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OpenOffice.org 2.0 Preview
Reader lord_rob the only on wrote in to mention a preview of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0 running on tectonic. From the article: "It is not too bold to say that OpenOffice.org 2.0 will usher in a new era of functionality, reliability, compatibility and ease of use. The extensive changes and enhancements which are to be included in the upcoming release are all the evidence needed to justify this assertion." As we mentioned earlier this week, the beta candidate is currently available.
It looks really nice. Especially the addition of "Base", the database portion which appears to be much more well thought out than most "easy to use" database products. FileMaker Pro? Forget about it. More like FileMangler Pro! ;P
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
...Then maybe the next version of StarOffice will be StarOffice 9, since Sun obviously thought the jump from 1.0 to 1.1 was worth a jump from 6 to 7. ..
.
.
(it's a joke. Lighten up.)
I have used OpenOffice.org (and derivatives like NeoOffice) off and on and find that most people should find all the functionalities that they need in an office in OpenOffice.org
Charles Jo
www.charlesjo.com
I find it funny, b/c my friends are still shelling out hundreds of dollars for M$ Office. At this point, I've decided never to pay again for an Office suite as long as Openoffice.org is around. There's no point. What I do not get, is why people are still acting stuck up when they say they use "M$ Office Professional." So, you can mail merge...OH wait OO.org can do that too...and you can play Pac Man in Excel...good for you...lol.
Help me, help you. - Jerry McGuire
As someone who uses OpenOffice 1.1.3 on a daily basis this is great news. My only gripe with OpenOffice so far has been the annoying quirks in th e UI. Looks like a lot of these have been taken care of and MS Office should finally have some real competition.
Anyone know if you can view and edit two pages side by side like you can in Word? It's a really useful feature when you have a decent sized screen to work with. I have played with an earlier snapshot release a bit but haven't been able to find anything in the menus that would accomplish it.
You forgot to mention, that it has been confirmed by Netcraft.
Let's hope that all theese new features will give OO.o the momentum it needs to topple the king and enforce openstandards and help them spread to other areas of software. I think we only need to find a weak point in MS's monopoly and then they will be gone in a matter of years, or at least be reduced to a small market share where they won't hurt anything and might actually begin to innovate again.
Wow, this looks really good. Being a Linux user and student, I've always wished I was as productive in Linux-native word processors as I am on Windows with Word (currently 2003). However, after using Word for my whole life, AbiWord and OpenOffice (OpenOffice especially) seem unintuitive (obviously the result of Microsoft brainwashing ;)). Hopefully OpenOffice 2.0 will solve this problem for me, but in the meantime does anybody know of a good (as in you've actually used it successfully) Word-convert user's guide to AbiWord or OpenOffice? If there's another (preferably Gnome-native) word processor that you know a guide for, that's okay too.
Has it grown even bigger and slower than it is now?
OOo is great, but I discovered the other day that it doesn't work anymore on my older laptop with 96M of ram and nothing loaded but a basic KDE. It used to work there not so long ago, not fast or anything, but well enough to do presentation with Impress on the cheap. No more, which is a real pain.
So if 2.0 has grown even more monstrous, I'm not even trying it out, nosiree. My other laptop still has enough oomph to use 1.1.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
http://www.mirrordot.org/stories/8815ecf16d8124c37 5e3bff7e0ec2fea/index.html
OpenOffice 2.0 beta (and every single other version of OpenOffice I have used) has a nasty show stopper bug in it.
The bug is this: If I want to make a document use any font besides their (IMHO, ugly) default "Nimbus Roman No9 L" font, the font will revert back to the Nimbus roman font if I hit the right arrow at the end of the document. Because of how I write, I frequently do this, resulting in what I type being in the wrong font.
I can't find any way to work around this issue (besides having to constantly look at what I am typing and changing the font when this bug pops up).
AbiWord (both 2.0 and 2.2) have a serious issue with being very slow. In particular, when I hit the up and down arrows at the ends of the vertical scrollbar, AbiWord freezes for one or two seconds while slowly scrolling. AbiWord also does this when I need to change pages while typing. AbiWord 1.0, which didn't have this problem doesn't compile without great effort (thanks, GCC developers, for breaking code that compiled just fine only three years ago), and doesn't run when compiled.
SIAG is very unstable and frequently crashes on me (using both the Xaw and the Xaw32 toolkits.).
I finally settled on Ted, an excellent light word processor which compiles and runs fine. Naturally, this word processor is also not bug free on my system; it has a problem with finding font, requiring some serious hacking in the file appFont.c before I could use this program to write a paper.
I am using Fedora Core Three and wasn't able to find a word processor without serious bugs in it. I finally had to do some source code hacking to get a word processor that I could use.
That said, please test it! OpenOffice.org's success in the long run is determined by the visionaries like us who give good feedback so that it can eventually make it to the mainstream smoothly.
Berto
Openoffice seems to be a prime example of how difficult it is to fix the problem of a monopoly. I mean how good does it have to get to be considered suitable for the average office bod?
Hopefully this release will be able to get more attention in the media.
1) launches faster :)
2) new quickstarter is useless, cannot launch apps from it. hopefully will add shortcuts to all apps like in old one.
3) uses new opendocument format. soon to be supported by legacy release of openoffice 1.1 and koffice.
http://www.tectonic.co.za/graphics/ooo-writer.jpg
Looks like they still haven't gotten the white page centered on the screen yet. It's only been about 5 years since it was first suggested. Oh well. And the interface is still cluttered with tiny icons, and there's the useless styles and formatting window. Not much of a "complete interface redesign" as far as I can tell.
Try creating a chart in the spreadsheet application to see what I mean. Compared to excel it's a dog.
That said. I use open office at home beacuse it's free.
It's good to see WordPerfect filters finally. Not having an import filter for WordPerfect was a real set back for us trying to move our section to a Linux based desktop. Hope they work well.
