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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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..."

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.

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.

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: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: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?

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: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: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.

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

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.

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!