOffice. I don't see Wine running until I click the button to start an app. So is it still preloading in my RAM in that case?

Re:Getting better but...

[MikeCapone]

MS Office still loads faster on my Inspiron 2600 running Slackware Current using CrossoverOffice than OpenOffice. I don't see Wine running until I click the button to start an app. So is it still preloading in my RAM in that case?

Nope, but the article and my previous post were talking about OO.o *2.0* pre-release loading times. It's well known that OO.o 1.x loads slowly and that this aspect needed to be addressed.

Besides, I never said that MS Office loaded slowly (it has other flaws, though), just that if you compared OO.o NOT pre-cached with MS Office pre-cached, you were not doing a fair comparison.

Re:Getting better but...

[msevior]

AbiWord-2.2 does a helluv a lot of stuff now.

I guess we have over 80% of OOo features (all the important stuff like: tables, text boxes, positioned objects, footnote,endotes, wrapped text) but our code base is an order magnitude smaller.

Visio/Dia program?

[Anonymous Coward]

How about something more compatible with Visio? There seems to be a big thing for this in the desktop environment. Dia sucks, and it would be nice to be able to use the Visio stencils.

Re:Visio/Dia program?

[EvanED]

I would kill for an OSS Visio-like program...

Anyone else know of any?

Re:Visio/Dia program?

[Reducer2001]

Yes. Dia.

Re:Visio/Dia program?

[Anonymous Coward]

other possibilities: xfig, inskape, sodipodi

Re:Visio/Dia program?

[EvanED]

Okay, now one that doesn't suck in a Gimp-like "let's have have 27,000 different windows that aren't connected so if you change to another program you have to activate all of them in order to keep working again" way?

Or a way to fix the above problem?

Re:Visio/Dia program?

[mr_shifty]

Okay, now one that doesn't suck in a Gimp-like "let's have have 27,000 different windows that aren't connected so if you change to another program you have to activate all of them in order to keep working again" way?

*grinds teeth*

I hate that.

Re:Visio/Dia program?

[Anonymous Coward]

Kivio

I don't use KDE anymore, and haven't used this in a long time,
but remember it as being a very friendly visio-like program

Re:Visio/Dia program?

[Anonymous Coward]

All I have to say is that you don't have much to complain about compared to the way that the Gimp, and to a lesser extent, OO sucks on the Mac. You can't click directly on the OO or Gimp icons to bring the windows back up. You have to click on the X11 icon first then start clicking on the sub windows. If you accidentally click on a real Mac program, you have to start the process over again.

You also have to click on windows twice on OO and Gimp the Mac! First to give the window focus then again to do what you want. I almost had my boss talked into switching to Macs, but a day with OO & the Gimp, convinced her to buy Dells w/ XP again. I almost got out of having to support XP & Office! Now I'm looking for a good, high bridge to jump off of.

Tendlines?

[warmgun]

I use Excel for simple number crunching and data analysis. The most complex thing I do is add polynomial regressions of varying degrees onto sets of data. Now with Excel, I'm able to do this with several clicks of the mouse. With Calc 1.x, I had to manually perform the regression, which is a longer, tedious process. I read that the guys a OO.o were going to streamline this process in 2.0. Is it in this beta release?

Re:Tendlines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it in this beta release?

Why not d/l and have a look? It's a beta and they want input so you might be able to help.

Re:Tendlines?

[warmgun]

I'm stuck with the family for X-mas and all I have to work with is a very old, very slow laptop running Windows 95. I'm afraid of hurting the poor thing with a new piece of software, hehe. Maybe I should give it a shot. I am runng Firefox...

Re:Tendlines?

[warmgun]

OK, regressions are much easier to perform now. Unfortunately, it isn't possible to display the equation for the regression. What is the use of performing a regresison if you can't get the equation?

Version History

[managementboy]

Pretty easy, Sun bought StarDivision a German company a few years back. That company had an Office like Suite called StarOffice, at that time in version 6.1

A few months after buying StarDivision, Sun opensources the commercial application under the brand OpenOffice.org (notice the .org) and keeps a supported, shrinkwraped version with the same sourcebase as StarOffice. The two applications start in Sun's world as StarOffice 7 and OpenOffice.org 1.0 respectively.

Now it is logical that the StarOffice versioning keeps keeping pace with OpenOffice, as it is basicaly the same application minus templates and support. From a marketing point of view keeping two brands makes sense.

There is much more history to StarDivision than this, but that is another story.

Cheers!

What is the database exactly?

[Bronz]

I was really hoping they would add a nice front-end to SQLite, but I can't find mention of the underlying codebase for the "Access like" functionality. Does anyone know what DB code they are using?

Re:What is the database exactly?

[flacco]

hsql

Re:What is the database exactly?

[melandy]

I can't find mention of the underlying codebase for the "Access like" functionality. Does anyone know what DB code they are using?

From the article:

One noteworthy addition to this upcoming 2.0 OO.o release is the HSQL Embedded database engine a fast Java-based embedded database engine that once surprised everyone by beating IBM's Cloudscape (now also open sourced) and even C++ databases. Also included is a user friendly database application dubbed "OpenOffice Base" which allows you to effortlessly create both databases, queries and reports using helpful "wizards".

Paintbrush AKA "Format Painter"

[cuban321]

I wish OO Calc had the Format Painter feature Excel does. I love using it to clean up the format of a spreadsheet.

Re:Paintbrush AKA "Format Painter"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's included already:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1 1823



(Man, am I ever missing out on Karma by moderating today!)

Broken record…

[shic]

Any news about a grammar/style checking tool?

Re:Broken record…

[upsidedown_duck]

Is there any news about a grammar-checking or style-checking tool?

Don't know.

Re:Broken record…

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it is called english 101!

Re:Broken record…

[Anonymous Coward]

Alpha/beta versions of such tools are available externally.

Re:This just makes maintenance harder.

[pbailey]

"Microsoft already makes a good office suite that doesn't cost much" - well I would beg to differ. I think Office is quite expensive, specially if you have a lot of desktops. If you are in a position to just get rid of those MS licenses and switch everything over to OO, cost savings are significant, specially down the road when you don't have to add hundreds of dollars for every new box you bring into the company. And, your maintenance issues will not be impacted longterm because you will have one open source product to support instead of a closed proprietary one.

Obviously there is some cost to switching over on the training side etc. But once you have that under your belt, think of all the cool things your department could spend those dollars on instead of giving them to M$.

non rpm download...

[msh104]

I can only find a rpm based install. but my distro doesn't support rpm... :( does anyone know of a non-rpm release? I'd love to test it out.

Re:non rpm download...

[advocate_one]

well if you use debs then there's this handy guide to converting the rpms to debs...

Re:non rpm download...

[psi42]

Now there's a good question. What was wrong with the generic installer? Well, besides it being pretty much useless (tar jpxvf openoffice.tar.bz2 -C / would have wasted less time), it did happen to work pretty much everywhere.


Now I have to wait and pray that rpm2tgz will work on these things, because the openoffice people decided that everyone uses Red Hat.


Now I can understand why they would provide RPMs, but the nice generic tar.gz should still be the default download.


~psi42

Re:non rpm download...

[psi42]

Well, I decided to STFW, and what do you know, I got it to work. Linkage above.

Access Like Program!

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

This sounds good, very good. I have to say, dispite all the other rubbish thrown into MS Office, the combination of Excel and especially Access is an amazingly powerful tool. Even lowly users with no programming expierience can organise their files into a simple database and play around with them. I've known plenty of quite large companies that still use Access as their main database. True the thing is slow, buggy, hoggy, and can only support 5 user connections at a time, but you can see the potential.

I must check out this new Open Office Database App. If it's got the (relative) ease of use of Access, and hopefully some way to hook out to a database like MySQL when things get too big, then this will be a really compelling reason for a LOT of companies to begin looking very seriously at Open Office. For some that I know, only their reliance on Access + Excel is keeping them hooked.

Not all databases need to be uber, high fidelity or military grade. Most database applications are fairly small scale and all people really need is a small Access type app to tinker with data when its needed. True it may not be able to handle 10,000 connections with 50 million records, but most back office Access computers will be lucky to see 1000 connections a day and won't usually see the 1,000,000 record mark before the next server upgrade anyway. Possible exageration, but Oracle and SQL-Server is just overkill for most applications out there. We need this. Go OOo!

Re:Access Like Program!

[Unordained]

My dad recently asked me to help him set up a spreadsheet to track budgets, expenses, etc. for his team. He's pretty dedicated to using linux and openoffice, despite his lack of experience. I tried really, really hard to use the spreadsheet in openoffice to give him what he wanted, but he really needed a database -- a normalized set of tables and some reports, not some end-of-process spreadsheet that can't be re-used for anything. I was almost there, until I discovered the only aggregate I could use inside the spreadsheet, when doing database "stuff" with a spreadsheet as a backend (to keep it simple, make data-entry easy, etc.), was count(). Count() is not terribly useful for financial book-keeping.

He still had MS-Access installed on his windows box, and in a couple hours I had everything set up with a few parameterized queries and crosstab reports, giving him as a -result- what he wanted but giving him a lot more flexibility, none of this "adding a new sheet every month" crap, and so forth. I'm actually rather curious how well some of those Access features work with "real" database back-ends; some of the features offered don't seem to have an obvious SQL equivalent; parameterized queries look like stored procedures to me, but Access would have to know how to create and modify those for each database back-end. Anyway, there's no chance of this database getting big and overflowing Access' limits, and I have to admit liking it.

Quite simply: people use spreadsheets where they shouldn't, they need to be shown they can create "real" databases against which they can run useful queries and yet retain non-redundancy, flexibility, cleanliness. Access does that.

I'll keep using Firebird at work, of course, but there are a lot of things database vendors could learn from Access about language design: letting things be nested easily, parameters that don't suck, at least client-side support for crosstabs, etc. On the other hand, Access is terrible at datatype support, its SQL is limited in ways you might not expect, etc.

All I want is for my users, family, and friends to stop using spreadsheets anytime they want to track something that notepad can't adequately handle. And I just want it to work.

Re:Access Like Program!

[darnok]

> Even lowly users with no programming expierience
> can organise their files into a simple database
> and play around with them. I've known plenty of
> quite large companies that still use Access as
> their main database.

I've known plenty of quite large companies that have completely banned Access because of those same users with no programming experience.

They've been burned by having Joe Marketing create a personal contact tracking app in Access in his spare time, then show it to his mates. Pretty soon it's been filled with every contact for the company, and is an absolutely vital piece of corporate infrastructure that still lives on Joe's PC. Then something goes wrong - Joe's PC gets upgraded/replaced, Joe gets promoted or leaves, Joe gets the new version of Office loaded and his wonky app doesn't work any more, someone tries to move the app onto a server and it all falls over, someone tries to upgrade it to SQL Server to support more users and Joe's code doesn't allow that, etc.

A big effort is expended by IT people who have to wade through Joe's illiterate and/or download/cut/paste coding style, to save data that should've been in Act! in the first place. Good thing Joe saved $50 by not buying the Act! application in the first place...

Many MANY places have been burned by this sort of crap over and over, so they've banned Access outright from the workplace.

Re:This just makes maintenance harder.

[Mathiasdm]

[i]Microsoft already makes a good office suite that doesn't cost much and runs on PCs and Apples.[/i]
Wait, did I just hear you say that?
Let's see...
Office 2003 Standard Edition: $399 ($239 if you're upgrading from another version) for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook.
If you would also like to get programs like Access (included in the Professional edition: $499 ($339 if you're upgrading from another version).
Now, let's see... OpenOffice...
Oh, look. It's free!

[i]The upside is you "save" a little on price. The downside is you lose on maintenance costs and you'll probably get fired for not going the safe route. Just stick with Microsoft.[/i]
Maintenance cost... You mean like in maintenance when fixing your computer because Outlook let a virus slip through?
Or like with macro's in word?

PDF, grasshopper

[Gothmolly]

If you want to make sure your resume comes through clean, PDF it. No subtle MS-Office compatibility issues, you can use whatever you want to create it (OO.o, SO, LaTeX, etc).