This whole suit is rather unstable , but of course it is a beta/alpha/whatever. Writer is fine, but Impress kept on crashing on me. I eventually had to go back to 1.1 for editing the powerpoint file I was working on. I haven't tried any of the other programs in this suit.
This is only a beta, so things can only get better.
I thought they cleaned up the interface, but IMO it's worse than ever. Not only are the icons ugly, they also introduced a non-native toolbar with a fading color in the background and if that's not enough for you, then you can still customize all the other colors, like the background of the window... you can however not change the background of the toolbar...
Any news if they are working on native Mac OS X port or not ?
I post this out of genuine curiosity and do not intend to troll. Where is the innovation in OO.org? Yes, I have used it, but a few extremely annoying glitches, such as copy/paste not always working correctly, made me switch back to Office. From my experience it is just a direct recreation of MS Office. Any feature that is added to Office seems to just show up a version later in OO. They are nearly identical even down to the UI.
Is the fact that it is free the only innovation?
I'm a firm believer in the philosophy of a ruling class. Especially since I rule. -Randal, Clerks
You work for a woman? Who's the loser now?
So with Open Office 2.0 in the near future how will sun promote it? A firefox like campaign? (That would be something to see. Future Headline: "Microsoft Claims Open Office not a Threat".) However, I've always wondered if sun's motives for funding open office were a bad thing. (Apparently they just want to make Microsoft mad.) Still yet version 2.0 looks great. Base is cool. The new icons are a plus and that Math program would be great for educators. As for community they seem to be really into it. (Open Office Splashscreen contest.) Yet I wonder... Who has power in the project? Are they evil? Do I get a t-shirt?
Looks good. Word import filters work much better than before. However, if a font is not available, OO uses some really lame un-anti-aliased crap font (I don't know what). Basically most docs authored using Word will have this problem with Arial and Helvetica (very common fonts). Now I was able to find and install Arial with little trouble but I cannot find helvetica anywhere! I even have crossover office installed and it seems to use helvetica with out problems but I can't find the file, it isn't in the fonts directory. I even looked on a win2k box I have and couldn't find it either.
a) what is the deal with this?
b) shouldn't OO have a better fallback behavior for missing fonts?
"... OpenOffice.org 2.0 will usher in a new era of functionality, reliability ..."
..."
"This beta is not for the faint of heart, and should not be considered as reliable
So on the basis of trying out some unreliable software, we conclude that the final version will be reliable?
While it may turn out to be true, the logic is lacking here.
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
i hope it can unlock ms word documents..
or is this a cryptographic-rights issue?..
My only gripe with OpenOffice so far has been the annoying quirks in th e UI
My biggest gripe with OO.o (as of 1.1) is that it's still stuck in the MS single-user system world. I hope that 2.0 will break this, and make it a true multi-user application.
I've tried 1.1, and the "multi-user" install is nothing of the sort - in addition to being painful, you still have to "install" it for each user, after you've "installed" it - quite a pain on a multi-user system (try doing it for 20 users - I can only imagine what it must be like for systems with a few hundred users).
Just like every other Unix app, I should be able to install it once, and every user on the system should have access to it - I shouldn't have to do anything for each user.
Has anyone installed it on Windows 98SE, with 64MB of RAM or less? Is that even possible with this release, or is another Office product better to go with?
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I tried the Beta, and I don't think it's ready. I'm not referring to the crashes, those are expected. I'm referring to the database application they include. Emulating Microsoft Access is a necessary effort, but it is tough, and they have a long way to go.
For instance, when you try to design a form, you are given a blank space in what appears to be OO Writer. It was not drag-n-drop easy and intuitive. In fact, I couldn't figure out how to make forms without a wizard at all.
Due to crashes, I never got to see how they make the forms work behind the scenes. Hopefully, they will not require their OO scripting langauge, as that too it odd and difficult to work with.
If they want to succeed, they need to perform scripting in basic, java, php, or some other mainstream language with an easy-to-use object oriented API, like VisualBasic. They also need to make the forms more intuitive.
In OO 2 its supposed to load faster, but to be honest, Hell Works 2.0 has done basically everything I've needed since 1988. Office 2000 added some useful features, but then I switched to Macintosh anyway. I wish they would optimize the code and take out the bloat. I would be impressed if just once someone came up with an application that version 2.0 ran on older hardware instead needing newer stuff because of code optimatzation.
I have Office V.x for my Mac primarily for one program: PowerPoint. I've just purchased iWork and damned impressed with Pages and Keynote 2. Still not as many design templates as Powerpoint for Mac, but I am sure that will change with time.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
This made me laugh:
"... the new limit will allow advanced users to make fuller use of OpenOffice.org Calc when dealing with vast quantities of data."
More like moronic dumbasses working on a job that far exceeds their own capabilities. It's a bit like using a teaspoon to dig for diamonds.
Has someone managed to set up a mirror? The site seems to slashdotted already.
It's geared more for installing the primary binaries on a server share and then installing the minimal install on workstations. Once you look at it that way, it kind of makes sense- doesn't make it any less painful on a local install for multi-user, but since most of the distributions are taking care of most of that pain for you lately, it's less of an issue unless you upgrade...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
This was the biggest showstopper for us - multi-user.
Believe it or not, I've had a 4 month old build of OOo 2.0 (1.9.49, I think) running on our Terminal Server for the students. Not even a glitch. Far better this than the absolute hell I went through installing it in the labs.
Yes, thank God, they've finally fixed the install! And thanks for asking - a lot of fellow admins out there were totally turned off because of this glaring omission. They should be aware that OOo 2.0 installs like Office does.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
A lot of geeks and non-geeks would love to switch to OpenOffice.org if it had a sexy commercial like "It's all about the O...", but with a theme like "It's all about the OOo...".
I've given it a decent try for several days now, and it keeps screwing up tables when it imports them from MS Word.
