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OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released
Da Massive writes "The official release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been pushed to the download servers, as of Thursday the 20th." From the article: "OpenDocument is an XML file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentations. It was approved as an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard at the beginning of this year. OpenDocument, set as a default in OpenOffice, is cited by proponents as a way of fighting vendor lock-in associated with proprietary formats. Already, it is the required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts." You can download, or read past coverage including a preview or a comparison with MS Office. Update: 10/20 17:22 GMT by Z : Made date reference more topical.
My milk hasn't expired yet.
I've been eagerly awaiting 2.0 Official release for 6 months - its about time!!!
Going to download and install it tonight - WOOT!
"Murderer? Well, that's a harsh word. I prefer to think of myself as a Mortality Technician."
...it would be before my milk expired. Well, they are a day late. This is just udderly devastating.
You are in a maze of little twisting passages, all different.
Can someone explain to me why the gang at OpenOffice can't create a printer for windows ala Adobe Acrobat in order to "Print to OpenDocument"?
This seems like the answer to all of the issues.
More
That's l33t speak for 20th? : )
You can't take the sky from me...
Did some one read the date wrong? 20/10/2005 is the 20th, not the 10th.
Can't help but wonder what kind of press release MSFT will put out today.
Surely cross-platform nature of OO.o is the whole point?
Directly after the release this morning, Mad Penguin published a lengthy interview with OOo's Lois Suarez-Potts which represents part 3 of their OpenOffice.org interview series (part 1 and 2 were covered previously on Slashdot). The article is 3 pages long but an excellent read all the same.
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/download.ht ml
Soon, MS Office will have native support for PDF (like OOo has always had). Now, all they have to do is add support for ODF, give it away free along with the source code, and it will be almost as good as OOo.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
It'd be nice if they released a build for OSX. The only 2.0 build they've had for as long as I've been checking is a development build in french.
This page has bittorrent links.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
No support for the Mac OS X is a show stopper for me. :(
A great accomplishment. I've been using the product for a couple of years now and really love it. My wife's entire business is based on Open Office as well. Thanks for all of the hard work!
After using OO for nearly 6 months, I wonder why anyone is still using MS Office? Is it habit? If it is its like cigarettes, an expensive habit to keep that is bad for you.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
BitTorrent I'm downloading it right now. I've used the beta and RC1 version for months now, and I've only seen it crash once, and I've used it on various computers.
A million Microsoft shareholders cried out in pain today.
Saskboy's blog is good. 9 out of 10 dentists agree.
I feel a productivity surge bubbling up inside me.
Software freedom...I love it!
I don't believe it! I only downloaded and installed RC3 4 hours ago. Grrrr.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
It is not in portage yet, therefore it must not exist.
...
Off topic my shiny metal ass... a simple google search for openoffice milk expired would have led you to this article. Now wait until after noon before you smoke any more crack.
music lover since 1969
I just recently restored my laptop, and rather than go fishing for my MS Office 2001 disk with the faded product key, I opted to give OpenOffice.org a shot. For me, a casual .doc reader who just needs something light and quick to open and read with, OO.org is a great solution. It does just about everything a cheap guy like me could want. Plus I didn't have to dig in that dreaded closet of PC past and type in a cd key I can barely make out anymore. I had no idea a new version was coming out so soon, so this is great news to me! I even began spreading whispers about it at work, it may not be the juicy Lost roundtable, but a free alternative to something Microsoft for our Macs always perks some ears.
-Buddy of DoQ
Has anyone repackaged it in a straight tarball? This is inconvenient for people who use other distributions.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
This is great! Congratulations to the OpenOffice folks. Now all OpenOffice needs is a good vi keymap.
I have the distinct feeling I'll be losing some Karma for saying this but I'm REALLY disappointed that they didn't solve the Java issue.
According to the System Requirements page it still requires the Sun JVM.
Last I heard (admittedly sometime last year) they had found a likely solution in the ability to compile the Java stuff into binary for each platorm, I guess that didn't pan out.
I've said it before but I really don't see the advantage of having an OSS product if you are still dependent on a definitively non-open product. Ofr course I know it's completely different sice Sun isn't evil like Microsoft is.
I'm hoping to be able to run v2 on my AMD64 box sometime - but reports of it even compiling are pretty sketchy, and it runs like a dog, unless you disable java in the build. (Why are the words java and slow always appearing in the same sentence...)
Anyone know of any AMD64 v2 binary packages until that time? (Binary - I feel dirty saying that word.)
Get your own free personal location tracker
Other than that Mrs. Lincoln, how was the show?
It's been a while since I laughed at one of these... I didn't with this one either.
For those who don't know, openoffice has an excellent API. It will run in server mode with an open port on the server so you can query it and perform almost any operation including File conversion, pdf export, calculations, etc. Check it out!
http://api.openoffice.org/
The have a link to torrents. I highly suggest that. I am seeding right now so come and get it.