Re:Get NeoOffice/J for the Mac

[Macrat]

http://www.planamesa.com/neojava/en/index.php

Impress font sizing issue

[daveaitel]

Does the new version automatically resize text so that your bullet points fit within a single page, the way PowerPoint does? This is missing in OpenOffice 1.1, and it's really annoying. I don't see a mention of it on their new features page.

Re:Impress font sizing issue

[advocate_one]

If you have to resize your text to get all the bullet points to fit on one slide then there's something very wrong with your presentation.

I do believe there's some maxims that should be applied to presentations... one of them is never have more than 6 bullet points on each slide.

Another is that if the text for a bullet point spreads over more than one line, then it isn't very pointlike now is it and should really be examined to cut it down.

Re:Impress font sizing issue

[Politburo]

Yeah well you didn't go to business school. Bullet points are all that matter to many MBAs. It doesn't matter what the actual words are, or how they're presented, as long as there's a bullet at the start.

WordPerfect import

[jridley]

PLEASE!!!
My wife and our church both used WordPerfect for years, and have thousands of documents in that format. Existing conversion utilities, particularly free ones, really don't work well at all.
At this point we'd be happy just preserving the text and the basic formatting. Having images and complex formatting import properly would be nice, but at this point we're really just looking for a way out of WP-land.
It's kind of hard to believe that it's that hard to read a file format.

Re:WordPerfect import

[managementboy]

This might answer some of your questions:

http://wp.openoffice.org/

Re:WordPerfect import

[hydertech]

You might want to have a look at http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/. It appears that there might be a solution to your problem.

Re:WordPerfect import

[mopslik]

While certainly not the optimal solution, have you tried Corel's own WP-to-Word Conversion Utility that used to come with their WP7 disc? I don't remember if it supports batch files, and you'll have to do the "WP-to-Word-to-OO.o" path, but it may help.

Re:WordPerfect import

[DerPflanz]

just fire up an old computer that runs an old version of WP, open the files, export them to ASCII and you at least have all the text. Perhaps it might be possible to export them to some richer format and also export the formatting/pictures.

Re:WordPerfect import

[mkosmul]

You can use wpd2sxw, which is a part of libwpd). Since it's a command line tool, you can use it to convert all your old files to OOo in a single bash loop. If you hit problems with some of the formatting features after conversion, read this tutorial, which might help you get it back into shape.

Re:WordPerfect import

[msevior]

Use AbiWord-2.2! It comes with a lovely Word Perfect importer plugin. Created by the libwpd guys.

Re:WordPerfect import

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I heard this Jesus dude was really good at miracles...

64 bit?

[scharkalvin]

Now if they will only fix the source code so it
will compile as a 64 bit application under
AMD64 based Linux. The currrent source is VERY
badly broken in 64 bit compatibility.

Re:64 bit?

[Isbiten]

Yes Im sure you need all that extra access to memory for a word processor

Re:64 bit?

[Bloater]

AFAIK there is effort underway, but most of the programmers are from a commercial shop so the quality of the software engineering is mostly unimportant.

If you want it to transform into decently engineered software, they need more volunteer developers (who care about the aesthetics and generality of software) or more developers from committed Open Source companies.

Re:64 bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

And this is from a company (sun) that's selling a 64-bit operating system (solaris)...

Once again this tells me that sun is going down.

//fredan.org

Re:64 bit?

[amorsen]

It's annoying to have to install lots of compatibility libraries because just one application is stuck in 32-bit-land. Also, 64-bit applications are faster on x86_64 than 32-bit applications, contrary to just about all other architectures.

Re:64 bit?

[bhima]

OT, I know, but great sig man!

Re:64 bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's unfortunate. There was an item on the task list along the lines of "64 bit fixes" or something. It's status has been green for a long time now. Apparently it wasn't all that was needed... I was really hoping to run 2.0 on a pure 64 bit Debian system, but it sounds like that won't be possible for some time. Bummer.

Re:64 bit?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hell, Linux itself barely runs under AMD64. FreeBSD is perfect, though!

not just a suspicion

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure why the original post is modded as "insightful."

Last time I downloaded a pre-release build, it had a big bolded notice in the release notes something to the effect of "NOTE: this is for testing purposes only and there is a big ugly splashscreen that says so."

So the developers are specifically saying that there is a big ugly splashscreen to let you know it's a PRERELEASE build.

They Canged the Icons...

[Socrates Demise]

...Now I have to change them in Google's Desktop Search again.

Re:They Canged the Icons...

[mcslappy]

the icons look a lot better now, the old ones didn't look nearly as polished.

it's no Firefox...

[unfunk]

Well, I downloaded it, and I was expecting something along the lines of what Firefox is to IE, but I was sorely disappointed.
Writer can be crashed with two clicks (Tools > Languages > Thesaurus), and no part of the suite can handle Publisher files, which is a real setback for the cause, as far as I'm concerned.

An Outlook 'clone' would have been nice too, as Thunderbird doesn't really do it for me.
Also annoying is the aggrivatingly slow loading times, even with the OOo Loader... er.. loaded. (Windows version here, obviously)

Here's hoping the final release fixes the loading and crashing issues, and that a future release addresses the other issues.

Re:it's no Firefox...

[Skjellifetti]

I want 'em to do to OO.o what Firefox did to Mozilla: Split the package into multiple independent programs. I get mad every time I choose "Exit" on writer forgetting that it will also kill my spreadsheets.

Re:it's no Firefox...

[bcmm]

It's a preview release. It's supposed to crash a bit...
And who actually uses Publisher? I don't think MS even changes anything apart from appearance from release to release now (that is partly true of word as well, but anyway...).

Loading times are definitely an issue though.

Re:it's no Firefox...

[westlake]

who actually uses Publisher?

Publisher 2003 currently ranks #150 on the Amazon.com sales list as a stand-alone program, $70 after holiday rebates. There will always be someone who needs to get a small print job out the door with a minimum of trouble and expense.

Re:still..

[rscrawford]

Until it has a "reveal codes" function like WP, it still ain't imitating "the best". ;-)

You know you've been on slashdot too long..

[Kjella]

* Loved the new interface, it is very clean and much more pleasant to use than v1.

..when you read the above as "more pleasant to use than vi."

Kjella

Re:You know you've been on slashdot too long..

[Anne Thwacks]

when you read the above as "more pleasant to use than vi."

The truth? You cant handle the truth...

Re:You know you've been on slashdot too long..

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, EDLIN is more pleasant to use than vi...

Re:You know you've been on slashdot too long..

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohhhhh..... you mean it's like emacs?

Re:You know you've been on slashdot too long..

[teg]

..when you read the above as "more pleasant to use than vi."

Maybe it should be called edmm, then?

Re:You know you've been on slashdot too long..

[Ozan]

..when you read the above as "more pleasant to use than vi."

...and think that would be revolutionary.

Re:You know you've been on slashdot too long..

[MarkRose]

v1 is better than 3m4c5!

Re:This just makes maintenance harder.

[unfunk]

Maintenance cost... You mean like in maintenance when fixing your computer because Outlook let a virus slip through?

Ah, the sounds of somebody who hasn't used Outlook in the last year...

MS Access

[tacocat]

I read from the article that they intend to have an application that mimics MS Access.

I hope they do a really bad job at this. A full featured mimic of MS Access would introduce a variety of really bizarre errors, instabilities and WTfs into their feature set.

Actually, I'm surprised they didn't just roll off something that ran on a database plug-in. And that plug-in would support MySQL or Postgresql. By supporting both you avoid the flame wars and by supporting a real database you get some real capabilities.

Re:MS Access

[phaln]

I read from the article that they intend to have an application that mimics MS Access. I hope they do a really bad job at this. A full featured mimic of MS Access would introduce a variety of really bizarre errors, instabilities and WTfs into their feature set. Classic, and so unbelievably true. VBA is frustrating enough without having to add Access into the fray.

Re:MS Access

[0racle]

You might want to look into a little thing called ODBC. OO.org Base 2.0 can talk to a variety of database backends, as can Access. Not everyone needs a 'real database,' forcing the installation of MySQL or PostgreSQL would just be stupid.

Re:MS Access

[tacocat]

ODBC is slow

Installation of databases is becoming so simplistic that it is becoming less and less of an issue every year.

I can see where someone might want to play with a single user type of database. But I've read articles that MySQL was the best candidate for this because of it's simplistic deployment.

Better Office compatibility

[abreel]

It was the part of the previous versions too, plz mention just the NEW features >:>

PS: I shall continue to worship all developers.

Re:This just makes maintenance harder.

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, Apple and Microsoft make great products. Why the parent post is rated troll is just amazing.

Access = Database + Front End

[handy_vandal]

An Access-like program? ... I remember when those were called "databases."

Access is more than a database per se -- it incorporates the front-end development tool for the database proper.

In my experience, Access is good for power users, who have enough experience/motivation to write modest apps in Access, but not enough to, say, develop web-based front ends for SQL Server.

That said, I will admit -- when I saw the phrase "Access-Like Program", I felt a dread chill run down my spine ....

-kgj

just rpms

[PerlDudeXL]

Meh, I expected the usual installer and not a tarball with rpms.
I could unpack them but soffice refused to start with 'The application can't be started. An internal error occured'.

I don't think that qualifies for a story on /.

Office version compatibility is a joke

[SuperBanana]

So far, I've yet to come across another office suite that renders the documents the same way word does

Where I work, we're on Office 2001, because 2003/2004 both screw up all our templates for Powerpoint, among other problems. Seriously- even Microsoft can't get it straight.

The worst is when someone comes in with a 2003/2004 file, and someone bitches that it doesn't look right.

Re:This just makes maintenance harder.

[mr_shifty]

Office 2003 Standard Edition: $399 ($239 if you're upgrading from another version) for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook.
If you would also like to get programs like Access (included in the Professional edition: $499 ($339 if you're upgrading from another version).
Now, let's see... OpenOffice...
Oh, look. It's free!

Wait... maybe he meant over a larger deployment of it.

MS Office 2003 Professional at $499 per workstation x say for our purposes 50 workstations == $24,950

OpenOffice.org at $0.00 per workstation x 50 workstations == Huh.

Still free.

When will it be released?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they set due dates like the Firefox project? I haven't followed OO.org for long, so I don't know what their release schedules are like.

Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[jbn-o]

I fail to understand how any part of that response lies "on the other hand"--if anyone doesn't like what they get with free software, they have options. Two of those options are to learn to program and do the work themselves, or purchase the time and expertise of a programmer.

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I fail to understand how any part of that response lies "on the other hand"--if anyone doesn't like what they get with free software, they have options. Two of those options are to learn to program and do the work themselves, or purchase the time and expertise of a programmer.

The "on the other hand" part is that they have valid issues to complain about, even if it is a free program. One of the reasons OS X is more popular on the desktop than Linux is that no one in Mac OS X forums ever tells you to learn how to program or RTFM. Learning to program for a non-programmer, or hiring a programmer are both pretty unreasonable solutions for most people. It is much cheaper and easier to just buy MS office (which is what most people do). There is nothing wrong with making polite feature requests. In fact it is very useful as it help the creators understand what people would like their software to do. On a very related topic, I'd just like to mention that I know a number of writers and artists who have expressed interest in helping out on open source projects. (Have you ever noticed how crappy the docs, help systems, and graphics are for many projects?) The response from the open source community has been profoundly negative. Polite offers of help and requests for information on what needs to be done have mostly been ignored and occasionally been flamed. The hostile and elitist attitudes of many open source zealots are really hurting the community. Perhaps you should be a little more understanding of non-programmers and you will find that they do have useful things to contribute, if you will let them. I know one open source game that lost the potential free services of one of the most talented graphic artists I know, simply because when he offered up a few sample textures and models for the game, he was flamed off the boards for offering them in the wrong format (something that could have been converted in about a minute if someone would have politely told him what format was used.) Comment like, "thats a windows only format MS-bitch" are not exactly going to win any friends. Now I'm not saying that you have been impolite, or that you are specifically causing a problem, but your attitude that non-programers have no right to make comments is just the sort of attitude that pushes talent away.

