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

Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It?

[Tufriast]

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.

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

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

I find it funny, b/c my friends are still shelling out hundreds of dollars for M$ Office.

I find your friends funny, cuz mine don't pay a cent for M$ Office. P2P, ya know...

I mean come on, honestly: apart from businesses and some high(er)-profile folks, who the hell pays for Office?

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

[generic-man]

It's not that they're acting stuck up. The number one reason why people still shell out hundreds of dollars for Office is VBA compatibility. Whether you like it or not, many companies have built shockingly full-featured applications using Excel as a base. Imagine a spreadsheet where you need to fill out forms (which are in cells) and hit submit buttons to transmit data to a server which then transmits data to you which opens up another form in the same file. That's an extremely clunky way to build (say) a procurement platform, but it uses a tool (Excel) that everyone has.

Is VBA a great language? Not really. Does everyone use it? No. But you can use it to claim that OpenOffice does not have 100% of the functionality that MS Office does.

OpenOffice has its own programming language, StarBasic. When you* get done rewriting all your MS Office-based applications in StarBasic, let me know just how "free" OpenOffice was for you.

* By "you" I mean "a large albeit short-sighted company that entrusts important business functions to macros in spreadsheet programs."

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

[einhverfr]

I find your friends funny, cuz mine don't pay a cent for M$ Office. P2P, ya know...

Congrats... Your friends are helping to raise the barrier to entry for smaller office suites.

Friends don't let friends pirate software. Nor do they let friends by from MSFT....

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

[generic-man]

Walk over to the finance department of any sizable company and secretly switch an analyst's computer over to OpenOffice. It's a fun way to learn dozens of new swear words.

At this point, saying "OpenOffice Calc is just as good as Microsoft Excel" is just as dumb as saying "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop." It makes open source advocates really happy to hear, but it makes experts just roll their eyes. That makes open source advocates belittle the experts for very shallow reasons, calling the experts names like "Joe Businessman."

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

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Congrats... Your friends are helping to raise the barrier to entry for smaller office suites.

Sorry but your argument doesn't hold water. Office never was significantly much cheaper than it is today. And besides, if everybody stopped piracy today, the only thing that'd happen is Microsoft getting a whole lot richer, and the price would stay exactly the same.

Welcome to reality: Microsoft shafts their users whenever they can, and the users shaft Microsoft back whenever they can too in turn. That's the name of the game.

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

[ceejayoz]

Congrats... Your friends are helping to raise the barrier to entry for smaller office suites.

One would think the opposite is true.

Given the fact that the vast majority of users still buy their software, Office going up in price due to piracy would be a good thing for cheaper alternatives.

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

[ckaminski]

I just finished a contract with a trading firm to build a year-end customer reporting tool in Access. Needless to say, 48 hours later, after having the version changed from Office 2000 to OfficeXP 45 hours into the project, and having the DateTimePicker control removed, I will *NEVER* write another embedded VBA project again (except maybe Outlook. Outlook VBA has rarely broken my projects.)

There were enough bugs and differences between versions that my code broke. Personally, I'd rather have written the app in VB and used Access via MDAC/ADO. Never again, and that goes for Excel and Word too... <shudder>

VBA is actually a pretty formiddable scripting language. Nowhere near as powerful as perl, but quick, dirty and relatively clean.

<dons asbestos underwear>
Flame on.

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

[einhverfr]

Sorry but your argument doesn't hold water. Office never was significantly much cheaper than it is today. And besides, if everybody stopped piracy today, the only thing that'd happen is Microsoft getting a whole lot richer, and the price would stay exactly the same.

Then you don't understand my argument. In the software industry, if you remove the requirement that many customers decide where to spend their money, then you make it harder for other office suites to get enough market share to be self-sustaining. Furthermore, such individuals only reinforce the dependence on MS Office without providing any real incentive for competition.

Welcome to reality: Microsoft shafts their users whenever they can, and the users shaft Microsoft back whenever they can too in turn. That's the name of the game.

But the problem is that the consumers are *not* shafting Microsoft when they pirate Microsoft software. Instead they are reinforcing users' dependency on it. Furthermore they make it harder for others to enter the market profitably. If users want to shaft Microsoft, they should *stop using Microsoft software!*

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

[einhverfr]

At this point, saying "OpenOffice Calc is just as good as Microsoft Excel" is just as dumb as saying "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop." It makes open source advocates really happy to hear, but it makes experts just roll their eyes. That makes open source advocates belittle the experts for very shallow reasons, calling the experts names like "Joe Businessman."

OOo is not only as good as MS Office, it is *better.*

However the killer feature that Excel has in your example is something called "Vendor Lock-in." This doesn't mean that OOo is not as good, but rather that there is a high cost of migration due to vendor lock-in and that such migrations must be done slowly and deliberately, rather than quick and simply.

How long for mainstream use?

[mrtom852]

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.

Where's the innovation?

[gnarled]

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?

Re:Where's the innovation?

[kfg]

Some softeware is intended to innovate, some is intended to provide comfort. OOo is intended to provide comfort. It does so reasonably well.

Personally I do most of my writing in an innovative editor that lets me control all editing functions on standard keys while touch typing, never having to take hands off home base, let alone remove them from the keyboard to use a mouse.