The tables I've got aren't complex, but there is a fair bit of "tables within tables" for the sake of formatting. While I know there's better ways of doing this sort of "poor man's page layout" within Word, unfortunately I'm stuck with using these templates for the forseeable future.
I'm trying to isolate the problem at the moment to give a nice small document to the OOo developers to work with, but be warned - some of these table layout bugs only become obvious when the document is printed and the layout is all wrong.
Other than that, OOo 2 seems a lot more stable and is pretty much a rock solid replacement for MS Office in my experience to date. If you don't have to muck around with stupid Word tables in document templates, I'd say go for it!
> if they threw in some boobies, I wouldn't complain.
0 1/ Images/school_styles/man_breasts.jpgs ay-it-in-english.com/EverydayEnglish/B odyParts/MyTorso.jpga rm/pigs/pigs1315.jpg
You weren't exactly specific, so here's what a quick google search found (work safe):
http://www.gyeah.com/ezine/ramblings/2001/Aug20
http://www.
http://www.joelday.com/TheF
Another review:
It hasn't quite caught up with MS Office 2003 in terms of functionality - but who cares? OpenOffice 2.0 is more that good enough for your average office worker. The suite is comparible to older versions of MS Office, which are functioning fine on millions of desktops around the world. The only things that I really disliked was the increased reliance on proprietary software (Java JRE) and the interoperability issues I experienced cutting and pasting tables between calc, write and impress. The Beta is currently a bit slow - however that should improve once it is released and any debugging code is removed. The user interface feels significantly nicer than the previous version; however, the dialog boxes are still not perfect. The suite uses Oasis file format - which may become the holy grail of document formats. HTML editing in write is far superior to MS Word and I recommend OpenOffice as a filter for word documents that require conversion to HTML or Oasis. Write includes a long awaited WordPerfect import filter. Overall I was extremely impressed with the new MS Office interoperability and the application's overall functionality.
* Very good new functionality
* Oasis file format - may be the new killer feature
* Meets the needs of your average text oriented office worker
* Excellent MS Office Integration
* Annoying Java JRE reliance. Either open source java or remove the dependancy.
* Dialog boxes occasionally still feel clunky
* Crashes and table copy and paste issues need to be cleaned up before gold release
* Free and open source
7.7 out of 10
The thing I use the spreadsheet for the most results in a graph. OMG is it ever slow! It would be really nice if they would fix that.
On the positive side, Oo has given me fewer problems using complex numbers than Excel. Excel does have some suprising abilities like doing FFTs for instance. I haven't even tried to do anything like that in Oo because the resulting graphs would take forever to produce.
Why do I harp on the graph problem? If my spreadsheet has a graph and I change the data then I have to wait while the graph gets redrawn before I can do anything else. I realize that I could work around it but I have to remember to do so. The result is that I get a lot of 'Oh shit' moments.
I love OpenOffice, but this preview won't even run on my Window XP with its Blackbox desktop environment. Very annoying...Works perfectly otherwise. I just hate the fact that I can't spend a bit of time getting used to OpenOffice 2.0 before the final, and stable, build is released.
I don't think that was Sun's only motivation. Most people think of Sun as only a server vendor. They really started out as a workstation company and still make a lot of workstation products. They were very good machines for workstation type functions such as CAD, EDA, simulations and other engineering/mathematical applications. Typical IBM PC's couldn't handle the type of workload these workstations did.
As PC's and the collaboration and office tools used them became more prominent (Windows, Office, groupware), people that only used workstations were at a disadvantage because they couldn't run these Windows applications on their workstations. Then PC's started to get more powerful and were able to handle some more of the work that you'd normally get a workstation for.
Sun at one point had a PCI x86 card that you could insert in your workstation to run windows in solaris. Not sure if they still have it, but it shows how important running these windows only applications had become. If you needed a workstation, you also needed a PC for the "regular" stuff. This made the already high cost of workstations more expensive because they couldn't handle everything the PC could.
So, the goal to "make Microsoft mad" isn't the only reason. The reason was, that you shouldn't be locked into any particular platform to be able to function in most organizations. With an office suite that can read and write to the defacto company standards that runs anywhere you want it to run, you were freer to choose the platform that made more sense for you, without having to have two computers.
This is probably the most compelling reason that Sun did what they did with Star/OpenOffice, not to just tick someone off. It's not just good for Solaris users, it's good for people that want to run any platform they choose. Including Linux users.
Imagine a company that can give it's engineers high end workstations running unix, it's call center and admin staff linux or some thin client based on a *nix, it's public relations and design groups Macs, etc. Or you can choose whichever you waht that makes you more productive still while being able to read and write documents sent from others in and out of the company. This is a very important thing for someone that doesn't sell windows based machines.
That's why projects like evolution and the various connectors are important as well. I feel it's a shame IBM never went all out with LotusNotes. It had a lot of good things going for it. Maybe if they opened sourced it they wouldn't have gotten slammed in market share by exchange like they did. It also would have given everyone a very mature, well known, widely deployed groupware product. I wonder if it's even still a viable option to do such a thing anymore.
Open Source Java DAO Generator
What has won me over from M$ office is mainly the excellent support for my language. You just grab the version for your language, run the installer and voila!..spell checker, hyphenator all in place and with excellent accuracy. No activations, no product keys, no EULAS. In 5' you have a fully localized working opensource office suite!.. If you stick to M$ you either have to find some form of addon pack for your language (crappy crappy crappy) or get a localized version (and pray that they won't charge you high).
Community support has made OO *VERY* relevant in situations like these. From what I have seen OO2 has a much more agreeable interface and the load times are roughly the same (perhaps slightly better). Well, from my point of view, it definitely gets better all the time...
(Score: -1, Commenter expresses desire to program in VB)
I, for one, welcome our new OOooverlords.
What encouraging P2P piracy means is that those cheaper alternatives will just get pirated too, so they have to raise prices to compensate--thereby not being so "cheap" anymore.