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[jbn-o]

Apparently, some MacOS X users have a desire to use OpenOffice.org and complaining isn't getting them what they want. Telling others that you want people to do the programming work for you at no charge to you apparently is not convincing people to see things your way. So, it's time to try something different.

What happened when they tried to put their money together to hire a programmer to port OpenOffice.org to MacOS X? This requires no programming skill nor does it require reading manuals. As more people join the effort, less money is needed per person to accomplish the goal. Everyone already has the permission they need to do any modification work they want to do. You don't need to wait to get cues from anyone else. With free software, you are as dependent as you make yourself.

I understand that most people aren't programmers. I also understand that most people aren't plumbers, yet they have pipes that clog. When their pipes clog, they hire someone to clear their pipes, or they learn to do the work themselves. Lack of serious action toward reaching the goal tells others where their priorities are.

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Lack of serious action toward reaching the goal tells others where their priorities are.

People are working towards making a good open office port, they are just too few in number. In some ways you are right that the lack of support is indicative of the user's priorities. For most of them the priority is to have a functional word processor. There is only one option right now, MS Office, so they buy it. I'm sure many users would be happy to pay for open office instead, but that is not an option. If your pipes get clogged, you can get someone to come out the next day, and find them in yellow pages. When someone wants a word processor, they look on the internet and buy one that is available. The open source movement is not even a consideration. Not many users want to pay now for something they may or may not get sometime in the future. Also, it would cost a great deal of money to hire enough engineers to make it work any time soon. Reference early comments about the poor programming practices and lack of portability introduced by Sun's engineers. For this to work a large company, probably Apple, would have to step in and hire coders to do the work, with an expectation of a future return (like Sun has done for Linux/Solaris/Windows.

You talk about people coming together to code or hire coders, but that is not what happened to get this to work on Windows and Linux. What happened was Sun made a strategic move.

I fully expect their to be a working OpenOffice for OSX, but I doubt it will ever compete well with MS Office. Unless the project forks drastically, or Sun changes their attitude and coding, I doubt it will ever be as polished as it is on Linux/Windows. Feel free to blame Mac programmers, but the reality is, there are not that many Mac coders who can also handle X11, and are willing to deal with such a complex mess.

Your attitude seems to indicate that you do not care, and that is fine. But open standards will lose out to MS's proprietary standards when that 5% market share goes with .doc instead of .svw. Maybe it will make no difference in the long run. But maybe it will mean another few years you have to put up with .doc files.

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[jbn-o]

Not many users want to pay now for something they may or may not get sometime in the future. Also, it would cost a great deal of money to hire enough engineers to make it work any time soon.

Much of your comments add nothing new, but this section clearly demonstrates that you are missing something pertinant to the thread. Exactly how many is "not many"? And do these users realize that they would be entering into a contract with a programmer, not asking a favor of a friend? Exactly how much is "a great deal of money"? I ask these questions because it doesn't look like you have done enough homework to know the answers to these questions.

So, it sounds to me like you have a golden opportunity to blaze some trails here: help your MacOS X friends consider another alternative and use that money which they "would be happy to pay" for something which they can share, modify, or distribute for a fee. If buying a ready-made office suite is lucrative, you might make your money back. You could get started by: asking for consultants on a OO.o mailing list (users, discuss, or social look appropriate at first glance), asking Ask Slashdot about hiring programmers, looking up "mac os x programmer OR consultant hire" on Google (I got some hits on this, including people looking for comparable services and you could ask them), or ask Omni (who makes OmniWeb)--they did some porting for NeXTSTEP years ago. If they're still doing programming for hire, you could talk to them.

I care about software freedom; I am a member of the free software movement. The freedom that allows me to liberate myself from the whim of a proprietor is important to me. Therefore, I was willing to move away from a semi-free OS to a free software OS and run free software on top of that OS. If you care to move away from .doc to something native to OO.o, but continue running MacOS X, you have options. I wish you good luck in your endeavors.

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[Ogerman]

One of the reasons OS X is more popular on the desktop than Linux is that no one in Mac OS X forums ever tells you to learn how to program or RTFM.

There's no such thing as just "the desktop." I wish people would stop being so generic. On the corporate and education desktop, Linux is now more popular. On the home and graphics professional desktop, Mac is more popular. Overall, Linux is rapidly pulling ahead and it's because of the fact that, using the right distribution, newbies don't have to program or Read Fine Manuals anymore. At the same time, sysadmins deploying it have a platform that's easier to maintain (on a large scale) than either Windows or OSX. When was the last time you saw a network booted Mac?

It is much cheaper and easier to just buy MS office (which is what most people do).

Are you talking about Linux or OpenOffice? You seem to have switched topics, because there's no programming or manual reading required to make OpenOffice work on its supported platforms. In fact, it's faster to get working than MS Office in Windows. (no license key, no product registration, no rebooting, no service packs, etc.)

The hostile and elitist attitudes of many open source zealots are really hurting the community.

There are a handful of jerks out there -- like any other real-world community. There are far more people who have not had the kind of experience you mention, so please don't spread bad rumors about what contributing to OSS projects is like. And remember: more than just the source code is open. If you run into a jerk, you don't have to let that stop your own participation. Most likely other people in the same project are not jerks and may even talk to the jerk in private, telling them to apologize and lighten up. I've seen it happen. If your friend had set up his own site with alternative graphics, they would have eventually been integrated regardless of the wishes of the jerk. Rule by the masses means jerks don't ultimately hold much sway. Whoever gets the job done right becomes accepted into the community.

your attitude that non-programers have no right to make comments is just the sort of attitude that pushes talent away.

I agree that many OSS projects need to adopt formal means for non-programmers to help out -- perhaps even separate from the programmers. KDE, incidentally, does a great job of this. Usually the harsh attitude of programmers towards non-programmer upon receiving comments is because they are already overloaded. And I say this with personal experience as a developer who receives a lot of unprofessional offers of help or advice. Casual, non-technical help and advice is far more difficult to integrate into the process. Good projects should have liaisons to distill non-technical help into a form directly usable by the core developers.

That being said, there is something to say for people who have complaints contributing financially. Money has a way of getting people's ears very quickly.

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Overall, Linux is rapidly pulling ahead and it's because of the fact that, using the right distribution, newbies don't have to program or Read Fine Manuals anymore.

I think you are mistaken. Linux does well right now as a server, but it is not very common as a desktop. Obviously, the numbers are hard/impossible to gather, but from personal experience I can tell you I only know one person who is not a programmer that runs Linux as their workstation OS. I know plenty of programmers and non-programmers that run OS X as their workstation OS. In any case, we were talking about users of office suites, in particular OpenOffice on OS X. Take a look at the number of licenses for mac: MS Office versus the number of downloads of OpenOffice. Guess which number will be higher.

there's no programming or manual reading required to make OpenOffice work on its supported platforms.

Again, the discussion was about OpenOffice on OS X. The X11 version is basically nonfunctional (no copy and paste). The Native OS X version is way behind the Windows/Linux version because only a few people are working on it, and because it is hard-coded for X11 and Windows, with portability not being a consideration during the coding. (The example given by people working on it is only two file types, hardcoded repeatedly.) Neither Mac version is anywhere near usable, so Mac Users usually just buy MS Office.

please don't spread bad rumors about what contributing to OSS projects is like. And remember: more than just the source code is open ...If your friend had set up his own site with alternative graphics, they would have eventually been integrated regardless of the wishes of the jerk.

I'm not spreading rumors, I'm providing anecdotal information about what happened. Picture this, you are a professional artist, and have never programed and have no idea how to program. You have done some work on games in the past, and want to help out with some open source game you see being developed, after you see it's web page. What do you do? Well, downloading the code is useless to you. You can read the documentation, if any exists. But if you want to help, a good start is sending mail or posting on a related discussion board. So that is what you do. You make some cool images and models, post them to the main board and say, hey guys, how about these? If your response is no one offering to incorporate them, no suggestions for improving them, no one apparently looking at them, and a bunch of jerks insulting you and telling you to go away, what do you do? Well you can flame them back, and get in an argument, you can grab the code and learn how to program or try to get someone else interested in working on it with you, or you can move on and do something else. This is not, by any means, an isolated incident. I know several professional writers, who have worked on several large commercial UNIX applications that you rely on every day (even though you may not know it) who have expressed interest in helping out on an open source project. All of them gave up, when they could not get anyone to talk to them, or answer questions not contained in the existing docs.

This is a serious tangent from the ongoing discussion, but I thought it was an important point to make about how the attitudes of some people can hold back open source. The number one complaint I've heard about open source games is that while the engines are often cool, the graphics are always crap. I'm just trying to let you know why. I understand that help is not always wanted in every project, and most OS programmers couldn't care less about having good docs. But it is not like this is an isolated incident. I know 4 professionals (including as I said the best graphic artist I know) who all tried to work with multiple OS projects and all gave up in frustration because no one would even talk to them. This is symptom of a problem. Take heed.

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I can see that you have missed my point. What I was saying is that people will pay for a finished project, but unless someone makes a huge effort to organize them, they will not contract someone to write/port one. Most users are just fine with MS Office, and are not looking hard for an alternative. If one was presented, they would consider it, and it would likely gain popularity, but hiring someone is just not going to happen. Open Source extremists do not run OS X. OS X is for people who want power, and ease of use, and don't mind paying money for it, and don't care if all the source is open, so long as it works. MS Office works (but is buggy), OpenOffice does not (it is somewhat functional, but not finished).

Personally, I don't use OpenOffice or MS Office except to test the compatibility of files. The reason I mentioned that I think the OpenOffice team should consider putting effort into it, is because it is a good strategic move to prevent MS from killing them with their proprietary format lock-in. I don't expect Sun to actually care that much about promoting open standards and, realistically, they have done most of the work to date.

I will continue to use OS X, thank you, and Windows, and NetBSD, and Linux. I don't imagine I will be using OpenOffice for much anytime soon, and I don't expect MS's .doc format will stop being the standard for home/office file sharing.

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[Ogerman]

I think you are mistaken. Linux does well right now as a server, but it is not very common as a desktop. Obviously, the numbers are hard/impossible to gather, but from personal experience I can tell you I only know one person who is not a programmer that runs Linux as their workstation OS.

It's true that not very many non-technical users, as a personal choice, use Linux on their desktops. However, there is a rapidly increasing use of Linux on desktops where there is support by IT staff. The "numbers" don't really show this kind of usage because it often isn't backed by sales figures coming out of RedHat, Novell, etc.

Neither Mac version is anywhere near usable, so Mac Users usually just buy MS Office.

I wonder what will happen first.. stable OO.org for Mac or KOffice (or other) taking over instead. Thing is, StarDivision's StarOffice was originally developed for Windows and Linux only. It was a very sloppy codebase and the results are still obvious today. I liken it to early Mozilla milestone releases when we were dealing with the messy Netscape code. The cleanup work on OO.org will eventually make the project very portable, but for now, it still has a long ways to go. Somebody really needs to start a serious fundraising effort for OO.org in general. There are so many people and organizations who would save big bucks if they didn't need MS Office any longer.

The number one complaint I've heard about open source games is that while the engines are often cool, the graphics are always crap.

Agreed.. it's an obvious problem. Most OSS games, for example, have absolutely awful 3D textures and it completely ruins the appearance, even where the game engine is doing a good job with geometry and lighting.

I know 4 professionals (including as I said the best graphic artist I know) who all tried to work with multiple OS projects and all gave up in frustration because no one would even talk to them. This is symptom of a problem.

That's a real shame. Have you thought about teaming up and taking a stand? Nothing will change if people aren't made aware of the problem.. If there are comments / flames that were posted to a public forum, bring them to light. "opengamegraphics.org" anyone?

Re:Time to exploit the freedom of free software.

[steeviant]

Here are my gripes with OpenOffice on OS X

1) The key developers don't really care about making it cross platform, instead they want OpenOffice to take over the entire desktop, hiding the OS GUI from view.

2) It looks terrible on any OS, but really piss poor on the Mac

3) You need to run X to use it on the mac, X is hidden in an extra package somewhere and has to be purposely installed.

4) It doesn't support even the most basic interation with other programs.

