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Open Office 2.0 Beta Candidate Released

JPyObjC Dude writes "The OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta candidate has been released. You can find the feature guide that covers the wide array of improvements over the current 1.1 release. There are a bunch of problematic UI quirks in 1.1 that have been fixed in 2.0." Feature categories include increased interoperability with Microsoft Office, Asian Language Features, Developer-Specific Features, and new Internet based features. Commentary and an interview with Colm Smyth available at NewsForge.com.

27 of 415 comments (clear)

  1. OO.o for OS X? by amichalo · · Score: 2, Informative

    Not to be off topic, but there was a great OO.o 1.1 based version native to OS X - cannot recall the name.

    Has this (yet to be remembered by me) group made any announcement on using the new 2.0 code in their OS X implementation?

    --
    I only came here to do two things; kick some ass, and drink some beer...looks like we're almost out of beer.
    1. Re:OO.o for OS X? by Noksagt · · Score: 4, Informative

      The most native that I have seen is NeoOffice. Native look & feel through carbon and java.

    2. Re:OO.o for OS X? by Fortun+L'Escrot · · Score: 1, Informative

      http://www.neooffice.org/ its not ready for prime time. and im not sure (read i havent looked to hard) but i think its on some sort of pause. i have no evidence for any of this.

  2. Re:WP? by Marthisdil · · Score: 5, Informative

    WriterPerfect filter spec link Writer The WordPerfect import filter is supported. You can now open a WordPerfect document in OpenOffice.org. http://specs.openoffice.org/writer/fileIO/writerpe rfect.sxw Seems so.

  3. StarOffice 8 (beta) by SignificantBit · · Score: 2, Informative

    Just in case StarOffice 8 beta is also available here.
    A month ago I installed a pre-relase build of OpenOffice.org (not the RC) and run very very slowly and buggy. Then, i download and try StarOffice 8 and it run beautiful.
    I assume OO.org RC must be at the same stability/maturity level as Sun beta is.

  4. Torrent link here! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    http://borft.student.utwente.nl:6969/ is the tracker

    OOo_2.0bc_Win32Intel_install.zip
    OOo_2.0bc_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz
    these are direct links to the windows and linux installers.

  5. Re:Corel Suite by wes33 · · Score: 5, Informative

    wordperfect import is supported via the libwpd project. This evidently still needs some work (although wpd2sxw does a good job for me). As the OO people acknowledge (in a linked document):

    "the filter needs continuous development to arrest bit-rot, and to improve it's capabilities. Many such developments have already taken place, but are not merged/proposed due to the voracious demands of bureaucratic process, and the commensurate stifling of the will-to-live."

    I know the feeling ...

  6. Re:Corel Suite by Daravon · · Score: 2, Informative

    I can't find the link offhand, but my company (which does support work for other local businesses) was able to find a filter for OpenOffice that allowed you to open Corel documents and save them into other formats. The filter wouldn't allow you to save back into the Corel format, but if you're wanting to convert, then you can save the old documents to MS or OOo formatting.

    --
    I traded all my mod points for these magic beans.
  7. Re:Corel Suite by mopslik · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've slowly started a switch to Open Office, but opening old documents and spreadsheet is impossible with Open Office, if they are any of the Corel Formats.

    While conversion might take a good few days, have you tried using Corel's own (slightly older) conversion tool? Would a simple WP -> Word -> OO.o conversion work? Of course, this wouldn't help you with the Quattro files.

    After the initial conversion pains, you should be good to go in OO.o's sxw format.

  8. Re:Corel Suite by arivanov · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, you simply have not run into the other big OO gremlin yet.

    Not a single vector graphics import format works properly.

    The ones that barely work (Autocad for example) lose colors and most of the formatting. So if you want to draw a half decent diagram using DIA and import it into an OO presentation you might as well forget it. Your only chance is to export it as a raster image and import it in OO. The result is horrible by all means. Horrible size, horrible visually, horrible in a print form and horrible to edit.

    And OO 2.0 does not fix a single one of this issues. Instead of that we get visual candy - KDE widget support. Excuse me, but can we actually get the basic functionality fixed first before we get into Clippy land.

    --
    Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
    http://www.sigsegv.cx/
  9. Re:Maximum row number by no+parity · · Score: 2, Informative

    You mean, like this?

  10. Re:One day it'll be as good as MS Office! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Hopefully the OpenOffice team has incorperated support for Clippy (finally!!).

    And hopefully they'll remove it soon after! Clippy isn't in Office anymore; stop using outdated arguments against Office.

