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.

Comments

Re:How's the database?

[hey!]

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.