OpenOffice seems fine to windows and Linux users, because the interface in Linux and Windows are almost identical, on the Mac it looks like steaming poo, and more importantly doesn't work like the rest of the system.

Why would I, or anyone else for that matter, pay for some unemployed stranger to work on an unsatisfactory program, when I could well end up with some monstrosity that works barely better than the X11 version.

When my pipes clog, I can call a person with a proven track record of making pipes flow again, who is employed in that line of work and making a living at it.

It would take an enormous amount of money to get a company with a proven track record of creating Mac applications to port OpenOffice to the platform properly. After spending the thousands of dollars to get it ported by a reputable company, I would then be compelled to gift it back to the community again.

I somehow suspect that most reputable companies would be reluctant to give out their source code as well as porting, probably adding an extra cost.

Access Clone is the Wrong Direction.

[jellomizer]

Many companies are having problems with their Access Like Stradigy. This included Access, FoxPro, Paradox, etc. The Access Like programs cause major problems with a companies IT Stradigy. Because what it causes are Non-Developers Developing software. While at first it is not to bad but after a while Scope Creap sets in and Many of these Access Like Programs Grow into a monster, and because they are usually designed by a non developer they become extramly buggy and become very difficult to maintain, causing companies to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to support it or migrate it to a more comerical platform. Access and Access Like applications while might seem like a way to improve productivity at first quickly become a source of unproductivity and wasts a lot of time. While fiew may acually use Access as only an Interface to a real Database Server, Most will use access Database and then get themselvs stuck, and with there databases files spread out thew their harddrive in differn't location on differnt network shares when the designers system dies the application is generally dead.

Re:Access Clone is the Wrong Direction.

[Zachary Kessin]

yup, on the other hand it often means that things can be gotten done quickly by people who need them. I used to work in cleaning this type of thing up. It was nice work for a while to be honest.

OpenOffice vs. OS 9 Apps

[Anonymous Coward]

C'mon - is it any worse than the OS9 versions of word processing and spreadsheets that came bundled with the original iMac? There are plenty of chea..uh, frugal users that don't want to pay for an upgrade and still use OS 9 apps!

Re:OpenOffice vs. OS 9 Apps

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

is it any worse than the OS9 versions of word processing and spreadsheets that came bundled with the original iMac?

In my opinion, yeah I'm afraid it is worse. There is an OS X native version that is implemented with Java for the interface. It is passable but the X-windows version is pretty much unusable.

In other words

[Safety Cap]

Ignore the 98.5% market share and hope that your fanboy 1% (and that is being obscenely generous) will 'win the day' and everyone will convert overnight.

Funny, but those Paradox people thought the same thing, and as you can tell they were wildly successful in the SOHO market.

You might ask yourself why FireFox is making inroads against IE, while OOo is not. Could it be...painless conversion vs. the polar opposite?

It's time to start faulting MS for not supporting the XML office standard not play to their tune

Keep on believing that. The one who makes an Access alternative that can CRUD an MDB will win, not some "technically superior" alternative. Oh, you know Beta is technically superior to VHS, right? Same situation: same lack of understanding of how the real world works = same eventual failure and relegation to history's dustbin.

Re:In other words

[YrWrstNtmr]

The one who makes an Access alternative that can CRUD an MDB will win

This version of OOo Base can do exactly that. The only parts of an MDB it doesn't work with are the forms/reports/macros. Tables (internal and linked) and queries are opened seamlessly.

What's a "more"?

[MysticalMatt517]

like better MS-Office compatibility, an Access-like program and a more

Forgive me for asking, but what is a "more"? How will it give me a better office experience? Is there a "more" in Microsoft Office that I've been missing all these years? I must download this new build so I can learn about this "more"!

Re:What's a "more"?

[chochos]

They integrated the more UNIX program into Office, as an option instead of scrolling (for those who say that GUI's are for wimps, etc).

They were going to use less but they had some licensing issues, so they had to pay SCO $699 for a more license. But don't worry, I hear the design allows for other programs to be used instead of more so if you already have a SCO license you can use less.

Re:What's a "more"?

[hobbesx]

Forgive me for asking, but what's a "more"?

(sings)

When....

The moon hits your eye,
like a big pizza pie,
That's a "more"!

ps. I am terribly, terribly sorry.

Ugh

[Cytlid]

Murphy should have a second law...

"The minute you install the latest software XYZ, XYZ 2.0 will be out."

This happens to me with kernels too.

Re:Ugh

[Anonymous Coward]

Annoucing Fedora Core 4 Final

Arriving at mirrors as you read this.

"2.0" in the splash screen is intentionally ugly.

[Serious Simon]

The splash screen is intentionally ugly to indicate that this is a developer's release, for evaluation and finding bugs. It is not intended for normal use!

An amazingly nasty bug

[civiltongue]

I bought a cheap computer with WinXP but didn't feel like shelling out $hundreds for MS Office. So I happily installed OO and used it successfully for months.

But then I found that in one of my not-very-complex spreadsheets one cell just did not get updated (worked fine in Excel). This is in a tax reporting format that must work correctly! And it was only a lucky break that I noticed it at all. To me this is a killer (and not in a good way) -- features are pointless if the answers aren't right.

I pored over it for days, trying to figure out what I had done wrong. Then I found that this is a known bug in their bugtracker database. I submitted my spreadsheet as a repeatable example (they didn't have one before). But so far no bug fix.

I'm hoping that it got fixed in 2.0 (but it's still in the bugtracker).

Re:An amazingly nasty bug

[sci50514]

If you do a simple Google for Excel calculation bugs, MS is just as guilty for ignoring some simple mathematical rules.

HJLK

[oliverthered]

I'm sure you'll find HJKL real easy to navigate with.
It may seem strange at first, but years down the line that little bit of pain will be worth it.

Why the hell did they use HJKL?

Re:HJLK

[Anonymous Coward]

I use Dvorak you insensitive clod!

Re:HJLK

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, you must have spent ages swapping all the keys around.

Re:HJLK

[Anonymous Coward]

in Korea only old people use vi

Re:HJLK

[DunbarTheInept]

Bill Joy used HJKL for a very odd historical reason. The vi editor was developed on a terminal called a "ADM-3A". That terminal had little arrow pictures drawn on the H,J,K, and L keycaps. Bill Joy just decided to use those to make the editor "easy" to remember for people using that terminal that was prevelent where he was developing it. Of course, later on newer terminals came out that had actual independant arrow keys, but that was long after vi was already out.

In retrospect, it worked very well by accident, I say. I find myself more often wishing I could configure all my other text editing apps to use vi keymaps. Vi is very hard to learn but extremely fast to type with once you learn it because you never have to break context by switching over to the external keys and back just to move the cursor - you keep your hands in the touch-typing zone the whole time.

The only two complaints I'd have about it are:
1 - It would be very hard for me to learn Dvorak layout and use vi, since HJKL would no longer be in a row.
2 - It would be nicer if it was JKL;, since that's where your home row fingers sit. as it is, my index finger does double-duty on the H and J keys.

Re:HJLK

[oliverthered]

I would prefer something like jikl, my pinkie isn't quite up to navigation, and I can zip around doom with awsd which isn't too much different.

(I don't use home keys either so I'm quite quick on a PDA with a pen but I do get a hell of a lot of typos.)

I really like it...

[Corrado]

I just upgraded this morning (before the /. story - maybe I should play the lottery today :) and it's really an improvement over the previous beta release (1.9.5x??). Scrolling text/pictures no longer flickers like crazy and even editing text is much more less bothersome. However, it has crashed once and I have found some bad i18n on a couple of tool-bars.

So far I like it better than 1.1.3 and that's saying something!

Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[soullessbastard]

Disclaimer: I am one of the community members of the Mac OS X OOo "team" and founder of the NeoOffice project

It will probably be a while before you can even see X11 support for 2.0. Eric just got the 2.0 X11 based code to *compile* for the first time yesterday and it won't even run as setup crashes.

Part of the problem is that OpenOffice.org really isn't a "team"...it's primarily Sun Microsystems. Sun has four priorities: Linux x86, Windows, Solaris, and Solaris x86. Sun pays no one to work on Mac OS X support. Since it isn't one of their priorities, they frequently code without keeping the special needs of Mac OS X in mind, doing stupid things like hard-coding shared library extensions to only be ".dll" or ".so", neither of which are used by Mac OS X. They can't claim ignorance since folks have been trying to write Mac OS X code for over three years now, but yet they still don't even keep simple compatibility needs like that in mind.

Getting true native support for OOo without X11 on Mac OS X is most likely not going to happen within the OpenOffice.org project. All of our native work has been going on in the NeoOffice/J project. It uses a mixture of Carbon and Java to run using ATSUI for native fonts and Quartz for native drawing and printing. We also use full GPL licensing so we can incorporate the good work of contributors who can't get their translations and patches into OOo due to licensing and politics.

The process of giving it Aqua widgets has already begun. The latest 1.1 Alpha patches use native Mac OS X menubars. Aquafication is slow, though, because our first priority is to make it functional first, then make it pretty second. It doesn't matter if it looks pretty if it crashes after 5 minutes!

For what it's worth, it's already taken over two years just to get NeoOffice/J to the point where the native Mac OS X support is functional. By functional I mean that it can copy and paste both formatted text and images with other Mac OS X applications, has correct fonts and font layouts, functions with most all of the Mac OS X printer drivers, launches properly from the finder, works with the scrollwheel on those funky mice some Mac users have, has an integrated WordPerfect filter, uses the Apple Installer, has automatic upgrade notification, automatically translates the interface based upon your preferred language in the System Preferences language pane, etc.

OpenOffice.org 2.0 X11 has no native non-X11 support in it, much less the level of integration with Mac that we've achieved with NeoOffice/J. It's taken two years of some really dedicated engineers (namely, Patrick) to get NeoJ up to that stage. Replicating all of that work within OOo will probably take nearly that long and perhaps longer if the experts aren't there to help.

NeoOffice/J is in fact OpenOffice.org 1.1.2, and is 97% identical on a source code level. It's even got bug fixes that aren't in the OOo GM (such as functional JDBC support). This week we're going to be taking NeoOffice/J to 1.1 Beta after all known crashing and deadlocks have been fixed. And...

NeoOffice/J 1.1 Beta will be based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3, which isn't even available for Mac OS X X11!

Just keep up to date on the latest Mac OS X porting news on trinity instead of the infrequently updated OOo pages. RSS feeds are available too.

And don't let all of the politics and scare tactics of the OpenOffice.org denziens scare you either. NeoOffice really is the 'official' place for Mac OS X native OpenOffice.org and is where all of us core developers work (Patrick, Dan, and Ed).

ed

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[Anonymous Coward]

I have been using NeoOffice/J for the last 6 months or so, and have to say that it is a *really* solid product. I highly recommend it to anyone who wants good word processing on the Mac. I have recently used it to make a ~180 page document, including many screenshots and formatting tricks, and I found it easier to use and more adaptable than MS Word. Great job!!!

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[silentbozo]

Warning. Do not even attempt to run NeoOffice on any OS X Mac running 256MB or less. Your disk will start thrashing to handle the swapping required, and you won't be able to get any work done. (At least, this was my experience on an 10.3 equipped 1ghz iBook.) :(

With that said though, NeoOffice actually looks and behaves like a MacOS application, a considerable feat in itself when you compare it against the X11 version of OpenOffice, which takes forever to "convert" your fonts during the install, and still looks like garbage.

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[IamTheRealMike]

I'm not sure what politics and scare tactics you're referring to, but that thread seems to imply that they can't fold your patches back because of licensing concerns which is totally reasonable. They also said you'd forked the project, which also appears to be correct from reading your website.

What politics are you talking about?

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[Suffering Bastard]

Oh, for the love of...I just posted a plug of your app, just after you made this post (nice nick, btw!).

NeoOffice/J is great, and because of it my Mac is now officially and completely cleansed of everything Microsoft. Thanks for the free redemption! :-)

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[MarkWatson]

Thanks for all your work! (I just sent you a small donation, BTW).

I find NeoOffice/J to be quite stable enough for writing (although I have written 2 of my last 3 books using OOo because then I was developing mostly on Linux).