This is great news for me - it should make my wife happy!
.doc files that she gets sent via email.
I switched over to OS X for our home computer when Apple came out with the Mac Mini (I love iMovie, it makes great movies of the kids). It's been mostly painless, except for one thing: MS Word Documents. My wife needs to open and edit
I tried installing OpenOffice 1.4, but it was slow and felt unpolished. More importantly: she didn't like it. We tried NeoOffice/J but the Java startup time is a pain, too. The AbiWord OS X port doesn't look done. And I did't think that Word 2000 running inside an emulator was going to cut it for her. Up to now, I have had to keep our old WinXP box around just to keep her from strangling me.
I welcome the opportunity to finally donate my WinXP box to the local kids computer recycling program!
I created a program for here at work just yesterday that logs machine PLC data to a ods formatted sheet. I just created a ods template and my logger program written in python opens content.xml and feeds the log data into it. Now of course I could do that with office also but it would require either macro programming and or automating excel to do it, far uglier than just producing straight ods output from a program. Not to mention having to run a office suite on a server just to produce a document. For the developer ODF is a god send!
Got Code?
Probably an American. They'd look at that date and say "tenth of the twentieth month? WTF?" ;)
(Just like I keep wondering why everyone's going on about the 9th of November...)
Yeah, the rest of the world has it right... smallest units to largest units. It's more consistent that way.
This is also why, in Europe, the complete date and time would be given by (as an example):
56:32:11 20/10/2005 (ss:mm:hh dd/mm/yyyy)
(This is, of course, the current time in the Eastern US daylight time zone)
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
...you were "pool whoring"?
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not to totally plug my own article, but I have a detailed comparison between the two here that some might be interested in.
Best Windows Freeware
If you are downloading via Azureus...PLEASE do the following
Post the Azureus Magnet URI to Slashdot by doing the following
Go to "My Torrents"
Right click on your torrent and choose "Copy Magnet URI to clipboard"
Please paste this in your post.
This will allow people to join the swarm without having to get the tracker file which is TOTALLY swamped at the moment.
thanks!
No, it does't run under OSX. It runs, poorly (meaning, without access to system fonts because it's an xwindows app, not an OSX app) on PPC Macs but not as released (you have to dig up the right copy) and it's not integrated with the OS in terms of style which annoys a lot of OSX users (which is one of the claims for OO 2.) It doesn't annoy me, I can deal with whatever interface, but the fact that it can't access the system's fonts is a stone killer problem.
I'm a little worried about the decision to use Java for the DB, too, but I may be buying trouble that doesn't exist. I'm just going by the various interplatform/interapplication incompatibilities that I see on web pages because the wrong Java is installed (eg, flickr works on firefox but not on omniweb, etc.)
Too bad they didn't write it in python. Make java look like the c-descended nightmare it is. ;-)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yuck. they screwed up big time by getting rid of the linux installer.
now those of us that do not run a popular rpm based distro are forced to fight our way into installing it.
they had a great graphical/text installer that worked very well even had provisions for network based install and they dumped it.
worst move they could have made. I really hope that someone digs out the old installer and makes it work with 2.0 so we can get back to advancing linux software instead of stepping backwards by getting rid of the installer.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Ah - I'm not the best at these new fancy P2P features ;)
Found this in Azureus. It should work for the Win32 binary:
Win 32 binary.
I vote we call it Next-August.
Finding other idiots on
I dont see the osx version anywhere and there are three days left on my milk.
Ride recklessly only when safe to do so.
Note: System Requirements say:
The minimum JDK/JRE version required to use OpenOffice.org features that require java(emphasis mine)
So, java is *not* required to use ooo. You get extra features if you happen to have it installed, that's all.
have you ever heard about evolution?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
PDF is actually less dynamic. A PostScript file is actually a computer program that, when executed in a PostScript interpreter, winds up executing instructions to draw marks on a rendering surface. You can't, in principle, know what a PostScript file will end up looking like, until you run the program to its per-page completion. If the PostScript winds up looping forever or takes up too much memory, either a user or the printer has to be smart enough to cancel the job and report an error.
People have done crazy things with PostScript in this way, actually. I've seen PostScript print files that print out digits of Pi, using the printer's CPU engine to calculate the digits!
PDF, on the other hand, is basically a flash-frozen listing of those rendering instructions. That's why a PDF file can be edited with the appropriate Adobe software.. it just goes in and changes the rendering instructions.
Back in the day, when Adobe introduced PDF, the big excitement was that PDF's font support was fancy enough so that if your printer didn't have a font that the PDF specified, the PDF reader could just tweak the size and shape of a standard font in order to make the spacing and visual quality come out looking right, anyway, without having to stuff a bunch of full spline definitions for fonts into the PDF file. This fit into the goal of allowing PDF files to be efficiently compressed.
