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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
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.
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
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
This is only a beta, so things can only get better.
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.
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...
Open Source Java DAO Generator
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
I third that. Writing my thesis or any of the articles I've had published in scientific journals would have driven me absolutely batshit had I tried it in Word. LyX is my favorite WP for scientific and engineering work, hands down.
As an undergrad, I used Word with MathCAD for equations, Excel for some graphing, etc. It was kludgy, but I could make it all work. But LyX, almost from the beginning, allowed me to ignore the formatting and work on the content and everything went smoothly. Isn't that how it's supposed to work?
Ce n'est pas un vrai mouvement de robot!
"OOo is not only as good as MS Office, it is *better.*"
My company switched from solaris (with a pc card running windows) to linux and made all users use open office about a year or so ago. The verwhelming reaction was it sucked compared to MS Office. These aren't people with any particular allegance to MS or OSS. They just don't like it. The couple of windows boxes provided for the linux crowd are always in use and it's a pain to get one to use. Go ahead and mod me down for criticizing this product, but that is what people in the real world think.
Vote for Pedro
The biggest problem with Office is the price. What sort of person is going to cough up $300 for an office suite that will be rarely used.
I looked at Office 2003 for my Grandad, and if it been less that $100, I'd have said use it. I took a leap and put my Grandad on OpenOffice and we've never looked back.
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Any spreadsheet program that doesn't have basic and simple regression analysis is a JOKE. Puh-lease - OOCalc is a JOKE compared to Excel.
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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).
Did your company provide adequate training? As another poster noticed, it is usually not any difference in quality that matters, it is what people are used to.
I did that mistake at my previous job where I was a sysadmin. One of the girls asked me if I could get a licence for Photoshop for her. It turned out she was just going to do some light website graphics. Budget is tight of course, and I knew she was pretty smart and computer savvy, so I downloaded Gimp for her. Started it, showed her to do to the most basic things and said, "right click on a picture and you will get a pop-up menu with all the possible commands". A week later or so the head sysadmin came by and said "We got the Photoshop licence, could you install it at her desk?".
When I asked her why she didn't use Gimp, she basically said "I hated it." I must have looked a bit crestfallen, so she quickly said: "I'm sure it's great once you know it, but I couldn't figure it out, and I don't have the time. It's better if I go with what I'm used to."
Basically humans are very conservative. Once they are used to something, that is what they like. No wonder Microsoft gives huge discounts to schools. Hook 'em while they are young. I've read success stories about companies going Open Source here on Slashdot, but most include a week or so of training.
The only exception I found was with Firefox. Two people at the job had problems with IE. It crashed or they got spyware, etc. I installed Firefox for them and said that they should try it, and if they didn't like it I could take a longer look at IE. They both came later and said "I love it!! No more pop-up ads, it's fast, looks nice..."
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die