Best regards,
Mark

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[JPyObjC Dude]

Ed,

The one thing I find depressing here is that Apple has not put some resources at this one. The benefit that Apple will get from having Native OOO is astronomical. The number of users who would be available to switch to OSX is much higher than people imagine.

Picture all those users who:
-- Don't want to pay for crazy Win32 OS prices
-- Don't want to pay for M$ Office prices
-- Are not sys admins (or capable of) and as such cannot, and should not, use linux
-- Who, rightly so, have an moral aversion to installing M$ software on a OSX box
-- Want stable enterprise quality office apps running on a stable system (OOO on OSX)

I know that the number of users that are above are in the millions globally. If OOO was native, all of the above could selling features of Mac OSX. I am not even thinking of the corporate possibilities here.

I know that many argue that M$ Office is available but it's way too unstable and the interface bites. Also programmability is poor.

Another argument against OOO on OSX is that apple has AppleWorks. But, apple has never and will never come close to the features programmability of OOO. Personally, I still consider AppleWorks a toy product not worthy of true enterprise Office hacking.

I am sure that Sun is aware of the benefits that Apple will gain by an native version and this is why they don't care to pay anybody to do the work.

Sad state of affairs :[

I am very glad that you have put in all the work so far and I will be glad to assist in the future in any of your 'forks' to get OOO 2.0 on OSX.

Keep up the good work!

JsD

[Looking forward to hacking python/javascript/... apps on top of OOO 2.0]

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[fiddlesticks]

> Sun pays no one to work on Mac OS X support.

look, I know this is obvious and all, but since when has is it been one non-free OS company's job to support another non-free OS's software - even with the spirit of RMS blessing them (or not)

I'm sure you're doing a great job, but how's Apple's work on paying people to work on Dtrace?

Sun are doing a great job with the 4 (!) archs/kernels that you mention above. Maybe Apple could move some dev. time from, I dunno, fskcing widget extensions for OSX10.5.1.2.4.2 to chuck an engineer or two at OO.org on OSX?

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[soullessbastard]

Disclaimer: I am on the OOo Mac OS X team and a founder of NeoOffice. The opinions expressed here are personal and don't reflect official positions of either organization, Apple, Sun, or my employer.

People have definitely been wondering why Apple hasn't supported or started their own engineering work on OOo themselves. In my own opinion, I think the real reason why they haven't is pure politics. For better or for worse, the Apple platform really does need Microsoft Office. Think of how many Apple marketing materials include references to Office. It even makes it into their technical pieces with phrases along the lines of 'I can run my Unix chemical structure modeling software and still use Powerpoint on the same box!'. I also personally have many switcher friends who really require being able to do work in Office on their home machine for business, and probably they would not have been able to switch without it. Office is a crucial piece of software to have available for the viabilty of the platform.

If Apple started very public support for OOo (e.g. by firing off lots of engineering resources at it), it could easily jeopardize the continued development of Microsoft Office for OS X now that there's no agreement in place. Don't forget how quickly Adobe dropping Premiere after FCP was released. There's precedent from Microsoft as well with the release of Safari having been cited as one of the primary motivators for dropping Internet Explorer OS X development (a horrid shame as, yes, there are still a few web sties that require VBScript).

So although there may be many good logical arguments for why there should be support for a project like OOo, or even an enhanced business oriented AppleWorks derivative, there's always that one good motivator for not doing so...the continued existance of Microsoft Office for Mac OS X. Given its current positioning as bullet 8 on their top 10 reasons to switch, I highly doubt that Apple would make any type of moves that would jeopardize Office.

ed

BTW: pyobjc rocks!

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[nofx_3]

I think you are forgetting that MS owns a portion of Apple. I guess this doesn't mean that you have MS products on or as part of you mac, but you are certainly "Sleeping with the enemy" so to speak. Anyhow mac does rock, enjoy on (also NeoOffice/J is cool I saw it for the first time the other day).

-kaplanfx

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[nofx_3]

Also, why get your users hooked on an office suite that also runs on free os's. The way I see it, most people use their computer for web, email, office apps, and messenging, (and these days to a greater extend music and video). Safari uses khtml, there are plenty of good apps for email on free *nixes, as well as messenging apps. The one big deal breaker is most people do not believe free*nix has a stable office suite, once you give the users that there is little reason to continue to pay a hardware premium and an os premium (I do like mac myself, but the average user could care less about powerpc vs x86 hardware). thats just my $.02

-kaplanfx

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[Ogerman]

Are not sys admins (or capable of) and as such cannot, and should not, use linux

Linux is just a kernel. There are some software distributions that utilize Linux which are difficult for non-sysadmins to use. There are also some which are nearly idiot proof today. (moreso than Windows, almost as good as OSX) Don't make silly generalizations about who should and should not use Linux.

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[NardofDoom]

My dad owns a portion of Apple, too. And his portion is voting stock, unlike Microsoft's. Does that mean he tells me what to put on my machine?

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[JPyObjC Dude]

True, I am most likely over-generalizing based on my past views of linux distribs as opposed to their current status which I have not been keeping a close eye on.

I am sure that the time will come when linux distribs arrive at a bullet proof interface that is idiot proof, intuitive and fully functional. Every distrib of Linux that I have seen so far, always comes up with some sort of command line hacking that is necessary. But like I said, it's been a while. On OSX, you can use a computer for years without seeing, or caring about, any command line or that sort of stuff.

Even OSX has it's interface issues that still need tweaks to get right. But still I would recommend OSX over any Linux distribs any day for general every day users who don't mind a *nix kernel but don't want to see it.

Maybe someday I will actually use linux at home but for now, my home computers are OSX, my hacking boxes are Free BSD any my corporate heat generator is a dellXP :p

JsD

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[Macrat]

You really shouldn't be trying to run Mac OS X on less than 512MB in the first place.

Re:Not anytime soon from OOo...look at NeoOffice

[Moofie]

Microsoft owned a small amount of non-voting stock, which I believe they sold at a tidy profit.

So, no, in no meaningful way does MS own a portion of Apple.

Difficulty for Open Office to truly compete w. MS

[jellomizer]

It will take a long time if at all for Open Office to be Completive with Microsoft Office. Compared to Linux and Firefox projects. Open Office is tough to gain grounds.

1. They are just copying Office and trying to make it as compatible. The problem with this goal is that it will never reach 100% compatibility but like 99.999999% although it should be fine for most users people are afraid of that .00000000001% Compared to Linux which basicly (Yea Yea DOSEMU, WINE, CROSSOVER, are exceptions but not completely popular) ditch windows compatibility from the start. And firefox actually avoids some of IE's Features and they state that its a good thing.

2. No Major need to switch reason. While most of the flaws in Microsoft Products are in IE and Windows. While Security Flaws in Office to Exist they tend to be minor and not the cause of world wide downtime.

3. Lack of Killer features. There is no feature in Open Office that would make a happy Office user to switch.

OpenOffice unless something major happens to it will always be considered the Poor Mans version of Office, Good enough to get the work done but you are better office with the real thing.

Uhhh... Read the Fine Article

[Anonymous Coward]

Load speed is one area worth noting because of the improvements over previous releases. Launching the Office Suite installed on winXP Home SP2, with the program's "Quick Starter" feature disabled, produced the following results: OpenOffice Writer loaded in 10 seconds. The Spreadsheet (OO Calc) in 11 seconds. The Powerpoint-like presentations module (Impress): 9 seconds. OO Base (a new database program): 5 seconds. With Quick Starter enabled: OO Write: 3 seconds. OO Calc: 7.5 seconds. OO Impress: 6 seconds. OO Base: 2 seconds.

Yeah, I think load times have decreased somewhat, with Quick Start enabled.

Word count!!!

[siliconjunkie]

Hooray! Seriously...it appears to have proper word count now (I haven't tried yet, but it *IS* the first thing listed on the new features list (and rightly so!).

MS-Publisher (was:it's no Firefox...)

[RocketJeff]

... and no part of the suite can handle Publisher files, which is a real setback for the cause, as far as I'm concerned.

As a former user of MS-Publisher, I'd have to say that this isn't really a problem for the majority of Office users (it doesn't even come with most Office versions).

Publisher is a fine program - for the low end of the market (but it can't compare to any of the mid- or hi-end DTP programs). I wish there was an equivalent program available as OSS, but it isn't a 'setback for the cause'.

Note: I haven't used the latest version of Publisher (stopped doing my rocketry club's newsletter a while ago) - my main interaction is to tell people on my Web Host's forum who have problems using Publisher to do their sites (honest!) that they should switch to another program.

Re:MS-Publisher (was:it's no Firefox...)

[Zapdos]

For DTP try Scribus

bork

[bstadil]

and our church It will probably bork due to the content

"There are no guarantees."

[lxs]

That's what it says on the website. So how stable is it? Has anyone had any nasty crashes or messed up files with this release?

Re:"There are no guarantees."

[Quila]

There are no fewer guarantees when using OO than when using Microsoft Office. But I haven't had any data loss, as opposed to the loss I've had using MS Office.

Re:"There are no guarantees."

[lxs]

I was thinking along the lines of this being more or less a beta release. I agree that the official OOo releases have been very reliable.

Re:Pretty Neat

[DrBobcf]

I had trouble with Star Office doing that. I no longer use it after it ate my wife's obituary.
I have had no problems with the Open Office suite doing that. It also saves as a PDF file very nicely. Can't do that in word without a third party add-on.

All in all, for the price, its great - I have donated money to try and help. My programing skills ended with Q-basic & Pascal - dating myself (Hells-bells I'm only 51!!!)

I don't see myself ever going back to Word or any MS suite.

Re:This just makes maintenance harder.

[BlurredWeasel]

Also note: for 25,000 dollars, you can buy your company a nice intern or 2 at a very good salary who will do your bidding. I mean, 2 interns working 15 hours a week each at $16/hr = just under 25,000 dollars. What a deal, now you have tech monkies who do your work instead of microsoft taking 25000 dollars. Sounds like a plan to me.

"This is a dog license..."

[jdfox]

"...with the word 'dog' crossed out and 'cat' written in, in crayon."

It's excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

Installed OO 1.9.m65 two days ago and so far it's been great, despite the fact that it's not even a beta release. It's a better looking, smoother, cleaner app comparing to OO 1.1

It will most likely cause a lot of MSOffice users migrating to OpenOffice.

MOD PARENT UP!!!

[kf6auf]

I really miss reveal codes. For those of you who don't know, reveal codes in WordPerfect will show you the basic document source (think of it as similar to raw html; as IMO being able to view raw html when designing a website it incredibly useful, so is being able to "Reveal Codes" when working on a document). One can double click on a tag (say a Font:12pt tag) and the appropriate box pops up (in this example the Font box). Unfortunately, I cannot use WordPerfect anymore since I mostly use my Powerbook for everything (and VPC is not worth it) so I would really love reveal codes in OOo, even more than a native Mac OS X version.

For those of you who have never used WordPerfect, you're missing out and I suggest you go find a demo or something and use it for a while. The newest version has a couple of different "modes" such as imitating Word and such that did not exist back in the old days so I cannot really comment on those. The vast majority of people I have found who have used both WordPerfect and Word prefer WordPerfect for a variety of reasons, I just suggest you try it out and if you decide to buy it, its much cheaper than Word.

Any practical difference with MS Office?

[Anonymous Coward]

From those screenshots I wouldn't know the difference to MS Office. I see a lot of complaints about problems so I guess OOo isn't really complete yet. I don't do anything complex with it, so for me I haven't been able to tell the difference for a year now. Seems that it keeps getting better which is a good thing. I think that it is has been good enough for a while now to meet most average user's needs.

increasing Java dependencies a concern

[jeif1k]

It seems like the Java dependencies are becoming increasingly important. But if you have an open source office suite and it depends on a large, proprietary software product like Sun Java to function, then the freedoms you are supposed to get from using FOSS are not guaranteed anymore. Effectively, only the parts of OpenOffice that are usable without Sun Java are FOSS.

