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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.
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.
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.
Base looks ok for trivial databases, but its just too basic for any "real" use compared (sorry guys) to Abcess. If you want a non-abcess database you really should look at Rekall (www.rekallrevealed.org and www.totalrekall.co.uk). Might be a bit more of a learning curve, but its so much more advanced.
Satisfified of Tunbridge Wells.
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..."
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
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
It is nice, I've been using the beta for a few months now. Only had a few minor issues. (Lets just say the document recovery works great!)
While I haven't had time to play with Base much, it seems quite similar to access, but with some new fuctionality, and more user friendly for the Layman. Base does require the Sun JRE, or Microsofts Java VM installed to run.
Overall I've seen improvements by leaps and bounds above the 1.1.2 that I upgraded from.
DarkMantle I been bored, so I started a blog.
How exactly does StarBasic demonstrate any less "Vendor lock-in" than VBA? It's supported by exactly one product, and it's subject to break at any time.
The fact that it is released under the LGPL means that there is nobody preventing you from integrating it with, say, Gnumeric, AbiWord, KOfffice, or even MS Office.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
People could try the bittorrent links here:
Windows
Linux
Save some bandwidth and make them some money.
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
...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.
The reason I say that OOo is better than Office has to do with a few points:
1) I have some customers who print out booklets. They can do this better in OOo than in Word.
2) It is *good enough* for 99.9% tasks and comes with freedom of deployment and security from licensing audits.
3) Booklets on non-duplex printers are only the beginning. You can do far more regarding printing OOo documents than you can with MS Office.
I have used them both on a daily basis. In fact when I worked at Microsoft, I used MS Office at work and OOo at home. StarOffice 5.x was barely good enough but really did suck. OOo 1.0 was better but could be rough at times. OOo 1.1 was the first suite where I found I could easily do more with OOo than with MS Office re: comparible apps.
I don't deny that OOo still has room for improvement, and it is even true that you have an inherent issue regarding expectations when coming from a different product. However, saying that MS Office is always better than OOo even on Windows displays a great deal of ignorance regarding the different set of capabilities between the products.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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
I used OO Impress to import old Powerpoint files for a co-worker last year- so she could open it up in her new version of PP.
The other tech and I just looked at each other and shook our heads: they (management) didn't want to use OO because it wasn't fully compatible with MS. Turns out MS is not compatible with MS.
Information: "I want to be anthropomorphized"
Your Right the Recovery of Documents in OpenOffice is incredible. MS office recovery is always out of date , slow and sometimes recovers with a corrupt File/document. To test its full power Windows XP dfisable all but RPC servce through services.msc and use a limited user account with MS Office and OO they regularly crash and OO always left my work where i left of (to the character) MS Office recovered from a File from the hdd dated 5 mins before crash. :( lots of lost work.
My computer illiterate mother had less troublee determining which file to recover when using the OO 2 beta recovery wizard than MS office XP.
He didn't say that. You said OOo was better than Word, and he called you on it.
I'm going to challenge your specific points. As background, I have been involved in producing publicity materials for a large club for some time, and we've been using OpenOffice because we can't afford Word and we don't break the law. These materials include multi-page booklets, flashy flyers, membership cards, event tickets and programmes, and more. I've also produced numerous articles, papers, letters, technical reports, and other document types in the past, and have experience with almost every major word processor that's been released in the last decade. In other words, I produce documents, of varying types, a lot.
Now, to your specific points... The number of limitations we have found in OOo Writer when it comes to things like complex layout and mail merge is enormous. The club's publicity officer, a very experienced computer user, gave up in disgust at one point and announced that the printed materials wouldn't be produced for a particular event, because she couldn't make OOo Writer do some simple layout that would be trivial in any other WP she'd ever used, even after looking in the help (which didn't). Next time around, she used a machine with Word installed at her office instead, and produced some excellent results in about five minutes.
This is not exceptional for our design work; in fact, it's the norm, and we're considering spending the money to buy a proper DTP package for use in future (no small thing for a not-for-profit organisation whose members mostly have very little money) because as promising as OOo looks, most of us find that it just isn't up to the job. As an experiment, I tried to produce the same results myself using OOo writer (as someone who's been using OOo for quite a while now), and eventually managed it after about half an hour fighting the terrible frames UI.
Your freedom of deployment argument is irrelevant; if OOo Writer doesn't do the job, it doesn't matter how free it is in any sense of the word. Your freedom from licensing audits argument is just straight-up FUD; Microsoft has no right to "audit" anyone here.
OOo's printing abilities are terrible. The printing dialogs are cumbersome, and related things like mail merging into a single document so you can tweak some of the merged pages before printing just aren't possible.
I could go on at length, but my purpose here wasn't to criticise the details of OOo, it was to criticise people who unrealistically claim that it is feature-comparable with Word. To most users, that is simply nonsense, and all you're doing by claiming it now is damaging any credibility OOo's advocates will have in the future when it really is true.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Porting work is ongoing to support AMD64 platforms. See 64-bit porting CVS branch Bonsai.
When pressed to explain what functionality was lacking, nobody could do so, and furthermore there were several comments of this nature: "well, I guess that works better than Office, but it took me half an hour to get used to doing it that way."
Yes, people (well represented by the parent poster, apparently) will put up with years of lower productivity to avoid a few minutes of independent thought. And they wonder why everybody else considers them stupid.
The help system says there is a menu item for "Relationships" (under Edit->Database->Advanced Settings) but 'Advanced Settings' is greyed out. Guess that means it's something they've planned but not managed to get working yet.
The 2.0 beta has a word count under Tools->Word Count, exactly as this webpage requests. Although it doesn't count paragraphs or lines (I'm really not sure why you'd need to but perhaps some users require it for reasons I'm not aware of?)
I can only speak for myself - and I find OOo does everything I need it to. Still, I doubt I'm that far from the 'average' user.
These materials include multi-page booklets, flashy flyers, membership cards, event tickets and programmes, and more.
You sound like an excellent candidate to be using Scribus.
It's a full-featured DTP application that seems to improve almost daily. Friends of mine use it to produce two newspapers, among other things.
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!