Does this open MS Office files better? Specifically embedded stuff in documents? Also, go the new slashdot design!
-- Cemil.
Re:Sweet!
by
Neil+Blender
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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!
by
Neil+Blender
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
Perhaps MS Access or OOo Base is right for you? They should be able to seamlessly import and view a few hundred thousand lines, without requiring you to know about the data in advance.
-- Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
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.
-- Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Re:Sweet!
by
abandonment
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· Score: 4, Informative
I've been very pleased with the stability, performance and featureset of the open office 2 beta - we've been using it internally for a month or so and it is miles better than the current 1.x codebase.
you might look into trying it out - it might be a 'beta' but it's been very stable on our range of machines - we don't open any massive sized files like what you are looking for, and for that matter i haven't tried out the db side of the new release, but overall it's worth looking into if you are simply trying to open & examine large files.
oh, and i seem to recall that the max rows limit was increased in the 2.x oo spreadsheet app as well, but can't remember how much...
Re:Sweet!
by
Neil+Blender
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· Score: 2, Informative
Ah. I see. I still feel a bit vindicated, though; because it still looks as though the proliferation of file formats you are seeing is due to others upstream using a spreadsheet when what they really wanted was a database.
No, not really. The multitudes of software our customers use in reading their arrays always provide an export function. The export options (and mind you this is third party software) is generaly "you pick and name the columns" or "export everything". This is very advantageous to us. As long as their software can export tab delimited text, we can accomidate their data. If their software only allowed MS access or the like, it would be too hard for us to accomadate all the platforms out there. When we are able to tell our customers, "Send us a tab delimited text file of your data, we will figure it out for you" - they love it. We spend a few minutes in OO or Excel (depending on if it as developer or support staff), quickly reformat their file and load it for them. Given the compexity of most bioinformatics software platforms out there, this is like living at the ritz. We strive for excellence in customer service and my initial remark about 32 vs 64 vs 100K lines of data had to do with quick spot checking for quality of our work. If a statisical error exists, we have to solve the problem ASAP. I'll still spot check, but a spread sheet makes it easier and quicker than doing it by hand.
What I don't understand is why OO has such small limitations built into it. I understand that Excel is a very old app, with roots back in the 16 bit days. OO.o on the other hand is quite new. Why would they only allow first 32,000 and now 64,000 rows. You'd think they could make it handle at least 1,000,000 rows. Why do they build in such small limits?
--
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Re:Sweet!
by
Martin+Blank
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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.
-- You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
-- "As you say - certain behaviors minimize the HIV risk and writing Slashdot tripe on Friday night is by far the most secu
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
sinewalker
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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...
-- “Our opponent is an alien starship packed with nuclear bombs. We have a protractor.” — Neal Stepnenso
Re:Version 1.1.5?
by
HUADPE
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· Score: 5, Informative
OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a beta. 1.1.5 is the stable release. The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
-- This sig has not been evaluated by the FDA. It is not designed to diagnose, treat, prevent, or cure any disease.
The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
In other words, it has superior stability compared to MS Word.
The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
CyricZ
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
jesser
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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.
-- The shareholder is always right.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
rdwald
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
by
CyricZ
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
-- Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic.
by
mr_zorg
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· Score: 2, Informative
Search for NeoOffice/J. A much better port for OS X. Of course, it's not 1.1.5, but it works great, no X server required.
Not really "new" news
by
Petrushka
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· Score: 4, Funny
Er... this happened a week ago. Good news, to be sure, though.
Note: OOo 1.1.5 can import OpenDocument files, but not export them.
By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me.
I wonder if openoffice 2.0 can export them properly too. I just tried to open an odt document that I saved from openoffice 2.0 (the latest version from SUSE 9.3, it's beta, but it's good enough for Novell) and KOffice says that it isn't a valid OASIS opendocument, then refuses to open it.
Who uses the stable release... Beta is the way to go. Always. Real men don't do backup's, they upload their files to usenet or public ftp or bittorrent, and let the world mirror their files.
-- Gravity Sucks
Re:pssshhh stable.
by
leonmergen
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· Score: 2, Informative
When you're quoting Linux Torvalds, at least give him the credits he deserves...
Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
bkazez
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· Score: 3, Insightful
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Kjella
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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.
-- Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
soullessbastard
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
Yes, there are some folks rethinking the standard interfaces...such as Apple (with Keynote and Pages) and even Microsoft with Office 12 and earlier some of the UI design of Office:mac. On some platforms, it would even be possible to play around with alternative OOo interfaces by using OfficeBean (although I don't know of any off of the top of my head).
