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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.
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
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.
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
I second this! This was originally a WordPerfect feature and now Word does it. When will OpenOffice do it? I can't imagine writing without it!
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
"... 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.
A lot of software these days is heavely bloated. So a laptop like yours could properly only run old software, wich means that you will either have to buy a new one, or swich to something less demanding.
Well quite, but what I meant was that 96M of RAM should be more than enough to run something like Impress under KDE. Heck, Windows and Powerpoint run just fine on that laptop.
OOo has grown ridiculously big and slow. So has KDE and many other programs. So much for Linux users going all giggly when they mention Microsoft bloatware: OSS software has gone worse these days...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
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.
Have you tried altering the default style in the Stylist? F11 brings it up.
You say that looks the same?
To me that looks like it was rendered using GTK (or is that QT?) and matches the other apps instead of being rendered using Oo.o's own old graphics engine and looking like a Windows app.
# 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.
In my opinion, OpenOffice.org is the most important software suite in the OSS movement.
Wow, I would have figured Linux.
The bug happens because of styles. Since about office 2000, people have been realising that the approach of formatting-as-you go is stupid - like they already knew in HTML (CSS, anyone). Once And Only Once, remember?
So for both Word and OO Write, there are style managers. The "End of document" is always in "normal" style, and you'll frequently pop back to "normal" style as you work. The fact is that you should be altering "normal" to fit with your work.
Actually, OO 2 is catching up to word 2000, which is my current standard document program. The only newer feature I love in Office 2k3 is the improved style manager.
Anybody else notice that desktop user-oriented opensource software always looks 5 years old, but consumes resources like it was only 2 years old? The only reason that Firefox surpassed Explorer is that it stagnated for 7.
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.
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.
Personally I don't think that MS can out-innovate open source. The fact that open source development creates stronger connections between users and developers means that it will eventually meet customer needs better than software developed by a large company where a large wall exists between technical support and software development.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
4- well what DO you expect?
"yes we'll have it in a future release, but we understand that because you've asked for it that it should automatically be available _right now_, so we'll click the magic 'include it in the current release with all bugs fixed and functionality complete button' just for you, afterall the only reason we haven't already done that is purely because we'd hate for you to have a lack of anything to complain about'
However, responses 1-3 are valid complaints and depressingly common....
Advanced users are users too!
Now I laugh at those using MS office who have had to download security patches. I'm not sure how M$ fucked up that bad that there was security exploits in their OFFICE SUITE.
Whenever a Microsoft product (other than Windows) allows virus execution, you only need remember one thing: everthing MS sells is "integrated" to the point where the apps and the OS are one being. This is not a Good Thing.
When you look at the state of the world, how can you not become a radical, liberal anarchist?
I know this might sound very strange, but last I checked people use computers for their applications (Word Processors, Spreadsheets, surf the net). Most users could care less about the underlying OS. The biggest problem with displacing MS from the desktop is not the OS but the huge number of applications that people have gotten used to. Office is the one application that keeps most companies from migrating to alternative OSs like Linux, BSD.
To be fair, there's a good chance that this Open Office will have problems. And it's still in beta, and I don't know if it has equivalent functionality to Access. It's very early to declare a winner.
It is a fair comparison because you need to run 2005-era Linux to equal the functionality of 2000-era Microsoft. And that's no troll either - OO.org 2.0 equals MS Office 97 at best (which is good enough for most people).
Frankly, even the responses you call "insulting" are more informative than the kind of drivel that comes back from corporate response teams: at least I know where the project stands.
Only people born and raised on Microsoft's brain dead office suite would ever consider styles to be useless. For the rest of the world, we have the opposite opinion, because MSOffice can't do styles right.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Though I understand and there's many examples of arrogant idiots in the open source community giving those answers, there are many more cases of the community actually recieving good input and acting on this. One of the main advantages of open source is that the users are in the same group as the developers, so if the idea is a good one it will be implemented.
Unfortunately commercial equivalents give no or an irrelevant response, and don't even bother to listen.
I recommend you not to recommend software you don't use yourself.
Linux is not Windows
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 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.
I guess cleaners should thank people for vomiting on the floor or smearing feces on the wall then too.
Cheers
Stor
"Yeah well there's a lot of stuff that should be, but isn't"
Huh? I'd agree with you if we were talking about an RDBMS or something, but we're talking about a GUI app.
I don't really use GUI apps for the most part ('cept for a few of course). But sometimes I need to evaluate a few alternatives and make a basic recommendation to someone looking to fill a certain need. It might not be all things to all people, but if it sets them in the right direction it's obviously helpful.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
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.
Umm, because most company departments already have Excel and it does the job adequately without extra software purchase costs/maintenance costs.
The OpenOffice zealots have never extensively used MS Office products and when the zealots say that OO is as good/better than MS Office, they're ONLY talking about basic spreadsheet, word processing capabilities (they're totally unaware of the other MS Office capabilities).
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.