  11. Re:track changes? by ictyl · · Score: 3, Informative

    I would assume that version 2.0 of OO.o will support track changes, since the version 1.1.3 that I am running does... (look in the Edit->Changes submenu)

    It has even worked with the MSWord track changes the few times I have tried it.

  12. Re:Maximum row number by Florian+Weimer · · Score: 2, Informative

    He isn't joking, I'm afraid. The Cisco GPL ("General Price List") used to have more than 32,000 lines. Apparently, such abuse of Excel as a database (or CSV exchange format replacement) is quite common.

  13. Re:Native Widgets! by moonbender · · Score: 4, Informative

    No.

    No engineering work has been performed on Quartz or Aqua development within the OpenOffice.org project since mid 2003. For the last year and a half all engineering work focusing on a native Mac OS X OpenOffice.org version has been concentrated in the NeoOffice/J project, using a combination of Java and Carbon technologies to replace X11.

    Due to various licensing, political, and fundamental engineering difficulties it is likely, for the near future, that native Aqua porting work will be based off of the NeoOffice.org project and not under the direct aegis of OpenOffice.org.
    (from http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/timeline.html)

    This was reported on Slashdot a couple of weeks ago.

    --
    Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
  14. Re:But I just got done compiling OpenOffice 1.0 . by Stevyn · · Score: 2, Informative

    For gentoo users though who are used to compiling both from scratch, OOo takes much longer. Of course, that's why I use openoffice-bin.

  15. Yay! Multi-lingual! by sbryant · · Score: 3, Informative

    One thing that was an annoyance about OO.o 1.x was that you needed a complete new installation if you wanted a different language. I have users who have different language preferences using the same system, and while the desktop software (KDE in this case) can be switched, OO.o couldn't.

    Well, that's now fixed in 2.0! You can add language packs to an existing installation! spec link

    Yay!

    -- Steve

    PS. Anyone know if Firefox can/will support this functionality?

  16. Re:How's the database? by SixDimensionalArray · · Score: 3, Informative

    On a side note, using M$ Access as a front-end to MySQL has been possible for quite a while using MySQL's MyODBC connector. It might not give you all the features of MySQL, but it works fairly well for simple stuff. Just try googling "Access & MySQL" http://www.google.com/search?q=using+ms+access+wit h+mysql&sourceid=mozilla-search&start=0&start=0&ie =utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla:e n-US:official.

    Regardless, I definitely agree with everyone - I would LOVE, SUPPORT and CONTRIBUTE to a 100% open source "generic" database interface. I think it would be a huge hit with open source advocates and corporations because that way, end users could have any easy way to interface with open source databases!

    -6d

  17. Re:One day it'll be as good as MS Office! by malthusan · · Score: 2, Informative

    May I recommend http://www.neooffice.org/? It integrates OOo into Mac OS X via Java, and the latest version is the best so far. It's a little slow to load, but that could be my iBook. On the whole, I've been pleased with it. I've used MSOffice, Abiword, Mellel, BBEdit, ZWrite, and a few others editors/word processors (all for text editing, no programming), and NeoOfficeJ is the best I've found so far.

  18. Re:Corel Suite by mkosmul · · Score: 2, Informative

    Here's a description of how using some OOo macros can help you with issues you encounter when converting WordPerfect documents to the OpenOffice.org file format: http://hektor.umcs.lublin.pl/~mikosmul/computing/a rticles/openoffice-macros.html

  19. Office Standard Student and Teacher Edition by westlake · · Score: 2, Informative
    If Office was $79 or $99 (for the version with all the bells and whistles) I would by it, but im going to have to stick with 2000 for a long time on my windows box

    Amazon lists MS Office Standard Student and Teacher Edition 2003 for $125.
    Installs on three PCs, no student-teacher ID required. Ranks #3 on the Amazon software sales chart. Student-Teacher Office 2004 for the Mac is $136. Ranks #18.

  20. On Moving NeoOffice to 2.0 by soullessbastard · · Score: 4, Informative
    Disclaimer: I am a developer of OpenOffice.org for Mac OS X and a founder of the NeoOffice project.