Looks like they have switched to using native graphics engines instead of there own system. The screenshots show it adapting to it's host system like Firefox does.
GTK (and QT?) integration is cool, but did they have to copy Microsoft Office's stupid toolbar graphics on Windows??
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
It's called "reinventing the wheel." All these big OSS projects feel the need to rewrite everything for themselves. Running GNOME but prefer a KDE app? Okay, so now you have both GNOME libraries and KDE libraries in memory. Then you fire up Mozilla--now there's another ~50MB of reinvented widgets and libraries. Mozilla even has its own string class! Now, you also decide to fire up OpenOffice, which ALSO does its own thing with widgets and classes.
So you have four versions of widgets, strings, and so on all loaded into memory when they all should be using one set provided by the desktop environment. Why this sort of bloat is considered "okay" in the community is above me, especially when this sort of thing would be completely BASHED if it were from Microsoft.
Is the fact that it is free the only innovation?
Welcome to OSS. We bitch about Office and Windows, and then clone everything about them.
firefox is a success because it does somethign for people that ie does not: tabbed browsing and bookmark tabs in folder
success outside of geek world is built on very simple things that sarisfy problems.
(marketing 11)
open office does not solve a problem - it is just an alternative
and as noted it has the problem of people who have built excel macros
I think you can only type Latin in it. Just look at the screenshot. Damn these beta versions...
dows anybody think that open office is ready for the ecdl? the ecdl foundation seems to be a good to place to try and convience about using the suite. But it has to be ready for mainstream. As things are now, at ecdl exams we get files in the format of MS Office. Even though most of the time are pretty simple files, ecdl exams like word and excel must work flawlessly. how is mail merge, tables, tabs, bullets and numberring formatting in general and spell checking works out? I have just downloaded it and i am going to try it out but from a first look it feels pretty slow. We shall see!!
What this app also needs is a major interface redesign.
I had the joy of being able to use Pages from iWork all day yesterday. After using that app which has something like five toolbar buttons total, seeing this cluttered interface of tiny, tiny toolbar buttons all jammed into two rows with everything and the kitchen sink right there staring back at you makes my eyes hurt.
I mean, it looks almost exactly like Microsoft Office. Even a lot of the toolbar icons are incredibly similar and function the same way. This is just an Office clone, not a new, innovative OSS office suite. Businesses don't mind paying for Office and won't see a reason to switch if they can just get the real thing that runs faster, integrates better, and opens/reads their files.
It's geared more for installing the primary binaries on a server share and then installing the minimal install on workstations.
That (again) is the MS single-user philosophy, and it makes no sense at all in a Unix environment.
The Unix way would be install on a server share, and then just running it from the client. Again, no "install" (minimum or otherwise) should be required.
Yeah, you're a real visionary, using buggy bloatware that's incompatible with the rest of the world just so you can be an Open-source hippie. Get that vision checked.
has anyone been able to compile v2.0 on 64 bits architecture such as AMD64
right now, the only way to run OpenOffice 1.0 on x86_64 is through the 32bits compatibility mode while OOo 2.0 promise to offer native version
What the AC described is the correct behavior if you're doing "format-as-you-go," not a showstopper bug.
An immediately noticeable and significant change to OpenOffice.org is the complete redesign of the interface. This has been updated to reflect the current look and feel of alternative office suites...
Translation:
OpenOffice.org has been updated to copy the interface and feel of MS Office 2003.
I'll try it, though I still prefer MSOffice because of its color scheme and better-organized features. It has only to do with MY preferences though, so don't criticize me because I don't support OpenOffice.
Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Bugs are good for building character in the user.
Stallman has been using GNU+Linux rather than GNU/Linux for some time now, after it was pointed out to him that the / has a super/sub implication that was not necessarily present "back in the day", when it was less prevalent for pathnames - remember, Stallman first developed software back when many filesystems didn't have subdirectories!
However, for whatever reason, countless geeks/geek-wannabes and trolls immediately jumped upon this as suggesting that Stallman thought Linux was a subset of GNU (technically incorrect, as Linus never assigned copyright to the FSF), based on the Unix style hierarchical filesystem path syntax.
I'm using the beta version now, its sorta unstable :( hopefully this will be better
Thanks, I'm downloading the beta now.
when they start to copy clippy.
then it's all over.
Yes, it's funny, but at the same time, it's so true :( One of the things i don't like about Open Source is the tendency of the community to go as incompatible as they can get.
Sometimes it's good trying new things. But when you're talking about REPLACING EXISTING PRODUCTS... please.
Personally I got tired of handcranking my old notebook. I just bought a very nice 2600 celron with 512 ram for $650. I've seen them lately for under $600. It has a DVD drive, firewire and built in modem and 10/100 network. Is it as fast as my 3200 Athlon desktop, obviously not but it's saved me many times. I just spend the week working on it while they got the new office set up. Don't blame the software when you want it to be backwardly compatible to out of date equipment. If you don't want the new features stick with the old version. Don't ask them to hobble the software to keep it compatible when most of the rest of are working on equipment that is less than two years old. Some of us much less. I keep all my old software for the reason of occationally having to work on older equipment. Got to say I wish I had a machine that still ran DOS. I have a couple of pieces of software I still miss. The chances of getting the software to work with newer equipment/drivers is highly unlikely. Still be fun to try out software I first ran on a 386 with a 3200 athlon.
Where's Clippy? I mean, what's with that?
That would be something to see. Future Headline: "Microsoft Claims Open Office not a Threat".)
Maybe six months ago, M$ pretty much that. They released a PDF showing the so called advantages of MS Office vs OOo. What was ironic about it was that the PDF was made on a Mac, and that while they had to use an external program to convert the document to PDF, OOo can do it natively.
Every time you post an article on Slashdot, I kill a server. Think of the servers!
