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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.
The only thing keeping my small office from switching over to OpenOffice is compatability with the Corel Suite, specifically Word Perfect and Quattro Pro.
It used to be what our officed used exclusivley, but several people have been having issues with them. 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.
is to work exactly like MS Office. Let's learn from the success of Firefox (vs Mozilla). Shortcuts, Menus, should be similar even if functionality is different. So people can migrate from Word without noticing the difference.
Well, yeah. The open source databases are way beyond Access in robustness and performance and compare favorably with commercial offerings for non-enterprise level stuff. As a database professional, I would never willingly target Access as a delivery platform.
But what is missing is the ability to give a normal person the capacity to muck around. That means spreadsheet entry view, a form entry view, forms design and report design components. Are you going to run a fortune 500 MRP system on Access? No. Are you going to run your office supply inventory on it? Sure. Even I use Access some times to do one shot projects like data conversions.
What gets people into trouble with Access is when a small, ad hoc project gets not-so-small and not-so-ad-hoc anymore. We call it "hitting the Access wall". The world would benefit greatly from giving a system like mysql, postgres, maxdb, for firebird (preferably your choice!) the kind of front end convenience Access does.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
My understanding is that it is NOT native widgets.
Instead OOo did a lot of work to upgrade their own unique GUI framework to look and behave LIKE native widgets. This should guarantee longer load times, some unusual behaviors, and difficult integration. Most importantly though, this guarantees a duplication of effort as they maintain a completely seperate code base rather than contributing to one of the alternatives (eg. GTK+, wxWindows, SWT).
As a C++ developer, I'm not going to work with the OOo code until they get their act together and start sharing code and work. Until then their code base is innaccesible to me.
Please correct me if I'm wrong about what OOo is doing (I hope I am).