OpenOffice 1.1.5 Released

Community Technology writes "New stable release of OpenOffice has been released. Download OpenOffice 1.1.5 from OpenOffice.org"

Comments

Sweet!

[SultanCemil]

Does this open MS Office files better? Specifically embedded stuff in documents? Also, go the new slashdot design!

Re:Sweet!

[Neil Blender]

Does this open MS Office files better?

In addition, can it open spreadsheets with more than 32,000 lines? I know Excel tops out at 64,000 which for my needs sometimes is not enough. I have searched the prefs in previous versions but can't find any way to open files with that many lines. Well, the open, but the cut off anything after the max line number. I regularly get csv files with 50-75K lines that are of different formats and would like to be able to open them in a spread sheet, especially OO. I usually have to resort to perl or awk to find what I need, but spreadsheets are quicker if you need to perform a bunch of ad hoc searches and calculations.

Re:Sweet!

[Neil Blender]

Dude. Try a relational database.

Examining the file is the first step towards inserting the data into a database. I work in bioinformatics. I get files from customers which often share only two common characteristics - they hold some data, and they are tab or comma delimited. Other than that, they could be two columns with 50 rows, or 100 columns with 75,000 rows. Opening the file and looking at it is the first step. A spreadsheet is a handy tool for doing that. I'm not sure if you have used a text editor or used "more" or "less" to look at file with 75 columns, but it is pretty hard to decifer it that way. A spreadsheet is also handy for quick check validation of the data. I can't find the median of 75,000 numbers or search for the values of particalur identifier if the spreadsheet only reads in 32,000 lines. Sure, I could write a script to do all the various things, but a spreadsheet that could read in 100,000 lines would really ease my life. And, as I said, it is only the first step towards much more complicated calculations which do, in fact, use a relational database.

Re:Sweet!

[ajs318]

It sounds to me like you are using your spreadsheet as though it were a database. That's a common mistake, and no doubt something that can be {rightly or wrongly} blamed on Microsoft. {Unix = a well-stocked tool box with one screwdriver for each type of screw recess: slotted, Posidriv, hex, Phillips, Torx, and those weirdy ones you get on appliances. Windows = a "magic hammer" with which you can fasten any kind of screw simply by hitting it like a nail. When raised, it uses a small camera to identify the screw recess; on the way down it automatically fits the correct screwdriving bit, and the impact is turned into rotary motion by a ratchet system.} A spreadsheet looks a bit like a table, but its real purpose is highly-parallel numerical calculations {that's why they all have names ending in *calc, or they used to before Microsoft killed them all off}.

A consequence of this is that telephone numbers in badly-set-up spreadsheets often lose the initial 0 from the STD code {because they were entered in a numeric field; but a telephone number is not a number on which you are going to do mathematical operations, but a text string which happens to be composed solely of numeric characters}; and on one occasion, I have even seen people adding up a column of figures using an idiot-calculator and entering the total by hand!

Have a Google for some introductory stuff on mysql or postgresql {you're likely to have one or the other, if not both, on your distro CDs} and see if that's what you were really trying to do in the first place. At entry level there isn't much to choose between them {the so-lightweight-it's-almost-a-toy MySQL is falling out of favour following an ill-thought-out deal with SCO; and PostgreSQL, having shaken off its reputation for slowness, is the new darling}. By the time you get onto more advanced stuff, you will know which one is for you.

If you're familiar with perl, then you won't have any trouble extracting data from a CSV. Try bunging it into an SQL database {actually, a table within a database} and searching that instead.

Re:Sweet!

[Martin Blank]

You might want to check out Gnumeric. There's a fairly simple hack to the source code (three lines? I don't recall exactly) that allows you to alter the maximum number of rows. For a while, I was opening files of 400,000 lines at work in a copy of Gnumeric that would handle up to one million rows.

And in other news, Slashdot's posting page looks... different.

The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.

[CyricZ]

The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.

Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.

[jesser]

I might be impressed if it actually worked on Mac OS X. As it is, when I launch OpenOffice 1.1.5, it asks me to select my preferred X server, and then gives me an obscure error message when I hit Cancel because I don't understand WTF it is asking. I also tried 1.9 Beta and it gave me an even less useful error message earlier in the install process.

Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.

[rdwald]

The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.

I guess that's why it takes 5 hours to compile in Gentoo, then. I wish I were exaggerating.

Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.

[CyricZ]

It's a massive piece of software. Of course it's going to take hours, literally, to build. It's just a matter of OpenOffice being so massive.

It'd be like building a bridge across the English Channel. It will take longer to build such a bridge than it would to build a bridge across a 10 m wide stream.

Re:Version 1.1.5?

[sinewalker]

me too.

I think 1.1.5 is a back-port of some stuff? The homepage mentions OpenDocument support.

This new slashdot layout is freakin me out... looks cool, but I have to look around to find things again. Strange parallels with OOo...

Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone

[Kjella]

Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?

Lots of people are ready. The users don't want to.

64?

[BrainInAJar]

Still not 64-bit clean. Why exactly is it so hard to make a 64 bit version? Don't get me wrong, i think OO.o is a great app, i'm just curious as to why there's no AMD64 port

OpenOffice in government contracts...

[Spoing]

I need help.

I have a good chance to include the OpenOffice format (specifically, a reference to the Oasis Open Document specification), as part of a specification for a US Federal Government system. The current specification includes MS Office formats as acceptable document formats for reports, etc...and OpenDocument would be inserted along with MS Office as an acceptable report format. This specification will be the basis for a few more related specifications.

What I need are references to other US federal (preferred), US state/local, or non-US government use of OpenOffice (the app) or OpenDocument (the Oasis document standard). The higher profile the better.

