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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."
Or The Inquirer! :)
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
But when will they ever have native OS X support?
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.
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.
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
Microsoft needs the help to keep their prices down :)
roamingfeet
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.
this sig limit is too small to put anything good h
an Access-like program
I remember when those were called "databases."
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 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.
When fins brush by your heel
That's not just an eel..
That's a moray.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
It's a PRE-RELEASE build, of a FREE package. WTF do you want with it, nuts and a cherry?
sulli
RTFJ.
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.
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
.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.
A few months after buying StarDivision, Sun opensources the commercial application under the brand OpenOffice.org (notice the
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!
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.
Any news about a grammar/style checking tool?
What I would like to know is when does Microsoft Office get better OpenOffice support?
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.
[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?
Join the anonymous, help develop the network: http://www.i2p2.de
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.
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.
What I would like to know is when does Microsoft Office get better Microsoft Office support?
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.
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.
* 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
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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.
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.
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.
Treehugger? Treehugger... Treehugger!
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).
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
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!
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.
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
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
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
Actually, yes... there's that annoying little light bulb.