Let's hope that FOSS Java-like implementations (Kaffe, RVM, etc.) will become a drop-in replacement for Sun Java for OpenOffice so that all of OpenOffice functionality will be FOSS.

Wrong name by The Inquirer

[RikRat]

I wonder why The Inquirer calls it OpenOffice ("OpenOffice Base - the open source suite's Access"). You shouldn't call OOo that way. OpenOffice is an other company, which has nothing to do with with OpenOffice.org.

Re:Wrong name by The Inquirer

[alshehab]

This is actually a good thing. As more people tend to simply call it OpenOffice, it reclaims this name from that other company you mentioned.

Vector icon creators wanted

[Anonymous Coward]

Integration with KDE will be improved greatly in 2.0 but their are still many (tool) icons that need to be created to give users the feeling of using a completed and integrated office desktop.

Or should I say constructed as there are some strict guidelines to follow. But if you can't programm then this is an area where you can help out open source. So start up Inkscape or Illustrator and head over to www.dot.kde.org to read the request for help from several days ago.

MS Works

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know about an import filter for documents created in MS Works?

Re:Difficulty for Open Office to truly compete w.

[Planesdragon]

Three things, off the top of my head, that make me hope OOo is good enough to do what I want it to.

1: word prediction. OOo Writer keeps track of the 500-2000 words you use most often, and suggests them as you type. Since I tend to use a few long-length words reguarly (i.e., when typing a fantasy story), this would be a great boon.

2: PDF Export. OOo PDFs with the right tuning-macro are absolutely incredible. Size control, bookmark placement--and all free.

3: Standard XML files. It's all but impossible to render a OOo writer file unsuable short of deleting it.

Here are three JEs i did awhile back about what's good and not-so-good about OOo. Be sure to read the second one.

http://slashdot.org/~Planesdragon/journal/30727
http://slashdot.org/~Planesdragon/journal/30730
http://slashdot.org/~Planesdragon/journal/31327

wishful thinking

[jeif1k]

MacOS X has been the most prevalent Unix desktop for a while now

That's wishful thinking. Apple's recent sales figures have been higher than those for other UNIX systems, but that tells you nothing about installed base.

Why?

[bogie]

Because people are stupid and don't bother looking into whether what they are saying is true or not?

I guess you and I are the only ones to notice that many modern distros already ship/having been shipping OO.org with "native widgets".
http://aoeu.standardout.com/lxer/tom/26 363/sowrite r.jpg

sssshhhh. Don't wake up the mods...They're sleeping...But yes native widgets are KEY. Yep that's what's been holding back Linux from storming the coporate desktop. Widgets. *cough*

Re:Why?

[paulatz]

It ain't native widgets, it's just skinned to fit the look.

Re:Visio/Dia program? For OSX, OmniGraffle

[Anonymous Coward]

Not OSS, but free with my Mac (does it come with all Macs? I don't know...) - Omnigraffle. Very simple to use, has lots of features (look in the palettes, you can find UML, ERD, Boolean Circuit, Network diagrams, etc).

Yup, 512 MB recommended

[soullessbastard]

Although there's no "recommended requirements" section for it, 512 is definitely preferable. OOo X11 itself groans at running in 256, and using native windowing instead requires us to do some backing store tricks because some silly person decided that Quartz shouldn't have XOR drawing. The abstract drawing layer of OOo requires that XOR and isn't designed for any platforms that lack it. ed

Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

The owner of torrentbits.org gave-up on the piece of crap that BT is. It's no longer running. He, like most BT users, was fed-up with how horrible BT is in practise. I love the idea and it looks good on paper, but considering that less than 1% of actual downloads complete, it's not good enough for the real-world. Hopefully we'll one day have a popular and reliable peer-to-peer file transfer program, but it's not today.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, and it's just going to get worse as more and more of the hard-core users get fed-up with it.

Re:Sigh

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't go so far as to call it a piece of crap. It's a very poor implementation of a very good idea. I've actually gotten it to complete a download 3 or 4 times out of about a hundred tries. I know most people don't have that good of luck with it, but at work I have a T3 that mostly empty, so that helps.

open GUI standard

[jeif1k]

Perhaps Apple should first embrace open GUI standards and integrate X11 into Aqua rather than treating it like a leper. Integrating X11 into Aqua would be far easier than what they did with Carbon, which is just as foreign to Aqua as X11 is.

Of course, Apple doesn't want to integreate X11 because they know full well that if they provided decent X11 support, 90% of the OS X applications would be X11 based, and that's not in their interest.

But, frankly, it's not clear that Apple wants OOo on their platform either--after all, they have a cozy relationship with Microsoft now.

Re:open GUI standard

[Rimbo]

Of course, Apple doesn't want to integreate X11 because they know full well that if they provided decent X11 support, 90% of the OS X applications would be X11 based, and that's not in their interest.

I don't follow your logic here. If 90% of the OS X apps were X11 based, then there would likely be more apps for the Mac, making it a more attractive hardware platform. Since Apple is at its core, a hardware company, my gut feeling is that Apple'd like this more, not less, but I'm not the smartest in this whole field.

What's your thinking on this?

Re:open GUI standard

[jeif1k]

Since Apple is at its core, a hardware company, my gut feeling is that Apple'd like this more, not less, but I'm not the smartest in this whole field. What's your thinking on this?

In what sense do you think Apple is a "hardware company"? Most of their engineering and manufacturing seems to be outsourced.

Apple is primarily a brand, and Aqua/Cocoa is what keeps that brand distinctive. it doesn't matter whether it's better or not, it matters that their customers think it is.

More applications per se don't help Apple: if Macintosh just becomes another platform for running Gnome and KDE apps, Apple loses, even if that actually makes Macintosh a more useful platform.

Re:open GUI standard

[Rimbo]

In what sense do you think Apple is a "hardware company"? Most of their engineering and manufacturing seems to be outsourced.

Apple is a "hardware company" in the same sense that Dell is; their main corporate objective is computer hardware sales.

Note the pittance they make on iTunes Music Store sales along with the vigilance they have in making sure AAC files are the only DRM-enabled files to go on the iPod: iTMS is a tool to sell more iPods. Other things you can identify in this vein are the iLife suite, a bunch of applications that are shipped free with every new Mac; the FSF-approved licensing of Darwin's source code; and advancing certain other open-source projects, most notably ZeroConfig and Konqueror. They're business decisions that only make sense as they are part of a scheme to make Macintoshes and iPods more attractive products.

Based on this observation, I think that if it is the opinion of Apple that it can make the Apple more attractive to users, and that it's not prohibitively expensive (or distracting) to do so in terms of engineering resources, then they'll embed X11 directly into Quartz.

If Macintosh just becomes another platform for running Gnome and KDE apps, Apple loses, even if that actually makes Macintosh a more useful platform.

That may be true, and I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts on this matter. There is likely some merit in that point of view. Apples can already run KDE (and other open-source) apps through direct ports and utilities like Fink, so in a sense they already are what you describe here, and I admit that fact is one reason I purchased my Apple. Based on the observations I described above, I think Apple's management is using this kind of model, and I believe that they would see running Gnome and KDE apps better as a victory if it drives more Macintosh sales.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

So rather than downloading from a slow and reliable site, you'd rather hassle with something slower and not reliable? Why? You can just leave the download going in the background. With BT, you're stuck hassling with dissapearing .torrents, and with users that don't share. Again, why would you want to do that?

Re:WordPerfect import filters -- libwpd

[Anonymous Coward]

http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/download.html

wpd2sxw is a standalone tool to convert your wpd documents to sxw for use in OpenOffice.

There are plugins for other programs and such on the project page, too.

When will OOo have a Outlook-type application?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because that is the only true way to gain huge market support. If it had a program with contacts and tasks (and everything else we all have to use Outlook for) I would LOVE to switch. Even better, would love to have a Share feature (like Outlook 98 and 2000 had, which didnt require Exchange).

Re:A more?

[roystgnr]

When two patterns combine,
In a way serpentine...

That's a moire!

Database idea

[coldmist]

I'm a devoted fan to the software Folio Views for windows (by Nextpage). It basically stores all text in an internal flat-file database to allow advanced searches (like wordstem, heirarchy selection, substring, or and ( ), etc).

Is there a way to do something similar with OO?

Meaning, instead of having a database that has forms and such as the front end, the text editor itself is the "form". It would look like a simple document, but be a searchable database underneath.

Hit enter to create a new paragraph, and it creates a new record, for example.

Search hits would be web-like, but instead of having the words in the whole html document together, it would be paragraph or division based (ie between two tags in html-speak).

Folio Views can also export the database to a flat file that follows SGML/XML style syntax to be massaged by perl, edited, etc. and then re-imported.

If I can find anything like this in Linux, I'm going to finally get off of windows!

Lets see ...

[Laz10]

1. True they need to get close to 100%. However I think less than 100% clean can do it. Where I work we recently "upgraded" to Office 2003 and there was a couple of very important Word 97 documents that would cause Word 2003 to crash! So even Microsoft isn't perfect. I think switching is comparable to upgrading office. Technically anyways - there may be more FUD involved.

2. How is money for a reason. Upgrading office every two years isn't free you know.

3. I really really like being able to export to PDF. That is a killer feature for me. Exporting presentations to flash is also a cool idea. And did I mention free ? Having an open file format also makes it a hell of a lot easier to integrate with backoffice reporting systemes.

NeoOffice/J going Beta this week...2.0 plans

[soullessbastard]

Disclaimer: I am a member of the OOo Mac OS X "team" and a founder of the project.

NeoOffice/J isn't a prototype anymore. It got so good and stable that we decided to make it an official project. We just haven't changed the slogans and copy yet. NeoOffice/J 1.1 is going to be going beta this week, based off of OpenOffice.org 1.1.3 (not even available for Mac OS X X11). It will contain Aqua menus, too.

After we work out all the bugs and get NeoOffice/J 1.1 to final release, we're going to plow ahead with scrollbars and buttons and whathaveyou for a 1.5 release. We'll also be starting on the native work for 2.0 sometime next year, but that will take some effort, considering OOo 2.0 isn't finalized yet.

Our goal is to put out a final NeoOffice/J that is stable, well tested, polished, but most importantly, fully functional. It's generally our opinion that it's more important to be bug-free then pretty. It doesn't matter if it's got pretty blue buttons if it crashes after typing 5 words, and there are definitely testers and users who agree ;)

ed

Re:NeoOffice/J going Beta this week...2.0 plans

[Wordsmith]

I thought I read sometime ago that not much was being done with Aquafying the 1.1 line, because the plan was to work closely with the core team on 2.0, and keep it Aqua-port-friendly from the beginning. Is that no longer the case?

I'm about as qualified to comment on development as the average armchair quaterback is to comment on football plays, but it seems to be the current approach means the OS X port will always be a bit behind windows and linux. Is that the case? Can this adaptable theming business they're doing for gtk/qt/windows be made to work well with osx easily?

Re:NeoOffice/J going Beta this week...2.0 plans

[Aragorn992]

This really frustrates me. Why the hell arn't you working WITH the OO project, rather than forking and creating your own project?

This wastes effort in both camps and slows divides projects which should be unified.

Re:NeoOffice/J going Beta this week...2.0 plans

[nine-times]

This seems awfully rude to me. What gives? Your criticism doesn't even appear to be correct.

I'm not knowledgable about any of this, but if you read soullessbastard's posts, it seems he *does* work WITH the OOo project. Right in his disclaimer: "Disclaimer: I am a member of the OOo Mac OS X 'team'..."

In another post, he says:

Part of the problem is that OpenOffice.org really isn't a "team"...it's primarily Sun Microsystems. Sun has four priorities: Linux x86, Windows, Solaris, and Solaris x86. Sun pays no one to work on Mac OS X support. Since it isn't one of their priorities, they frequently code without keeping the special needs of Mac OS X in mind, doing stupid things like hard-coding shared library extensions to only be ".dll" or ".so", neither of which are used by Mac OS X. They can't claim ignorance since folks have been trying to write Mac OS X code for over three years now, but yet they still don't even keep simple compatibility needs like that in mind.

Now, I don't know if that's a fair criticism of OOo, but it doesn't sound too far off.