For office suites, however, I think the general interface paradigms are so commonplace now that any radical departure will be greeting by a nice resounding "WTF is this" from users. Case in point: OpenDoc. It was, in my opinion, a valiant attempt at shifting the focus for productivity suites off of individual applications and onto a free-form content-centric view. The idea never caught on with users, and ones I always saw trying to use it were just confused by the idea and were still asking questions like "what do I open to create a spreadsheet?".
Not to mention I can't get that stupid "I just did the Excel..." lady from the Video Professor commercial out of my head. With millions of users like that, I doubt things will really be able to change that much:)
ed
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
linguae
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
I would love to have a new, innovative, word processing software, spreadsheet software, and presentation software (although I use LaTeX and text editors for the former, so I'm not much of a word processor user anymore). However, OpenOffice's goal was never to become an innovative office suite (in the sense of revolutionizing word processors like Apple's Pages (or even LyX for that matter), revolutionizing spreadsheets like Lotus Improv, and presentations like Apple Keynote); it's goal was to provide 90% of MS Office's features and interface at a much lower price: free (as in beer and as in speech). And it does a decent job of doing that if you just can't afford MS Office (and, in some instances, a Windows or Mac OS license). I use OpenOffice on my computer. Even though I don't use it too often (I have been indoctrinated^Wintroduced to LaTeX, and don't have a need for spreadsheets and presentations [LaTeX can handle presentations, too]), I keep OpenOffice on my machine just in case I must work with MS Office documents.
OpenOffice is a very nice, pragmatic software project used for a free alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice isn't perfect and I actually prefer MS Office to OpenOffice for a few reasons (faster loading is the main key), but it is the no-cost solution to dealing with the MS world out there. OpenOffice didn't set out to become a revolutionary, innovative project. OpenOffice is an example of a program that tries to do a job that a $300+ program does, except offered for free.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
AcidArrow
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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
by
bloblu
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
c.r.o.c.o
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
the_womble
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Exactly, if people were willing to sue something different if it was better, they would be using Lyx (far more productive than a word processor), Gnumeric (fast start-up, built in Monte-Carlo analysis, no bugs in the stats functions) etc. They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.
The choice is there, users choose not to take it.
Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
TuringTest
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· Score: 2, Insightful
They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.
They do that because users understand spreadsheets and they don't understand databases. No, really.
A spreadsheet is a good prototyping tool, it doesn't force structure on your data - you can play with it and throw it lots of data dumps, reformat them, reposition them, and the overall structure of the data emerges from all that dirty work. Contrast this with a database in which the first thing you have to do is define the schema - before even you can type in the first data instance.
So users choose not to change because they're using what works best for them. Spreadsheets are a really good metaphor for user development of datasets - its just that for the final version you should use a proper storage technology (a database), but to do that you really need an expert programmer.
-- Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Back to OOo 1.1.5
by
vanka
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
2.0 Beta For MS Files
by
kg4gyt
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· Score: 5, Informative
I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
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
Unless you want to have a document which uses more than about 3GB of memory, what's the point of building it 64bit?
Firstly a 64bit program will be bigger and probably slower (dispite what the zealots tell you) because of having to drag double sized data across the memory bottleneck.
Seeing as the Opteron/Athlon64/Turion64 run 32bit applications fast natively there's no actual point (other than religious) to build and run an office product (or, indeed, most other applications) in 64bit mode.
As a general comment, "64bit program will be bigger and probably slower" is generally true. Things that benefit from 64-bit (databases, encryption) will speed up but everything else will slow down. Of course, when you speak x86-64 that isn't true at all. You get several advanatages in the design (more reigsters, flat memory, assume high level processor (no compat building for a Pentium 1)) which do speed it up.
In EDA tools, I've seen SPARC 64-bit binaries go slower and the x86-64 ones go quicker. That isn't a critcism of SPARC, it is just proof of the benefits of the x86-64 mode.
Anyway in THIS case I don't see any benefits of having a 64-bit OOo as such - the problem is if OOo is 32-bit, then it needs a 32-bit userland. So on my x86-64 boxes I've got a load of duplicated libraries (GTK etc) in 32-bit mode just to support OOo. If OOo was 64-bit, I simply would need less stuff. That has to be good right?
Myself, I've not seen a great number of x86_64 binaries go quicker at all. This is both under Linux with GCC and Portland C compilers with all the optimisations I can throw at it switched on and under Solaris x86 with GCC and Studio 10 compilers.