Will OpenOffice 2.0 be less of a pig? I'm being serious here - ever since StarOffice 5.1 it's been getting bigger and slower, sort of like Mozilla did. Is there any attempt underway to "Firefox" OpenOffice into something a lot less bloated?
I haven't used Open Office enough to have an opinion, but Elliotte Rusty Harold used it to write a book, and came away with the opinion that the program is full of "GUI Bloopers". More here.
It works fine with opensource Java. the OO.org2 beta from the Ubuntu Hoary universe repository works spectacularly. Open source Java has come a long way since Mono started giving it competition. Here are Ubuntu's current plans wrt Java. It gives you a rough idea of the state of Java in GNOME:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/wiki/JavaIntegration
2.0 is great and all, but shucks, I just spent a whole night downloading and installing the current stable version. couldn't wait, you know, to update from MS Office '97.
Logic, macros, and more
That kind of complacency is why OpenOffice.org is still nowhere near MS Office for many serious applications. It just doesn't (at version 1) have the polish. For example, simple usability issue #1: how do you define keyboard shortcuts to, say, insert a symbol, or apply/remove a style? It's a word processor; I shouldn't have to reach for the mouse and click half a dozen times to do these things!
The same goes for things like word count or mail merge. These are basic features for a WP package, yet in OOo they have (at least in the current version) pretty basic limitations that seriously reduce their usefulness for professional applications. As long as this sort of shortcoming remains, OOo Writer will never seriously challenge MS Word in the "best WP package" stakes. Similar comments apply to Calc vs. Excel. Notice that these are straightforward quality issues, with nothing to do with which product has the current market share or compatibility with the incumbent standard.
Right now, the OpenOffice.org apps get at least 11/10 for effort, but while I'd give them 9/10 as packages for simple hobbyist use, they're only pulling 5/10 as professional tools where minor oversights are unacceptable. That's why professionals spend hundreds on MS Office, and will continue to do so for a while yet. The question is how well OpenOffice 2.0 can improve all the "little things" that make all the difference to professional users.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Or, at least, not a cushy office job. Cushy office jobs are a great gig, and they're only available to those who are willing to play by the rules. So sorry that you're too stuborn to join society, buddy! Cushy office jobs are for mind-controlled losers. :)
BenCurry.net
I switched over to the blue background / white text option in MS word years ago and have a hard time going back to the standard black text on a white background.
Did OOo add this in or are they still leaving it out? That is one of the huge reasons I have stuck with MS Office.. I just can't bare to write essays and papers with out the blue background option. Makes it so much easier on my eyes during long typing sessions.
...that it's already making me money. I've written several magazine articles using 1.1, and the book I'm working on as well.
I've not yet tried the 2.0 previews on Linux, but they have both worked great on Windows. The UI improvements are quite nice, and interoperability with MS formats is even better than before.
Last time I reinstalled my Win2K machine, I didn't even bother with MS Office. OO.org is doing just fine by me.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Huh?
I see you left out testing Kword...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So tell us, what is this bloat you wish to be removed? Is there some subroutine that maniacally allocates memory just to hold? Are there frameworks written and loaded that cannot be invoked? Enlighten us where this bloat is and what causes it so we can remove it.
Seriously, the word "bloat" is so over-used as to be meaningless. Writing such a complicated software suite requires massive and complicated frameworks and patterns. This is not bloat, however much you may want to call it that. It is fundamental groundwork necessary for the application.
Does that mean that it's only as much relatively dirty as it is relatively clean?
Fetch Text URL - Firefox Extension
If you want to change the default font for the entire document, you have to change it in the default style. It's the same in most other word processors.
If this feature weren't there, it would be a pain to try to revert to the default style at the end of the text.
Changint the default style and saving it as the default document means that you'll always have your preferred font when you start up OOo. Isn't that nice?
http://www.mialug.org/downloads/static/documentati on/openoffice-staroffice/OOWriter-Guide.pdf
Pragmatism as an ideology is not particularly pragmatic in the long term. Keep it in mind when you dismiss Free Software
OMG. vi , of course. Ever heard of it at all?
Somebody with mod points... MOD PARENT UP
So, trying to support a more full-featured export than plain text from the OOO word processor might be too much to expect.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Fuck off luser
Any spreadsheet program that doesn't have basic and simple regression analysis is a JOKE. Puh-lease - OOCalc is a JOKE compared to Excel.
7 422 3 66
Just take a look at these...
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=1
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=
The "intent" has been there since it was StarOffice but these yahoos that are currently coding have NO IDEA what the Prosumer needs/wants. So long as these guys think this is an "enhancement" and not a sorely missing feature OO won't have any credibility.
Feel free to mod me down for telling it like it is. A VERY UNHAPPY OO user (except for data analysis which is why I use MS Office).
Don't you think that if they could magically make OO.org run on P166 with 64MB of ram while at the same time offering most of what MS Office offers they would? OO.org has always been slow to launch except on Windows with quicklaunch, that's just the way it is. Once its up and running it quite useable, can't you get over the startup time? Your dad probably waits 10 minutes for AOL to launch and connect online and yet waiting 15 seconds the first time his Free office suite comes up is too much?
Someone else had mentioned this but look at how long Photoshop takes to load on a 2GHz pc. Does the fact that's its slow to launch make the app not useable? Funny how I don't constantly hear that Photoshop is "bloated" everytime there is a story on it. Most people are happy enough with the features it offers to overlook the initial startup speed.
People need to look past the fact that OO.org doesn't launch exactly as fast as MS Office and look at what it offers instead. Namely a Free Open Source, Cross Platform Office suite that does what most business and home users need. Isn't that enough? If your waiting for OO.org to run on old slow hardware and somehow be feature perfect your going to be waiting a long long time.
When it comes to Free, full featured, OSS, Cross-Platform Office suites there is OO.org. End of Story. Let me know when MS Office or any other office suite can do that.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
it exists in a state of relative dirtiness *and* a state of relative cleanliness. It isn't until you observe the program running that one state is determined.