Anyway, I'm just someone who would really like to have OOo running natively on Mac and will be greatful to whatever developers make that closer to a reality.

Number of rows allowed in Calc increased

[wackysootroom]

The best enhancement by far is increasing the number of rows allowed from 32k to 64k. This will be a real lifesaver for me when importing/exporting XLS/CSV spreadsheets.

Re:Difficulty for Open Office to truly compete w.

[Democritus2]

HUH?

The "killer" feature is not having to pay $399.00 to MicroSoft.

yeah, this is nice but...

[bcarl314]

Do they have a "clippy-like" help system?

That's what I need! I mean, I'm running OOo 1.1.something (do minor minor versions really mean anything anyway?), and I just can't get that authentic MS feel without Clippy.

Re:yeah, this is nice but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, yes... there's that annoying little light bulb.

Re:yeah, this is nice but...

[netsureity]

I always turn that damn thing off. Just like autocorrect and check spelling as you type. Annoying as hell.

MS Word is not preloaded.

[Ensign Nemo]

MS Word does not preload at start up.

Try running winword under Wine under Linux. It STILL loads in a couple of seconds. Much faster than OO.o.

THERE IS NO PRELOADING on Word. This is a myth.

It's either because word does not load all of its libraries on start or because it is linked more efficiently, but OO.o loads slower because of the way it is written.

Re:MS Word is not preloaded.

[MikeCapone]

THERE IS NO PRELOADING on Word. This is a myth.

How come you can turn it off with msconfig, then?

Re:MS Word is not preloaded.

[Ensign Nemo]

Better question is why does it load just as fast under Wine on Linux as it does under Windows?

Re:MS Word is not preloaded.

[netsureity]

Perhaps because it isn't burdened by the underlying sucktaciousness of Windows itself?

Re:MS Word is not preloaded.

[MikeCapone]

I don't know because I haven't tried it under wine, but that still doesn't explain why it's possible to turn off the pre-loading in windows (and it makes a difference) if - according to what you say - there is no pre-loading and it's *a myth* (like all great myths, I bet there's a Wagner opera about it).

Re:MS Word is not preloaded.

[brank]

Are you talking about the Office indexer? (Search tool)

Re:Difficulty for Open Office to truly compete w.

[Zachary Kessin]

The killer feature for much of the world is language support. If you speak English this is not a big deal but for smaller languages (like say Hebrew) this is a big deal. If MS decides to stop translating their products into Hebrew then those of us in Israel who need it are really screwed. This ofcourse applies to many different countries and many different languages. Right now MS offices supports Hebrew on Windows, but not on the Mac.

But if you need to word process in a given language and Word does not support it well, then its useless for you.

Read further on in the thread...

[soullessbastard]

Read further along for great comments like the disinformation in this which omits our 2.0 plans. There's other ones like this where the project is described as "harmful and destractive" to OpenOffice.org. And this was all in response to a user just saying he enjoyed NeoJ.

If responses like those are not politics and scare tactics, I don't know what is.

(and yes, we do have patches that we've relicensed and submitted that do not get committed back into OOo, such as UTF8 filename support).

ed

Re:Read further on in the thread...

[IamTheRealMike]

OK, look I want you to understand that I'm not doing your efforts down - it's great that you're actually writing code instead of whinging like so many others - but I read those emails and I have to admit I agree (for once) with Sander.

For starters, let's look at the so called "disinformation" spread here. I'm not sure what your 2.0 plans are, because neither of your websites (confusingly there are two, which look the same but aren't) seem to mention any on the front page or FAQ. So I don't know what your 2.0 plans are, but if you simply intend to do the work all over again for each major release of OpenOffice then sorry but I think that's nuts. It'd be a massive amount of work even for a full time team, and you only have volunteers.

The most likely outcome is that users of NeoOffice are constantly using an out of date version of OO and will be telling friends and relatives "oh, OpenOffice is OK but it's missing feature XYZ that I need" when that's actually been implemented in a later version. I can see why Sander thinks this would be harmful (though I would not have put it as bluntly).

Re:Read further on in the thread...

[soullessbastard]

Well, he's not got any plans for 2.0 Mac OS X either and there are certainly no paid engineers working on native OS X support for OpenOffice.org. It's a shame when folks have to start talking smack citing their own vaporware, and this is even free software ;)

As to "do the work all over again", Neo/J isn't engineered that way. It's actually only over a meg tarball in size. It's so small that the source is actually included in the installer dimages. The way it works is that Neo/J first automatically downloads and builds OpenOffice.org X11. After that, it replaces the X11 components with its own. The X11 dependent components are actually quite small when compared to the largesse of OOo.

ed

Re:Read further on in the thread...

[IamTheRealMike]

Well, OK, at least it's being maintained as a patchset. Still, that's over a meg of patches that have to be reapplied to each new upstream version ... good luck

Re:Read further on in the thread...

[soullessbastard]

Thanks for the well wishes :) The good thing is that the patches are mostly to sections of code that are moderately stable. Most of the source tarball winds up being the new Carbon and Java code that's replacing the X11 code. As long as we can keep up with changes to the interfaces things will be good. The worst one for Patrick was adding right-to-left and vertical text support, but beyond that I can't imagine any other drastic unanticipated changes to how OOo expects to draw lines ;) ed

Which doesn't work for most people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you recommend something like that?

ugh, rpm only?

[fiddlesticks]

download quick, maxed out my dsl line, but yuk

geo@tcdee:~/bin/oo $ tar -zxvf OOo_1.9.m65_native_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
open officeorg-calc-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
openofficeorg-co re-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
openofficeorg-draw-1.9.65-1. i586.rpm
openofficeorg-graphicfilter-1.9.65-1.i58 6.rpm
openofficeorg-impress-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
op enofficeorg-javafilter-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
openoffi ceorg-mailcap-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
openofficeorg-mat h-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
openofficeorg-redhat-menus-1. 9.65-1.noarch.rpm
openofficeorg-spellcheck-1.9.65 -1.i586.rpm
openofficeorg-suse-menus-1.9.65-1.noa rch.rpm
openofficeorg-testtool-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
openofficeorg-writer-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
openoffic eorg-xsltfilter-1.9.65-1.i586.rpm
tar: Read 8192 bytes from OOo_1.9.m65_native_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz

++
yeah, I know, alien, but really...

Re:ugh, rpm only?

[netsureity]

I know, I know... but it doesn't take long and after the conversion to debs the dpkg install was flawless. Not perfect, but it does the trick. I imagine they are not concerning themselves with package builds until they get a release candidate.

Re:still..

[TheWickedKingJeremy]

Reveal Codes in WordPerfect:

[Bold]This is my header[HR]
[HR]
[Italic]To be or not to be, that is the question[HR]


Reveal Codes in Word:

[x234akdsfjad43kjtskjdfasdlfkjads432kjdfs]This is my header[3.14ftlbs]
[asdkj3k453lksdjl34k5j3l45kj345k3j4l53j45k345klj 34l5kj34kl5j345l]To be or not to be, that is the question[3.14ftlbs]

High priority item: Grammar tools!

[Anonymous Coward]

After all, there are open source grammar checkers. Why OOO didn't include any of them?

Re:High priority item: Grammar tools!

[The MESMERIC]

Automated "grammar" checkers are for simpletons.
They don't work anyway ...
But seriously -
"spellling" anyone can get that wrong.
But the simple construction of a phrase?
How primate can you be?
If anyone needs an automated grammar checker
- they seriously ought to re-attend Primary school
-- learn your
--- English lazy-brains !!

_____

... "spellling" is not in the dictionary.
Suggestion: "spelling".
... How primate can you be?
Suggestion: How primate can you are?
... If anyone needs an automated grammar checker.
Suggestion: If anyone needs an automated grammar checker? ...

Grammar Check is now complete.

All ya need is love...

[Jaegs]

like better MS-Office compatibility, an Access-like program and a more

Yes, because one thing that doesn't come with MS-Office is amore. And we could all use a little more love.

Re:Broken Record: Remix

[shic]

Is it too much to ask to be literate enough to write a grammatically correct sentence?

Please, may I also be blessed to receive only the considered texts of the careful and educated?

Spellcheckers are fine, to an extent; everyone makes typos. However, there is no excuse (besides being a small child who's learning) for being unable to compose a coherent, grammatically-correct thought, and for something important, take time to edit.

The issue isn't the ability of the author to understand grammar - or of the unwillingness to "edit" - but rather one of productivity. The texts I receive which have been written with the aid of automated grammar checking are more legible than those without. As far as I am concerned, this is justification enough. I believe automated grammar checking and style verification offers significant advantages to many users!

P.S. Do try to remove your head from your anus before ranting at a tangent.
P.P.S. For clarity, I'd consider breaking your last sentence into two or more. :-)

It's not necessarily deliberate

[jesterzog]

if the OOo-made document opens in Office 97, 2000, and 2002, but breaks in 2003, then it *IS* MS's deliberate attempt to break compatability.

Not necessarily. It's quite possible that the OpenOffice developers have reverse-engineered them incorrectly in a way that is only noticed by later versions of MS Word.

An easy comparison would be that many web browsers display malformed HTML, but that doesn't make it correct HTML and there's no guarantee that future browsers will continue to display it in the future. It's quite possible that anyone having to reverse-engineer HTML without access to the specifications might mis-interpret something and end up generating something malformed that would be displayed by some earlier browser versions but not later ones.

Undocumented formats suck, but I think it's premature to suggest that Microsoft is deliberately targetting the reverse engineers just because a later version of Word fails to open something that earlier versions will open. I'm sure that certain people running Microsoft wouldn't care in the slightest about this incompatibility, and it's most likely the effect they're after with the closed format. It's also possible that the Microsoft developers simply adjusted part of their document model that the OpenOffice team had semantically mis-interpreted.

Re:It's not necessarily deliberate

[Planesdragon]

Undocumented formats suck, but I think it's premature to suggest that Microsoft is deliberately targetting the reverse engineers just because a later version of Word fails to open something that earlier versions will open.

If we were talking about any other company, you'd be right.

but MS has a track record of doing this. "DOS ain't done until Lotus won't run" isn't an urban legend, it was a staple of the cut-throat unethical business practices that MS used to get to the top.

OTOH, this is all hypothetical. I haven't done the complex testing required yet.

Re:It's not necessarily deliberate

[jesterzog]

That's a fair enough comment and I certainly wouldn't rule it out. It's almost certain that most people at Microsoft wouldn't bother to lift a finger if they were aware they'd broken OpenOffice compatablity. But for me at least, it's still at least as possible that Microsoft just changed something, and it's jumping to conclusions to assume it's been done deliberately.

But yeah. It's all hypothetical, as you say.

outline processor

[samantha]

I cannot write anything long than a page without a real outline processor to organize my thoughts/blatherings. Word has one built in. It will be a great day when OO has one too. And no, building one in myself is not in my line of expertise.

Re:This just makes maintenance harder.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think OO is much simple and is better than MS Office.

It was a joke...

[Anonymous Coward]

Laugh.

Good

[Safety Cap]

So you have the part that 1% of the Access-using crowd will appreciate. Now you need the forms/reports (and associative macros) that that other 99% Access users will need.

Reminds me of a website I set up for a client a few months ago. He didn't want to pay for an admin tool (i.e., simple to use front-end to CRUD the content). Bear in mind that this was a 3nf database, so it wasn't a simple table with all the fields ready to go; there were at least 5 many-to-many relationships off the main table. It took about 10 days before he agreed to spring for the admin tool after struggling to input a new record. CRUDding--in this case--wasn't hard if you were comfortable with subqueries, but the average person couldn't do it.

Re:Good

[YrWrstNtmr]

Now you need the forms/reports (and associative macros) that that other 99% Access users will need.

Check the Wizards included in this prerelease. They do that as well. Forms, subforms, reports...all using standard OOo file formats.
No, it does not open the mdb and its internal objects as such. But quite similar functionality. And for most users (your 99%), this just might be similar enough to replace what they do in Access.