But some people find this uncomfortable. They're used to MS Office. For them there is OOo. That's what it's for. If you wish to find innovation, look elsewhere, but then don't complain that it's different.

KFG

Re:Where's the innovation?

[runderwo]

From your Windows-centric viewpoint, it probably doesn't matter, but OO runs on many platforms and architectures, has many features built-in that require third-party support in Office (such as PDF export), and has not only provided us with a standard word processor document format for data interchange, but also unraveled most of the mystery that is the Microsoft Office file formats. It's a massive distributed development effort meeting a demand that you probably didn't even know existed: a standard, supportable, interoperable, platform-independent office suite.

If you want a more succinct answer, it would be "choice". The choice to move to another office suite if MS Office does not continue to be the best value for you, not simply because of its availability for a low/no price, but so you can get your data out of MS Office formats if need be. This choice is the only thing what will keep Microsoft on their toes and innovating if they want to keep selling Office, so even as an Office only user, you still benefit from OO's existence.

Re:Where's the innovation?

[legirons]

"I post this out of genuine curiosity and do not intend to troll. Where is the innovation in OO.org? 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."

At the risk of offending the people who are doing innovative stuff in OpenOffice.org (I appreciate all of you!), I can't think of any obvious reason why you'd be wrong. Yes, it's pretty blatantly copying Microsoft Office.

Look at the history to see why:

"The company [StarDivision] and the rights to StarOffice were acquired by Sun Microsystems in 1999 for US$73.5 million, as Sun were seeking to compete with Microsoft Office." (from Wikipedia)

So it started with Sun wanting something to compete directly with MS-Office. Now and it's being used by the Free Software community to compete directly with MS-Office. And it's being used to convert people who don't have any technical gripes with their current office suite.

As far as I can tell, it's not seen as good place for innovation. Any difference, no matter how slight, will be jumped on as "not being compatible" or "too difficult to learn" or "not the de-facto standard" or "not what people have learned on". Keeping it the same as MS-Office makes it a drop-in replacement, it means you can switch to Linux or BSD without changing how you write documents, it means you can get 20 extra office-suites for your new graduates without having to pay licensing, but it doesn't offer many immediate technical advantages.

So how to explain that when the community is so known for being innovative? I guess that they direct creative energies elsewhere. Maybe they do so in web-based collaborative authoring systems. (MediaWiki is just a big word processor) Maybe they're working on better paradigms for document-production (LyX is the obvious example, as are specialised things like perldoc, LaTeX and programs which work with HTML documents)

Or maybe people find their creativity works better on other projects. AbiWord is being written ground-up as Free Software, rather than having the methodology tacked-on at a late stage. Gnumeric the same. GnuCash the same. Project management software and presentation software are becoming web-based.

Even things like Bugzilla, SourceForge/GForge, Plone/Zope/PHProjekt and the other Groupware tools are competing directly against the office suite in many places. Compare the small businesses using Excel for bug-tracking, or Access for workflow management, or Powerpoint for software architecture. (hell, my own office uses MS-Word for bug-reporting!) so Bugzilla and not OpenOffice is where that competition should take place.

OpenOffice might carry on adding new features, but it's unlikely to do anything scarily innovative because most people don't seem to want it to. They stick with the same tired old role of "Word processor, spreadsheet, drawings, presentations" with a bit of database and email integration, but it would be silly to add (for example) simultaneous internet multi-author features when that role is probably better served by a web-based "Text to LaTeX/HTML/PDF" solution.

Similarly, adding the best database interface in the world would be nice, but a Plone or Ruby on Rails solution would probably interest the developers more. It would do the same job, but is simpler to program, more reliable, more flexible, more useful, inherantly multi-user cross-platform and all the rest, and they don't have to deal with people saying "it's just not the same as Access".

Maybe. Or maybe the community has been using "Office Suites" long enough to know how useful they truly are. Perhaps the innovation comes from moving beyond that 30-year-old business paradigm.

Re:Double page spread?

[aussersterne]

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!

Logic?

[Michael Woodhams]

"... 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.

Re:The only question I have is

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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...

Is it multi-user yet?

[schon]

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.

Re:Test it!

[bonch]

In my opinion, OpenOffice.org is the most important software suite in the OSS movement.

Wow, I would have figured Linux.

Re:OpenOffice has a show stopper bug in it

[Pxtl]

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.

Interface redesign

[bonch]

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.

Re:Test it!

[thammoud]

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.

Re:Double page spread?

[idlake]

As opposed to the options you get with commercial software:

1. No Reponse

2. Automated Response Thank you for your communication. We will look at it as soon as possible [i.e., when hell freezes over].

3. Human Response Thank you for your message. We are sorry that you are having problems running our product. In order to run our product, please click on the "Start" button, then select the "Bloatware Inc" entry, and finally select "Program". Our software is easy to use and self-explanatory from that point on.

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.

Re:Double page spread?

[strider44]

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.

Re:I Took it For a Spin

[Taladar]

I recommend you not to recommend software you don't use yourself.

Microsoft responding to user feedback

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Whoever modded that a troll, I'm sure we'd all be most interested to hear what features Microsoft added to Office for you.

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.

Re:doesn't that keep you employed.

[stor]

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