I've been playing with the Beta. I've not done any real work on it, just opened old docs, PP slides, whatever... and mucked around. I've had issues with the new Impress as well. It has crashed a good bit. The animations force the whole, otherwise unused, processor to max out. Inserted images are mangled randomly.
I've sent in error reports for everything so far, using the built in feedback. Hopefully that helps them resolve some of these issues. This all from just playing around and trying to break it with normal-esque stuff.
OK, back I go to writing my thesis. Funky WYSIWYG style crap be damned, I'm climbing the steep learning curve of LaTeX!
...but is there a way to make Calc create a graph that is its own sheet instead of inserting a graph into a data sheet? The lack of this feature alone keeps me from ever considering using OO.
One of the things that really annoyed me at first about OOo, but which I eventually started to like is the auto word completion. As long as I'm on a reasonably fast computer (I use a *LOT* of old computers) where all the constant repainting doesn't bog things down, I am actually starting to use it on a regular basis. You have to learn to ignore it when it is wrong, and watch for the word it's guessing at. When I am typing straight text (i.e., not trying to create an outline or something more complex), I think it gives me a slight advantage.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
It's nice that we consumers are in a position like that now. Sure, Word Perfect was (is?) a terrific product, but it isn't free and OO is certainly its equal, too. All for the bargain price of free.
That said, it's only there because of the hard work of a ganga folks, so if you like it, I hope you're donating a few bucks to the fine folks developing OO. It's worth it.
Running 'Nix is like owning a Lightsaber. It's "a more elegant weapon for a more civilized time."
Just not going to take out my ram sticks to find if it will run with 64MB. Note I am running a memory manager to get past 256 limit without locking up.
OpenOffice still works great with Windows 98 SE 1.1.4 and the BETA.
I clicked on the download for Mac OS X on the beta page and got sent to the mac page and the lame 1.1 version. I think they need to be truly cross platform. There are a lot of desktop Linux users who also use Mac OS X. OO needs to support both to properly support those users.
When you type 'muderfocker' in OpenOffice it corrects it to the actual curse phrase. When you type 'muderfocker' in Word 2003 is has no suggestions.
OpenOffice 2.0 is CLEARLY superior!
"Areas that received particular attention from developers are the enhancement to the document filters for Microsoft Office, as well as the addition of import filters for Corel WordPerfect."
We need to know how much of the MS Office format OOo supports. A test suite that opens MS Word docs in both MS Word, and in OOo, and compares the bitmaps, would let us know which Word rendering features are supported 100.0% by OOo. And therefore which Word features are safe for using in a doc to be distributed. If we made a Word plugin that warned when saving a Word doc with unsupported features, we might stop those proprietary docs from spreading. Which might inhibit MS from adding those features for lockin.
--
make install -not war
I've never requested a feature in Office, but I had an extensive discussion with a Microsoft developer on the Visual Studio team (after he posted here on Slashdot, curiously enough) a couple of years back. He was very keen to hear the views of an end-user, and ultimately I sent him several suggestions, mostly quite trivial and a couple pretty deep. I'm pleased to see that in the beta of the new version, almost everything I mentioned (both the minor tweaks and the "big ideas") has been added in some form or another. I don't know exactly how many people it takes asking for such features to get them in -- I'm sure I won't have been the only one asking for most of them -- but in they are, and the product is better for them.
Now, let's talk about bugs in major OSS applications with dozens of votes and/or dozens of duplicate reports that haven't been addressed more than a year after first being filed, shall we? "It's free, you get what you pay for" is a perfectly valid response from the dev team to such bugs, but then again, "Thanks, but I'll go use [CSS alternative] instead then" is a perfectly valid conclusion from the user.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The sad thing is, it's been a well-known and well-used concept for serious typesetting for decades, but just as everyone's a published author in the Internet age, I guess everyone knows about graphic design and typesetting now we have word processors on our desk. ;-)
As an aside, if I were designing a modern word processor/DTP system from scratch, one of the first big changes I'd make from most of today's software is to get rid of the prominent formatting-on-demand options. Instead, I'd create a robust, flexible, and most importantly easy-to-use framework for templates and styling, and put this at the heart of all formatting. The "Format Font" dialog box with five hundred settings that you can apply independently to individual characters in the document should be the thing that's hidden away where only power users can even find it, and the styling and template features should be on the top-level menu and toolbars, not the other way around.
Unfamiliarity would probably make this approach unpopular for the first five minutes, but experience says that an objectively better solution with clear advantages will catch on with a first wave, and then start to spread. In the long run, you'd do the world a favour by getting rid of most of the horrible formatting that so many people think is clever, even though it's actually harming the readability of their work...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I had an extensive discussion with a Microsoft developer
So, for some random reason, a Microsoft developer talked to you personally and actually listened. Given the hundreds of millions of customers Microsoft has, that's about as lucky as winning the lottery. Most people have to talk to tech "support".
Now, let's talk about bugs in major OSS applications with dozens of votes and/or dozens of duplicate reports that haven't been addressed more than a year after first being filed, shall we?
Yes, let's. Microsoft, of course, doesn't air their dirty laundry in public, so we just don't know how bad it is with them (but it seems pretty bad). Sun, however, does publish their bug tracker for Java. Have a look at their bug parade some time.
"Thanks, but I'll go use [CSS alternative] instead then" is a perfectly valid conclusion from the user.
Don't let the door hit you on your way out.
If I'm going to be abused by tech support and developers at all, at least I don't want to have to pay hundreds of dollars for that privilege every year.
I am a OO user, I have been since I worked at Sun.
:)
(StarOffice, OpenOffice same thing). I like Open Office because it is small. When you (buy/download) MS Word, it is huge... the amount of resources required to effectively run the program is ridiculus. WordPerfect is better, but not by much. I downloaded the beta, its tiny in comparison and yet still appears to have the majority of the usefull features.