So far, I've scraped up a couple references but not enough to make a simple and direct case for the inclusion of OpenDocument. (The practical and technical benifits are not always a good argument to make...who's using what seems to be more effective.)

Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...

[zerblat]

Start by contacting OOo's marketing people, I'm sure they can help you. Also, the OOo Newsletter usually has a section listing high-profile success stories.

Ever store a pointer in a long?

[soullessbastard]

Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.

Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size? Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out? This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code. Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long. gcc4 may spit out a warning at you, but it'll still be valid C.

I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...I almost can fathom spreadsheets, but really the unsigned int row index will bite you in the ass *waaay* before a 2GB per process memory limit :)

ed

Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone

[AcidArrow]

Yes, it is a clone of Microsoft Office (even if it is a little better in my opinion), but since we just established that it has the same functionality as MSOffice and it's free, why isn't everybody using it?

Anyway, it seems that someone is actually rethinking the UI design of an office application, and strangely enough it's Microsoft! (I have no idea if it's going to be any better though..)

Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone

[bloblu]

Did it ever occured to you that the current state of MS Office had been though about hard? Mod me down, but MS Office is rather near perfection. So it's a good idea for openoffice.org to copy good ideas in MS Office. I know it's fashionable to say the contrary on slashdot, nevertheless MS make real good products, sometimes.

Sweet: just installed Beta 2 on Ubuntu Linux

[MarkWatson]

It was a small hassle: installed the zillion RPMs with "alien -s *.rpm" and then changed the ownership of /opt/openoffice.org1.9.125 to my user account and I had to set some execute permissions in /opt/openoffice.org1.9.125/programs. Not sure why everything was root with no permisions; maybe I missed an option on running alien. Nice though, runs well, and looks great.

I hope that the Ubuntu team packages the latest beta of OOo with the next Ubuntu release.

I have been running beta 1 when I need to run Windows for a long time.

* Healthier hacking: http://cjskitchen.com/

Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone

[c.r.o.c.o]

The MS Office interface is very well established, and most (if not all) people are used to it. For people to migrate easily to OOo, it has to feel like a clone of MS Office. When its userbase will be significant enough, it will afford deviating from the norm. I am sure that MS Office implemented a similar interface to its precursors (WordPerfect et al) when it was introduced, and added new features gradually. And by the way, OOo did have a very different interface when it was still called StarOffice 5. It had a desktop manager, file browser, etc, but unfortunately, it felt cumbersome, and the suite ran slowly even on systems with reasonable specs. Moving to the current interface improved things significantly.

I have used OOo exclusively for the past two years, mostly for school work. Between taking notes in class, typing assignments, etc, I spent many hours using it. While I also have MS Office 97, 2k and XT, I stuck with OOo because of a few default behaviours and features. First, it does not bullet, tab, etc by default. You have to actvely format the text. When taking notes in class this is crucial, because I really do not have time to fuss around with how the text looks like. MS Office was driving me crazy with its auto-everything behaviour, which cannot be turned off (it can be undone on a case-by-case basis, but that is not good enough for me). Second, it can export the file as PDF. When sharing files, this is amazing. Not to mention that most people cannot edit your work if you chose not to let them. And upon completing a course I can just archive the material as PDF, without having to worry about installing OOo or MS Office in order to read it. MS Office however, does not (or at least did not) have this feature.

Thank you OOo for giving me a new argument

[Reemi]

I'm in the process of introducing OOo in my company and have been allowed to start a trial half a year ago. We mostly write technical documentation and OOo has held up quite well. Some of the guys even refuse to move back to other tools.

But now, I can show management that OOo is already FORWARD compatible with a file format that they did not even release (except the beta). No FORCED upgrades, this might be the best argument I'll have. Upgrading a large company that uses Solaris, Linux and Windows is not a cheap operation.

MS Foxpro

[Anonymous Coward]

MS Access is never a viable option/ If you absolutely must have an MS product then MS Foxpro is what you are looking for. It is much more powerful and flexible than MS Access.

OO Base might be a more practical option even.

Re:And is also its Achilles heel.

[Anonymous Coward]

However, a project this size surely needs a single build system for all platforms, and that means command-line tools. XCode is nice, sure, but any work done converting OOo to use XCode is (a) work that's wasted for the vast majority of users who will never touch a Mac, and (b) work that will need to be done all over again every time the smallest change is made to the portable build system.

I speak as someone who's had to rewrite build scripts for (small) projects time and time again because the Windows ports of most open source projects seem to assume that everyone has Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE, and I only have command-line compilers. Believe me: reliance on an IDE is bad. Far better to cater for the lowest common denominator, and pressurise the IDE makers to abandon their proprietary formats and use standard Makefiles and so forth instead.

Eww! What about quoting?

[Grendel Drago]

Handling CSV files is a solved problem; there's no need to roll your own, since it will wind up breaking on strange corner cases...

use DBI;
my $dbh = DBI->connect("DBI:CSV:f_dir=data")
    or die "couldn't connect";
my $sth = 'SELECT * FROM bigfile LIMIT ?';
 
$sth->execute(50) or die;
my @r;
while (@r = $sth->fetchrow_array) {
  % do something brilliant
}

Or whatever. DBI works something like that.

Great for opening corrupt Excel files

[JJRRutgers]

Best resource I can find for fixing corrupted Excel files.

IMHO 2.0 beta (1.9.xxxxxx?)

[Anonymous Coward]

IMHO OOo 2.0 Beta (1.9.xxxxxxxx?) is both a heck of a lot more stable than any "stable" 1.1.x.x build, and interoperates with Microsuck Office better as well.