    I don't mean to be a curmudgeon, but NeoOffice/J won't be available in a 2.0 beta anytime soon. There are a number of reasons:
    • 2.0 isn't finished yet on any platform! We've already got so much on our plate that we simply can't spend our time working on such a large codebase that hasn't even yet reached code-freeze.
    • Mac OS X (X11) build support and testing for 2.0 isn't finished yet! In fact, it's only just begun. Because NeoOffice/J is built on top of the X11 base, we need to have a solid X11 version running and compiling before we can isolate whether bugs are inherent to Mac OS X or whether they are unique to the GUI replacement layer.
    • We haven't even finished NeoOffice/J 1.1! We're still working on trying to iron out all the bugs in the 1.1 based product. Moving to 2.0 is obviously going to introduce new bugs, and we can't consciously shoot ourselves in the foot right before a final release.
    • Translation of 2.0 isn't complete. NeoOffice/J supports localizations in over 40 languages, and we definitely don't want to leave any languages behind. We won't be considering moving until all of our supported languages are available.
    • 2.0 is not the final 2.0.x release. This is just a matter of fact...2.0 will probably have bugs after it is introduced and will have another 2.0.1 release, a 2.0.2 release, etc. It's easy to get caught up in the hamster wheel of keeping up with the torrent of patches and point releases from Hamburg and we can't afford to lose focus and let native porting suffer.
    • Moving to 2.0 is going to be a lot of work. Definitely months worth of dedicated work, actually, perhaps even more than a year. Just going from 1.0 to 1.1 took Patrick over a year easy and we're still not finished with that jump yet.
    • There are higher priorites than moving to 2.0. While folks love to clamor for "feature parity", we have different priorities (well, I do, perhaps Patrick disagrees). I am more than happy to trade 2.0 features in exchange for working on and completing the equally complex Mac OS X specific tasks, including:
      • getting the first "Final" release of NeoOffice/J!
      • moving to Java 1.4/1.5...crucial for the long-term viability of Neo/J on Tiger and future operating system revisions. There's no sense in spending a year perfecting 2.0 only to find it won't run on the latest and greatest. We already have to work around crashing bugs in the 1.3.1 VM every time there's just a minor update (e.g. 10.3.7 -> 10.3.8), and there's gotta be only so many more updates for which we can find workarounds until the VM just plain no longer works.
      • implementing the NWF and other Aqua widgets
      • using native file dialogs
      • beginning to redesign the interface to adhere to Aqua HIG
    • We only have so much time available! Although Patrick is truly astounding, there really is only so much time available as we need to feed our families and pay the rent from time to time. With limited resources available and several large and very technical projects looming on the horizon, they need to get prioritized.

    We're intending to backport the major feature of 2.0 that is required...OpenDocument format support. There are plans for an OpenOffice.org 1.1.5 release on other platforms that provides OpenDocument support which we hope to incorporate.

    What's most likely going to happen is that we'll try doing a NeoOffice/J 1.5 release with Aqua widgets and other Mac-specific features and technical enhancements. Our #1 goal isn't to keep up with the most up to date OOo release, but rather, to make a great Mac OS X office suite. NeoOffice/J 1.1 is the most solid foundation upon which to build it since it's the most bug free.

    Without substantial assistance (e.g. perfecting

  21. Re:Let's just hope by dizzyduck · · Score: 2, Informative

    The OO.o equation editor syntax is amazing, but it's useless for all but the most simplest of documents until they get the equations properly aligned. Manually aligning fives pages of equations is no fun, I can assure you.

    Oh well, back to MathType and Word.

    --
    Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
  22. Re:How's the database? by Ded+Mike · · Score: 2, Informative

    Druid is what you are probably looking for, and it reliably and almost painlessly integrates with the hsqldb/Base front and back ends.

    --
    Remember guys, this is Amerika. Just because you have the most votes, doesn't mean you get to win.--Fox Mulder
  23. Re:How's the database? by killjoe · · Score: 2, Informative

    rekall

    Now get to work, they need help :)

    --
    evil is as evil does
  24. Re:Native Widgets! by richlv · · Score: 2, Informative

    i believe i've seen a discussion about this - according to some bizzarre microsoft systray usage guidelines oo.org has removed this funcitonality from it's windows quickstarter.

    maybe you should try to express your opinion in mailing lists (users@openoffice.org, for example)

    --
    Rich
  25. Re:One day it'll be as good as MS Office! by cowbutt · · Score: 2, Informative
    But, why the hell does OpenOffice launch so slowly? I mean, really. Gnumeric launches in two seconds. Abiword launches in 4 seconds. OpenOffice (writer or calc) launches in 25 seconds?? An app that starts piggy, feels piggy.

    Because it's a large application (it includes lots of cross-platform portability toolkit functions), written in C++. This affects Mozilla and KDE too. More info here.

    If you're not using a distro that includes prelinking, you should upgrade. If you are, you should make sure that the prelink process runs regularly.