Its not perfect mind you, my biggest complaint is the formula editor. WordPerfect has the best equation editor out there, it is really simple to use and form complicated equations with. I can't figure out what the heck Open Office is doing... I haven't gotten it to work once. They could really improve this feature.
But the above didn't stop me from installing in to all my machines... I mean Latex is what should be used for any real papers
you should thank MS for creating work opportunities.
You CAN do this in OOo...in the new beta, go to Tools -> Options -> Open Office.org (the first one) -> Appearance, Under "General" find "Document Background" and select "blue" or pink or green or whatever...
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
In most areas it's just dandy, but I find the commenting and change tracking features still a little crude compared with MS Office. Usable, but reminiscent of my now 13-year-old copy of AmiPro.
I'm running the beta of OpenOffice.org 2 on Linux. It looks nice, but not all the features seem to be working. If you're planning on using OpenOffice.org for anything you find important, use the stable version. I tested the AutoRecover, and it's not working well. Other features may not work correctly as well. I'm sure many of the problems will be fixed in the final release, but please use the stable for anything but testing.
All I want to know is whether the new version can be automated more easily than the old version. Suppose I have to convert 50,000 documents from random word processor formats to a more standard format. Am I doomed to do this manually, or is there a way I can easily interface with the process?
The older versions, you had to keep a whole copy of OOo running which you sent remote commands to, and if you kept it running long enough, it would memory leak until you had none left.
I've been hoping that they will eventually make the conversion stuff a single DLL that you can load and call in-process.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I would love using OO but I somehow think my boss wouldn't understand why do those cool slides with embedded videos stop working as they used to.
When working in something like aesthetic surgery... cool is a MUST HAVE... movies in presentations are a MUST HAVE...
If it's to be used in universities, the Equation Editor has to work. I tried to use it and "something" opened but it certainly wasn't an Equation Editor.
dont get me wrong, i love ooo, and i would be sold if it wasnt for the crappy spellcheck. maybe i have been raised wrong, and schooled wrong. but i suck at spelling, and so does ooo. here is the test that i ran. i spelled the word "Meticulously" phonetically, or fonetically if you will. and in ooo 2beta, i get about 10 sugesstions that all start with the letter "r". same thing in ooo 1.1. so i guess that ooo has made no progression in this area. in wordperfect 12, one sugesstion, and it was right. in word i bet it would be the same (i cannot aford to try it). I also tried google, and it sugessted the correct spelling. would be that hard to develop a front end for googles sugesstion service for ooo? so it wouldnt suck? this is the major compalint that i have with ooo, and it is major in my opinion.
Kevin
I have occasional problems with OOo as well, but I realise that is purely becuase I really don't know how to use every bit of it - so I read the docs if I have time or do things other ways if I don't. I'm not a secretary, so I don't know any one word processing program backwards - in that situation you give the secretary the program they know or give them time to learn another.
If I want to get punched in the face, I berate random smokers huddled on the street. Evangelism belongs in church or on UHF stations.
But the problem is that the consumers are *not* shafting Microsoft when they pirate Microsoft software. Instead they are reinforcing users' dependency on it.
Users who pirate software accomplish nothing except to provide the rope that will eventually hang everyone who uses copyrighted material - legally or otherwise. I'd like to extend my appreciation for this fine effort.
Seriously. If you already have kde loaded it will perform better than anything else. And it already has a database component, currently a separate project but it's there. And it works fine.
I am trolling
The tarball you download for Linux only contains RPMS. Has anybody been able to install it on Slackware?
1. Is this new version faster on bootup?
2. Do the fonts look nice, out of the box, on linux?
Having tried to use OOo for all my work for a while (and breathing a hurricane-size sigh of relief with 2.0bc!!) and submitting some UI bugs, I think reality is a good thing to have in OSS. Caveat I have pushed it a bit, doing a lot of Word and Powerpoint imports with mixed Japanese and English, and I run it on a way underpowered system (by OSS standards), a 450MHz Celeron (Dell Inspiron 7.5K) running RH9.
OOo 1.1 sucked pretty badly unless you were doing absolutely minimal stuff.
OOo 2.0bc is really nice and much faster and smoother. Still a few niggling UI bugs that I don't think it is ready to be called 2.0 yet but hey, it is light years ahead of just a few months ago.
Bloatware. I am in the position of recommending software for third world companies this week. But to be honest OOo is not really safe as far as I can see with only 128MB so I don't think I can recommend it for use on old computers. Still if it gets polished a bit more it should be very nice.
The niggling things are probably low memory artifacts, insufficient testing, and inadequate (not 100%) import/export compatibility with Office (with windows fonts installed). And a broken autocomplete system. I think also that OOo should add some simple, useful functions that Office does not have, so people can say "gee I wish Office had this!" and keep them from going back.
I think I'm going to recommend a new feature I had on my Apple II and have never seen since then though I have dreamed of it.
Spin the clock back to 1980. I am using Apple PIE, by David Gordon at Programma International. This was a programmer's editor with keystrokes that would make emac users' eyes gleam. It is relevant to the thread because this was probably the first consumer word processor (and written in 6502 Assembler! Hah hah!) and inspired Appleworks which was the forerunner of what OpenOffice.org and MS Office do.
The function I want in OOo is where you hit the 0 key on the numeric keypad and it jumps your cursor back to the last position you were at when you saved the cursor position. You could save at least a few positions and cycle through them with the 0 key. I'd like that (and also the white block cursor too!) with the ability to pick a different key combination, and maybe also save those positions for footnotes or something.
If anybody has PIE please let me know. Should run on Catakig the emulator I think. Or if you have a manual, even better!
Links: retro.html
Apple II History (but I think mistakenly says Lissner made PIE), and google for ((( "Apple PIE" "word processor" "Apple II" ))).
