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.

Comments

a few things

[matt me]

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.

OpenOffice 2.0 vs MS Office 2003

[t482]

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

Re:Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It?

[einhverfr]

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.