For purely integer code on our v40z's, v20z's and W2100z machines there seems to be a 50% drop in speed, for floating point scientific code generally a bit less. This is the same for FORTRAN as well. These are all Opteron with dual channel memory.
I've tried similar on an Athlon64 machine with single channel memory and the performance drop is far greater.
All the advantages of the extra registers seems to be offset by the extra memory overhead at the moment, at least on the codes we run.
--
Agrajag: "Oh no, not again!"
REPLY:Just a Microsoft Office clone
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 2, Funny
But the did NOT clone the outrageous price that Microsoft charges for it!!! I installed it on 25 computers in my company and stopped paying the outrageous amounts to Microsoft for Office!;-)
Carlos
And is also its Achilles heel.
by
soullessbastard
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· Score: 5, Informative
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:
It builds its own build tools as part of its bootstrapping process. This makes it near impossible to cross-compile without completely retooling the build system (a pain for doing any type of single-machine PPC & x86 OS X builds).
It has its own "make" equivalent that encodes module dependencies and language localizations in a custom format. To add appropriate dependencies you need to learn yet another makefile system. Don't mention trying to figure out the module build order without actually running a compile. Try it sometime if you want to lose your mind.
It uses quite a few preprocessing tools for custom file formats for processing including slots files, IDL files that generate more headers, resource compilers, and more. Custom toolchains make figuring out what generated what file even more fun to discover.
Some of the build tools have dependencies on versions of Java that do not exist on all the platforms on which the application might be able to run, preventing it from even compiling on those platforms.
The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.
The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.
ed
OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Spoing
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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.)
-- A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
zerblat
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
-- Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Re:OpenOffice in government contracts...
by
Coeurderoy
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· Score: 2
In France (not sure its the best reference to use in the US:-) The Gendarmerie National (Militarized Police Forces) uses Open Office on all new stations and is in the process of upgrading all the old PCs. (its 70 000 PCs) The Customs Office is using OO on 16000 office.
City of Vienna, and Munich are in that process also.
The Junta de Extremadura in Spain (regional government) is using Linux/OO for everything (the Education dep only has 80 000 workstations).
Finally remember that there are three categories of CSS (Closed Source Software) supporting Public Servants: - Some are Corrupt - Many are incompetent - Some are Both.
(unfortunatelly to be truthfull, FOSS supporting Public Servants are not necesarelly Angels, it would be too simple otherwise)
So you have to find out in wich category your decision makers are:-)
I am using SeaMonkey 1.0a, and it looks lovely. Did you try one of the many other browsers available for Linux before you had a conniption?
I'm in a karma free fall right now. Let's see how much more I can lose.
No...I used Slashdot's darling browser using one of the most popular linux distros. I suppose I could install some other distros and use some more obscure browsers. But you're right, though...I'm sure they tested the new code on SeaMonkey 1.0a....whatever the hell that is.
Ever store a pointer in a long?
by
soullessbastard
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· Score: 4, Interesting
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
Witty comments with submission
by
gringer
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· Score: 3, Funny
What happened to the in-depth analysis from the poster. "X has been released, download it here" seems a bit empty to me.
I was expecting something like the following:
Although version 1.1.5 is a bit less of a jump than the upcoming 2.0, there have been a few impressive improvements. None of which I'm sure of, but not knowing those guys who work on the product, I'm sure it'll be great. I'm thinking of downloading this update in a couple of weeks, so what suggestions do you have for software to support this massive leap into the unknown?
Sweet: just installed Beta 2 on Ubuntu Linux
by
MarkWatson
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· Score: 3, Interesting
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.
Re:Sweet: just installed Beta 2 on Ubuntu Linux
by
b.e.n.n.y_b.o.y_1234
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· Score: 2, Informative
Why didn't you just type apt-get install openoffice.org2 ?
Thank you OOo for giving me a new argument
by
Reemi
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· Score: 2, Interesting
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.
MacOS X Version
by
tranquillity
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· Score: 3, Informative
Of course you'll still need X11 to run those applications, but 1.1.5 works fine and stable for me (havn't tried 2.0 yet) on tiger with Apple's X11.
the looks of slasdot
by
N3wsByt3
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· Score: 2, Funny
"By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me."
Well, that says it all, doesn't it? I mean; it looks normal in Lynx! What more proof of the highly skewed and distorted layout do you need?;-)
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"To pee or not to pee, that is the question."
