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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."
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.
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.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
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).
Silence is golden... and duct tape is silver.
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).
.. Managers do have this version madness you know (guess which sounds better ;)
:)
And YTF is "StarOffice 8" == "OpenOffice 2.0"
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 !!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
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?
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
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.
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.
Hopefully Apple will adopt this lost child and popularize the world's first open standard for office documents a la USB, FireWire, Rendezvous
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.
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?
I wish OO Calc had the Format Painter feature Excel does. I love using it to clean up the format of a spreadsheet.
Any news about a grammar/style checking tool?
It's a joke, because it's a pre-release. Jesus.
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.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
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.
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."
Until it has a "reveal codes" function like WP, it still ain't imitating "the best". ;-)
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
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).
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.
Don't mind me, I have more fun this way!
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.
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?
I write in my journal
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.
What politics are you talking about?
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).
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.
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.