It froze on me during the class three times. I muttered things about me making a poor example of open source software and stuff, the class giggled, I think I carried it ok. I made it through the three hours and survived, albeit a little weary, but we made it!!!
OOo 2.0 beta is a bit of a risk now, but trust me, when it hits 'RELEASE', it's gonna rock. Go for it!
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Photo caption: "Four people who are perfectly happy with 64 KB of memory, a 1 MHz processor, and 16-color graphics"
Says it all right there! Now how do I run catakig on my i686?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is the one application that I need that will never be ported to anything but the Windows version of Excel.
Crystal Ball is an interesting little app that allows you to model various statistical distributions and risk analysis models. Lots of fun, in a geeky sort of way.
But, Decisioneering won't even port it to use the Mac version of Excel, let alone OpenOffice. (Sad, actually, since Crystal Ball was originally a Mac/Excel application. Mickeysoft changed the API for statistical functions in Excel on Windows for the sake of vendor lock-in, and you know the rest.)
So as an OS X user, I'm forced to use an emulator and an old copy of Win98 for one application.
Stupid stupid stupid. I refuse to give Microsoft any hard-earned cash for this reason alone. If I can help it.
If OpenOffice at least had decent data analysis tools (even just statistical functions), I'd consider using it on a regular basis. But for now, it's just a toy.
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
In the original, when using the word processor, the screen would automatically jump up about five lines whenever the cursor came within a certain distance of the bottom of the screen.
I found this feature disorienting and irritating, and while I could understand the pupropse behind it, I really wanted to be able to turn it off and just have non-intelligent scrolling. This is not a small thing! Typing and scrolling are what Word Processing is 90% about. If the process of making and reading through documents is not comfortable, then it's a big, big deal.
--After realizing that it was not possible to shut off this feature, I uninstalled OO and threw my lot in with Abiword, which scrolls like any regular text editor with no jarring jumps in what is displayed on the screen.
I do think, however, that it would be useful to have an integrated office suite. Does the new version of OO offer control over the way the text scrolling system works?
-FL
I had the opposite experience. Our small office of 26 people came in on an otherwise rainy Monday morning to find that I had switched all MS Office users to OOo. Furthermore, the few people that previously had no office suite, due to cost vs. usage, found a flock of seagulls in their corner.
The reaction? 30 minutes of uncertainty from previous MS users and joy from non-users. By the end of the day, everyone was comfortable using the same portions of the OOo suite which they had previously been running under MS. The rest of the week was smooth... with a couple people asking to borrow the "Switch to OOo" book so they could learn a specific, advanced task or two. Nothing dramatic.
By the end of the month, people finally became aware through the rumor mill that OOo was free and thus began a long series of requests for me to provide OOo on CDs for them. (Apparently, downloading was too difficult a task.) I was happy to make copies and people took them home for their families to use... including their teenage kids and extended family members.
All in all, I managed to infect a portion of this small town with OOo fever. All normal people with no computer training whatsoever. So, from my end of things, the real world is comprised of non-expert, regular folks and that real world does like OOo. A lot.
I don't believe I was in error. The GPL itself has a lot of uncertainty in it regarding where linking a GPL'd app to a non-GPL'd app is legal (I am not sure it is always illegal) because it bases nearly all of its criteria on case law which may vary from juristiction to juristiction. IANAL, though. Until we have international law defining the meaning of derivative work and providing clear guidelines, people will interpret the GPL to be very sweeping.
The LGPL cuts a lot of this out by providing very specific exceptions, for example linking, to the restrictions of the GPL. These exceptions are specifically designed to allow proprietary and other non-GPL-compliant apps to integrate LGPL'd components. I.e. with LGPL, you can impliment it as a library, and you only have to distribute the source to the library, not your whole application even if such linking would otherwise consitute a derivative work.
Furthermore, the LGPL is GPL compliant. So you will note that Gnumeric and Abiword should have no licensing issues whatsoever in integrating the code.
The GPL/LGPL proponents such as myself just simply want to protect our investment from being locked out of others extensions to our own work. That is all. People can embrace and extend it all they like, but in the end, if it is based on our work, we get access to these enhancements.
And nothing in the LGPL prevents you from implimenting it as is for another product.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
And if you want the standard deviation of the full population, you want n-1.
By this I mean if you want the stddev of the full population calculated from sample data, you want n-1.
I wish there was a way to edit/delete misposts here.
I need to preview everything from now on!
Anyway you said:
Beside, this is not a bug but a missing feature, and it may not be considered properly if you noticed it in this improper way. The question I responded to was...
please explain to me what on earth you do in MS Office, that you find hard to replicate in OOo? It would be good feedback to the project if you are really serious and not joking.
The question wasn't about a bug. The question was "is there one thing that is hard to replicate in OOo." In Word, I can hold down the alt key and do this with the mouse reliably in seconds. I do it a lot and for "arbitrary" portions of the line (not always a date/time stamp nicely at the start).
As I said above, I did enter this properly and voted for it (along with several others) and hopefully it will be addressed.
This is literally the LAST feature I need working to kiss Word (really Office) goodbye forever.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
I understand what you mean, this is an interresting function, even if I suspect this may be a kind of nightmare to implement properly.
But as for the example you were providing, I was just thinking that the search and replace function with proper use of regular expressions would be efficient to do it. Granted, it is not always easy to build regular expressions for Mr. Everybody, but this one should be pretty straightforward if I read your case well. Can they be included in a macro-command? I wonder.
Best regards.
I am not Remy Mouton, unfortunately: http://remy.mouton.free.fr/art/
This is a selection block. Once you have it
selected you can boldface it, cut it, paste
it in another document. The text to select
has arbitrary contents. For example in this
document I could select the bold portion an arbitrary rectangular region only.
Or I could cut it out of the middle to get: Word has done it for years, I'm sure it is not that difficult- just a question of having the resources to do it.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.