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But how else can you do portable?
by
steve_l
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· Score: 3, Insightful
As a member of the Ant team, I also have to bemoan their use of a non-standard build tool, given that there is pretty good support for C++ compiles in ant-contrib's , and with extra work C++ support could be improved.
without something portable like Ant or SCons, you end up needing either to
-build your own tools (this is what Microsoft's shared source version of.NET does; it builds things like NMAKE, their worst-in-class make tool, then builds the rest of the system)
-require a common toolchain on every box (e.g. Unix make+the unix commands; cygwin on windows)
The trouble with IDEs, is that they are either platform specific, or use their own configuration files to control the build. In Java Ant has finally become common enough (after 5 years) that it is broadly supported in IDEs, so you get the best of both worlds.
In C++ land, most people resort to the common toolchain, because only the ambitious fools with time on their hands bother to write their own build system. Does that mean it should't be done? No, just that it would be silly if every fairly large project came up with their own build tools. Instead every few years, we really ought to revisit the build processes and tools of the OSS projects, and see how they can be improved.
Slashdot Mirror
Does this open MS Office files better? Specifically embedded stuff in documents? Also, go the new slashdot design!
Cemil.
I thought OO.o was on version 2.0?
"As you say - certain behaviors minimize the HIV risk and writing Slashdot tripe on Friday night is by far the most secu
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.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Er ... this happened a week ago. Good news, to be sure, though.
Note: OOo 1.1.5 can import OpenDocument files, but not export them.
By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me.
Who uses the stable release... Beta is the way to go. Always. Real men don't do backup's, they upload their files to usenet or public ftp or bittorrent, and let the world mirror their files.
Gravity Sucks
It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.
Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?
Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.
By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
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
But the did NOT clone the outrageous price that Microsoft charges for it!!! I installed it on 25 computers in my company and stopped paying the outrageous amounts to Microsoft for Office! ;-)
Carlos
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:
The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.
The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.
ed
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.)
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
I am using SeaMonkey 1.0a, and it looks lovely. Did you try one of the many other browsers available for Linux before you had a conniption?
I'm in a karma free fall right now. Let's see how much more I can lose.
No...I used Slashdot's darling browser using one of the most popular linux distros. I suppose I could install some other distros and use some more obscure browsers. But you're right, though...I'm sure they tested the new code on SeaMonkey 1.0a....whatever the hell that is.
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
What happened to the in-depth analysis from the poster. "X has been released, download it here" seems a bit empty to me.
I was expecting something like the following:
Although version 1.1.5 is a bit less of a jump than the upcoming 2.0, there have been a few impressive improvements. None of which I'm sure of, but not knowing those guys who work on the product, I'm sure it'll be great. I'm thinking of downloading this update in a couple of weeks, so what suggestions do you have for software to support this massive leap into the unknown?
Ask me about repetitive DNA
WYSIWYM ?
Working for necessity's mother.
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/
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.
For those who cannot find a 1.1.5 version for MacOS X (that also works on tiger) on www.openoffice.org try this link: http://ooofr.org/telechargement/macosx/1.1.5/
There ist also a 2.0 beta version available: http://ooofr.org/telechargement/macosx/2.0/
Of course you'll still need X11 to run those applications, but 1.1.5 works fine and stable for me (havn't tried 2.0 yet) on tiger with Apple's X11.
"By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me."
;-)
Well, that says it all, doesn't it? I mean; it looks normal in Lynx! What more proof of the highly skewed and distorted layout do you need?
--- "To pee or not to pee, that is the question." ---
As a member of the Ant team, I also have to bemoan their use of a non-standard build tool, given that there is pretty good support for C++ compiles in ant-contrib's , and with extra work C++ support could be improved.
.NET does; it builds things like NMAKE, their worst-in-class make tool, then builds the rest of the system)
without something portable like Ant or SCons, you end up needing either to
-build your own tools (this is what Microsoft's shared source version of
-require a common toolchain on every box (e.g. Unix make+the unix commands; cygwin on windows)
The trouble with IDEs, is that they are either platform specific, or use their own configuration files to control the build. In Java Ant has finally become common enough (after 5 years) that it is broadly supported in IDEs, so you get the best of both worlds.
In C++ land, most people resort to the common toolchain, because only the ambitious fools with time on their hands bother to write their own build system. Does that mean it should't be done? No, just that it would be silly if every fairly large project came up with their own build tools. Instead every few years, we really ought to revisit the build processes and tools of the OSS projects, and see how they can be improved.
I have to agree with Shani -- the web site is a deal killer. I couldn't get anyone I know to consider LyX over Word if I sent them to the web site.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Best resource I can find for fixing corrupted Excel files.