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

I Took it For a Spin

[eno2001]

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

Re:I Took it For a Spin

[DarkMantle]

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.

Re:I Took it For a Spin

[Taladar]

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

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?

[njcoder]

Read this recently which confirms your point:

"Thirdly, we don't cut off the old file formats. So we maintain backward compatibility with the old Office file formats. I've got a bunch of customers who are using StarOffice to import their old Office documents and then export them to Office XP. Now go figure--we're the migration tool."

--- Scott McNeally, CEO Sun Microsystems.

From this article

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.

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

[einhverfr]

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.

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

[geekee]

"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.

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

[David Horn]

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.

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.

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

[danharan]

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.

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

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had nearly the same experience, but unlike you I bothered to ask what people didn't like about OO. Just about every single answer boiled down to "it's not exactly like Office."

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.

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

[LarsWestergren]

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..."

Double page spread?

[Psiren]

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.

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!

Re:Double page spread?

[generic-man]

Thank you for requesting a new feature (which I will call "feature X") in an open source product. Please choose from the following responses for the community to give you.

1. Insult the user. Feature X is only used by pointy-haired bosses for stupid reasons. I don't think anyone ever needs to use feature X outside your braindead company.
2. Insult the reporter. Why the hell do you need feature X? Other Open Source product already does it, and everyone on our mailing list hates other Open Source product. Go use other Open Source product if you want feature X.
3. Claim the feature already exists. I know it's not as simple as with your so-called "closed source product," but you can actually do feature X already. Just install plugin Y, extension Z, run the script at some broken URL, and recompile. Voila!
4. Cite a future release. Thanks for asking for feature X. We already have it in our beta branch. You can use it for now, but there's a long list of bugs in the branch. It's beta and it's free; what do you expect?

Re:Double page spread?

[kebes]

you forgot:

5. Reverse request. Thanks for suggesting feature X. Please let us know when you've finished coding it, so that we can merge it into the official release of this open source project.

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.

Conversion guides?

[rsrsharma]

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.

The only question I have is

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

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.

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...

Re:The only question I have is

[cozziewozzie]

drop kde, its not worth it. try using a true lightweight window manager like fluxbox or xfce.

Drop the car, dude, it's not worth it. Try using a true lightweight tyre, like Pirelli or Michelin.

My Michelin SX-LE4 tyre feels much more lightweight than any Honda Civic I've ever seen. It makes me much more productive.

OpenOffice has a show stopper bug in it

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:OpenOffice has a show stopper bug in it

[rco3]

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?

Test it!

[MicroBerto]

In my opinion, OpenOffice.org is the most important software suite in the OSS movement. You might argue that Firefox is, but OO.org is competing against a very expensive application. If it can be used to stimulate innovation and bring prices down, I'm all for it.

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.

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: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.

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.

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.

My problems so far

[bogaboga]

My issues with OpenOffice are the ugly fonts on Linux. The fact that OO.o is still too slow to start can be excused by that fact that it is still in beta. Whay did they choose to package it that way? I mean the core stuff? I hope they will provide some kind of installation script to handle the installation to make it similar to Office 2K.

This is only a beta, so things can only get better.

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.

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.

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.

What I really want in OO

[ducomputergeek]

Is optimized code damn it! I installed OO on my dad's K6-2 400 a couple years ago after a monster system crash due to a virus. Works for him for typing letters and tracking his stocks in a spreadsheet. He had no problems what so ever using it. His only complaint was it take a long time to load.

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.

Re:Is it multi-user yet? Yes, it is... FINALLY!

[Chordonblue]

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.

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:I wonder how they're going to handle this?

[njcoder]

"However, I've always wondered if sun's motives for funding open office were a bad thing. (Apparently they just want to make Microsoft mad.)"

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.

Localized versions rock in OO !..

[thanasakis]

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...

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.

64bits architecture ?

[cyrilc]

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

Dirty and relatively clean?

[Jeff85]

Does that mean that it's only as much relatively dirty as it is relatively clean?

Some people should just keep their trap shut

[enmane]

Any spreadsheet program that doesn't have basic and simple regression analysis is a JOKE. Puh-lease - OOCalc is a JOKE compared to Excel.

Just take a look at these...
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=17 422
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3 66

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).

Re:Some people should just keep their trap shut

[einhverfr]

Out of curiosity, why don't you use Gnumeric for data analysis? It might look clunky, but it is probably the most advanced spreadsheet that I have ever seen.

Currently, you are right-- OO Calc is the weakest point in OOo, IMO. It does need significant improvement, but that is why I use Gnumeric for all my spreadsheet needs. However, the other portions of the software are quite mature, IMO.

Re:Some people should just keep their trap shut

[DarkSarin]

Why in the HELL are you using a spreadsheet for REGRESSION ANALYSIS? ARE YOU MAD?

Seriously, if you NEED to do data analysis get a Statistical Package (SPSS will even do in a pinch), such as: SAS, R, S+ or even Systat. Need other stuff? Lisrel, EQS, and many others are out there. Many of them run on Unix/Linux. No offense, but regression is NOT meant to be done in a spreadsheet. Personally, I like R (control), SAS and even EQS is good for regression (EQS, for the uninitiated, is a Structural Equation Modeling program (SEM)--it also does CFA and EFA (Factor Analysis), as well as other stuff).

I cringe when I hear of folks using excel for data analysis. Yes, you can, but it isn't good for much.

Spellchecker test

[thenetbox]

When you type 'muderfocker' in OpenOffice it corrects it to the actual curse phrase. When you type 'muderfocker' in Word 2003 is has no suggestions.

OpenOffice 2.0 is CLEARLY superior!

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

Re:Good enough for most people

[b17bmbr]

part of the problem is that while linux, OO.org, etc., is fine for 95% of the needs of 95% of people, there is always something. and truth be told, most people who want office, get it for free. businesses pony up because they feel they have to and they're all like lemmings. nobody wants to be the first. and they all know that sending somebody a .sxw file is like sending them a chunk of moonrock. it's really cool, but really useless, except that it's really not cool.(unless you're in the spiderman cartoon, where it turns you into werewolf or something.)

hell, i use OO.org too, but people are wed to office, like it can cure the common cold. for example, here's the crap we get at my school. there'll be 9 kids leaving on some choir field trip and we get an email with an excel attachment. WTF!! it's crap like that. now, can most people familiar with office spend 20 minutes and not miss a beat. sure.