Re:Broken Record: Remix

[DunbarTheInept]

The primary thing that makes grammer checkers useful to me is NOT checking for me being too stupid to write correct grammar, but to check for sloppy editing - like dropping a word that I was thinking as I spoke the sentence to myself in my head. My fingers can drop entire words just as easily as a single letter, and for exactly the same reason - my mind gets ahead of my fingers and I trick myself into thinking I've already typed it.

New Grammar Checker addon!

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is the new add-on grammar-checker.

MySQL or Oracle

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny to me that your project will either use a crappy little SQL interface for flat files or an enterprise class behemoth.

macintosh = inconsistent

[jeif1k]

This whole interface consistency thing is one of those subtle things about the Mac that makes Mac people wonder how the rest of the world lives without it, while the rest of the world wonders what the big deal is.

The Mac ships with Classic, Carbon, Cocoa, and Swing, and for Cocoa applications, Apple ships two separate kinds of apps (metallic and plastic). That makes five different interfaces, with different looks, behaviors, and keybindings, out of the box.

In addition, there are dozens of ports of programs to Mac OS X (even "native" ports) that use their own toolkit (like Firefox and Thunderbird for example).

If I want to close a window, the widget is always in the same place. To copy text, I always press command-C no matter what program I'm in. Every program uses the exact same file chooser,

You're imagining things. There are lots of programs for Macintosh that violate each of those conventions. Apple's own applications don't even use consistent window decorations. Key bindings between Carbon and Cocoa applications are inconsistent. File system access is inconsistent between Carbon and Cocoa and UNIX APIs on the Macintosh. The list just goes on and on.

It's actually impossible to assemble a consistent desktop on your Macintosh--because you always end up with a patchwork of metallic and plastic applications, of Carbon and Cocoa. In comparison, something like KDE is far more consistent, since, unlike Macintosh, you can actually get a complete set of desktop applications and utilities, all with a single look and feel.

Of course, I think consistency is overrated and what the Mac is doing is just fine. But to assert that the Macintosh provides consistency is ridiculous; Macintosh is probably one of the least consistent GUI platforms in common use.

Intelectual Property and quips

[cbr2702]

The protection of quips is interesting; you might like to have a look at Copyright for Short Phrases.

Of course that article adresses only legality. For the morality of it, I would say that because we grant copyright to promote innovation and art, we should not protect short phrases in most circumstanses. People offer quips spontaneosly for the approval of the people around them and for their own enjoyment, so protecting them does not promote innovation or art. And the harms of restricting these phrases are great, as every time I want to print something, I need to check if someone else was inspired the same way. This is a far smaller risk for larger works, as the ways of expressing the same idea grow exponentially with the number of words allowed. So while I admire you generosity I think it may be misplaced.

Re:Broken Record: Remix

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny, your punctuation sucks ass. Oh, and your style is worse than your punctuation.

Let's look at this chunk: ... grammatically-correct thought, and for something important, take time to edit.

Shouldn't that comma be AFTER the and? You silly grammer bitch, the 'and' isn't part of that parenthetic statement! Oh, you also use WAY too many of those.

Yeah, don't be a bitch just because you suck and other people make you jealous.

Oh yeah, you desparately need to read 'The elements of style' -- you could learn quite a bit. That is, if you were capable of learning.

Pioneered in NeoOffice/C

[soullessbastard]

The native theming work was actually pioneered in NeoOffice/C Flaming Yeti back in 2002. Dan, who helped me get the intial widget stuff in, moved on to be one of the primary architects of the Native Widget Framework that does the theming in 2.0.

While NeoOffice/C was way to hacked to make the transition into a maintainable project, NeoOffice/J is actually using portions of that framework for the Aqua menus. We 'backported' 2.0 into 1.1.x to do the most requested native widget (and arguably the most complex) menus. Having it in the official 2.0 sources helps us because it means we won't have to hack to make the infrastructure ourselves :)

ed

Re:Pioneered in NeoOffice/C

[Wordsmith]

glad to hear it. sounds like the groundwork has been laid for a smoother osx transition. we in the user-only world thank you :)

Are PPC boxes really that slow?

[jmorris42]

> Oh yeah, and takes 9 hours to compile on a dual G5 2GHz.

Eh? I build OOo in just a bit over three hours on a single A64 3200+, If a Dual G5 is taking three times longer, something is horribly wrong. Kinda kills the claim of 'worlds fastest computer' that the Mac faithful whinge on about.

Double standards

[baquiano]

People who steal software must be punished.

While people who 'steal' other copyrighted works such as music and movies should be protected?

We really should encourage all ex employees to contact the BSA

But no-one should contact the MPAA/RIAA regarding unappropriate use or distribution of copyrighted works, right?

Re:Double standards

[killjoe]

"While people who 'steal' other copyrighted works such as music and movies should be protected?"

did I say that? Of course they should not. Stealing music discourages independent artists and furthers the RIAA monopoly.

"But no-one should contact the MPAA/RIAA regarding unappropriate use or distribution of copyrighted works, right?"

I say go ahead. Only then will people stop feeding on the slop that those organizations throw before the swine.

Re:Difficulty for Open Office to truly compete w.

[Anonymous Coward]

If they still want to use older Office version which was used to create documents, they don't need OpenOffice.

But with OO they are able to use open and well documented standards which will surely be supported for a long time, unlike e.g. old MS formats with newer MSO.
They will also have ability to easily convert it to some other format, not remain locked down in MS formats.

Incompatibilities with office documents are often easily corrected manually. Once you inspect all of your files, you are ready for a switch. Regarding exchanging files written with newer MSO versions, they, I guess, use much cleaner file formats than older ones, thus easier to reverse engineer correctly.

Killer features are, well, it's price, PDF export and open formats.

Re:A more?

[Gubbe]

When you're hit by a jug,
in a South Auckland pub,

That's a maori...

Re:Broken Record: Remix

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt any grammar checker would have caught either of your complaints.

Java bundled with a product

[cbr2702]

The issues with Linux distros do not translate to OO.o issues. The issue is that while the Java Runtime Environment can be distributed with programs that require it, it cannot be distributed without such programs. So jre + OO.o is legit, but jre + Debian is not.

Actually, I'd prefer just a port of OOo for now

[tentimestwenty]

I don't really care about full integrated X11 support. It would eventually be nice but I have a feeling it would take focus away from more important things at Apple. A nice port of Open Office would round out a near perfect software portfolio for Apple and would make their hardware even more attractive.

1.1 not good for production sites either

[Anonymous Coward]

"It's work in progress, maybe not recomended for production sites, but it is a good sample of what is coming."

I don't recommend 1.1 for production sites either.

It's not the boxes, it's the compilers

[soullessbastard]

It's not that the boxes are slow...the compilers and linkers that we have to use just suck, especially as to maintain 10.2 compatiblity requires using 10.2 dev tools that don't have most of the recent optimizations Apple's been doing in their compilers..

ed

OpenOffice vs. M$ office

[wrschneider]

OpenOffice, on the other hand, while getting very good, is still not as good as Microsoft Office in many ways.

The main weakness of OpenOffice, IMO, is its ability to read and write M$ Office files without munging them. I just bought a slick new IBM Thinkpad and resented that over 10% of pricetag was for the Office licence, because I had to have PowerPoint... not because OpenOffice Impress isn't good enough for my needs, but because I have to interact with other people who use PowerPoint. And I'm getting too old to be an l33t war3z d00d. :-)

I have the opposite experience

[Anonymous Coward]

I created my resume with either Word97 or an earlier version. I cannot edit any longer in Word2K the text is misplaced and the format looks horrible.

I use a table format for it. One/two lines per row. It looks really sharp and has plenty of white space on the left side. The right side has dense text.

I was about to rewrite it in Word2K when I tried opening it in Open Office RC1.1. WOW! What a difference. I can see the table format perfectly. With the table outline it's even better than before. I did end up changing formats. I now use OOo as the default format for my resume. I export PDFs if I send my resume to someone.

I just wish OOo had a spelling and grammer checker

Re:Broken Record: Remix

[msevior]

Yeah! Me !

Scare tactics?

[Per Abrahamsen]

I followed the link you provided, and I saw no "scare tactics", at least not in the beginning of the thread (it was long, so it might have degenerated). Only level headed discussions about the pro- and contra of working on the mainline vs. a fork.

Re:Scare tactics?

[Macrat]

You have to remember that Ed scares easily. ;-) BOO!

Re:Broken Record: Remix

[shic]

I doubt any grammar checker would have caught either of your complaints.

The grammar checker in Word 2003 certainly doesn't notice anything wrong with the offending sentence. Rather than this being seen as a reason to preclude grammar checking in Open Office, this should be treated as an opportunity for open source to offer significant practical advantage to ordinary users with a grammar checker which alerts weary authors to this sort of unintentional gibberish. That feature alone would make switching worthwhile for the common (wo)man!

Anger is sometimes too great a barrier.

[Futurepower(R)]

Quoting your last paragraph: "That's a real shame. Have you thought about teaming up and taking a stand? Nothing will change if people aren't made aware of the problem.. If there are comments / flames that were posted to a public forum, bring them to light. "opengamegraphics.org" anyone?"

I agree with what you said in general. However, in my opinion, it does not take into account the effects of anger.

Many people involved with producing Open Source software are also using their involvement as a way of acting out their anger. Anger is a very serious mental disturbance, and even people with a sophisticated understanding of it might find that they could not interact positively with someone who is building such a barrier.

NeoOffice works

[bach37]

NeoOffice works great.

Clarifications on contracting the work.

[jbn-o]

You would pay for someone to work on it to improve it and make it into the program that looks and feels the way you want it to. Apparently sitting around and waiting for someone to do the work isn't producing code fast enough for you. Hence you would hire someone to do the job. You would draw up a contract which stipulates the work to be done, the time frame in which it would be done, and list the negotiated price for the job--like any other for-hire work.

Since you haven't cited any quotes, I suspect you too don't know how much money it would take to get this done. You also appear to have not done any work on pitching this to the community of people who complain about a lack of native Mac OS X OO.o. Hence, it makes no sense to conclude that the price is too high for you to pay or to raise from a community of others. The folks who bought Blender (the now free software rendering program) bought the program for 100,000 EUR which strikes me as a lot of money (about $133,839.67, according to xe.com's money converter as of the time/date stamp on this post).

I somehow suspect that most reputable companies would be reluctant to give out their source code as well as porting, probably adding an extra cost.

Not at all, the source code to OO.o is already freely available under a license which allows sharing and modification. The programmers porting OO.o would get paid for the job of porting, not distributing proprietary binaries to people (nor would the license on OO.o allow them to do so). Assuming you hired programmers in a country which honors contract law and copyright law like the US, the programmers would not have the option of violating either your contract or copyright law. You could make it a condition of the donations from the public that the software would be released as free software, thus making it possible to be merged into the OO.o tree.

Even if the software were proprietary, the programmers would have no incentive for doing anything beyond the contract. Take Omni's porting of FrameMaker to NeXTSTEP 3.x (if I recall correctly): years ago, they got paid (what I assume was) 100% of the money they would ever make on this job by porting the software to what was the latest NS API. They did the work, and then they were done. The fruits of that labor are wholly owned by whomever hired them (Frame, I'd guess, which was later bought by Adobe, but my memory on this is hazy). I suspect that none of Omni's pay hinged on how many copies of that program were sold; I'm guessing Omni got a flat fee for their work. Omni wasn't distributing the software, only porting it. They were hired probably because of their understanding of the NS API.

In the beginning of the popularity of the Internet, finding an ISP wasn't that easy. Today you can flip open a phone book and find an ISP, but it was not always this way. That doesn't mean finding one was impossible or not worthwhile. A comparable situation exists for programmers today. If MacOS X users are unwilling to do the work of writing a proper port of OO.o, hiring someone is another option. Finding excuses to wait for someone else to do the heavy lifting without pay, and complaining about their lack of progress often doesn't produce the kinds of results one would like, but hope springs eternal.

OO.org 2.0 beta on debian (Was Re:ugh, rpm only?)

[fiddlesticks]

I must be new, posting back to my own post :P

After doing the above, running the binary barfed

This page helped me a lot. http://installation.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMs g?list=dev&msgNo=610

Now it works. and well. Comes with a built in media player? WTF?