So, PDF is good stuff! PostScript is the dynamic one, though.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Click here if you can't or don't want to use P2P method. Note this is Windows version.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
not exactly userfriendly when I can fire up excel and produce a nice graph. Just last week, I tried to use openoffice to plot some chemistry data. I was not able to plot a regression line. So I had to go back to Excel. If your saying the OpenOffice solution is to download another tool, well that's not gonna cut it for the general public.
No offence but if I need to download, install, configure, and learn how to use a third-party program, then work out how to integrate it with Open Office, I'll just stick with Excel.
Excel is a really shitty platform for data analysis for anything more complex than sophmore-level undergrad labs. At the least, using a dedicated analysis and charting tool or set of tools is like a breath of fresh air after dealing with Excel's cramped, business-oriented data toolset.
You're assuming everyone uses Excel for serious, hard-core scientific analysis. I use it for trivial purposes, in which case user-friendliness and an easy interface are more important than accuracy to 80000 decimal places.
Whenever OOo comes up, I make the same complaint, and invariably, someone tells me I'm a clueless asshole, but it's gotten to be a tradition now, so I'll do it again.
My benchmark for office suite comparisons is MS Office 97. I have used all of the subsequent versions of MS Office at work, but I always install Office 97 on my own machines. The reason for this is that, aside from functionality mostly aimed at group collaboration, there have been no significant changes in Word or Excel in the last eight years, so why bother upgrading?
Well, there has been one significant change -- the same functionality requires vastly more resources in later versions of Office. Office 97 runs comfortably on an old 120MHz Pentium I laptop with 32 megs of RAM that I like to haul around when I'd rather not risk losing my more recent and expensive desktop replacement laptop. Office 2003 or XP? Forget it.
As near as I can tell, OpenOffice has reached feature-parity with MS Office for single-user purposes; I can't speak to its collaboration features. There are some aspects of its interface that I don't much like, but I suspect that's mostly a matter of familiarity. But it is a giant, shrieking, slow resource hog, and I wouldn't use it on anything other than a fairly recent machine. It is, moreover, slower than Office 2003.
Now, as I noted at the start of the post, someone will inevitably -- and generally without much tact -- argue that some theoretical user population, like corporate office users, will have the latest machines and not be bothered by this. That might even be true in some cases, though my experience has been that most companies don't upgrade machines unless they absolutely have to. But that's the point to some extent: why should anyone have to perform a hardware upgrade to get the same level of functionality that was available back in 1997? Word processors and spreadsheets are mature application categories; shouldn't they become more efficient as time goes by?
Make no mistake about it, I am not a Microsoft partisan. I am as enthusiastic about the promise of FOSS as I was a decade ago. I am thrilled that OpenOffice exists. But I am deeply disappointed that in so many cases -- and OpenOffice is but one of many -- free software is just as bloated as its commercial counterparts. It may be that in the corporate environment, the cost of hardware upgrades is a drop in the bucket compared to the cost of endless Microsoft software licenses. (In fact, I'm pretty sure it is true.) But for the private individual, that's often not the case.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
The fact that OO is unable to import and export undocumented file types protected by patents and other intellectual property is not their fault. You need to take this up with Microsoft. Perhaps they could support the OASIS standard in their product, I hear some of their customers have been asking for it.
evil is as evil does
Although there is no native build for OpenBSD yet, OpenOffice.org 2.0 runs fins on OpenBSD through Linux emulation.e _on_openbsd
Here are instructions to run it on OpenBSD: http://www.00f.net/php/show-article.php/openoffic
{{.sig}}
The question is: How do tech-savvy office clerks and frontline managers automate data that is too extensive or dependant on forms/reports to handle in a spreadsheet? Especially when they need to apply this on a relatively small scale within a large corporation?
Of course, another answer is to impose a locked-down environment where very little is programmable and worker initiative is viewed with suspicion. I've experienced that too, in the form of mainframe- and Unix-centric environments. This MS-hater will happily take the Access-riddled workplace over that any day.
But finally having a widely-deployable (and FOSS) alternative to Access makes this a moment of great joy for me!
User friendliness, thats a laugh. I found M$ software became more and more user unfriendly as they dumped more and more useless features into them whether they worked or not just so they could differentiate it from previous versions basically the same program. Product quality, nah pure marketing and greed, the pointless upgrade cycle, well pointless to the customer, for microsoft it's just more money in the bank.
The best that they have managed to achieve with a clear and simple interface is office 97 and since then it has been doing nothing but getting more bloated and clumsy (who can forget the introduction of clippy).
It is the annoyances in microsoft office and the marketing nonsence coming of of microsoft that gets people to switch open office. I swapped over and have not looked back. Open office it does the job, save the B$ for M$, microsoft the software for you when all your pursuits are trivial, interesting marketing concept, I have to give you a pat on the back for that one ;-).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen