Update to OpenOffice 2 Released

VincenzoRomano writes "The very first update to OpenOffice 2, namely v2.0.1, has been released. Despite its version numbering, along with minor bug fixes there are a number of new features. From the update page: 'For example, it is now possible to disable and hide particular application settings, which comes in handy for central administration in networks. Plus, a new keyboard shortcut permits the user to return to a saved cursor position. The bullets and numbering feature has been expanded, and a new mail merge feature is available.' Downloads are ready in both binary formats and source code for an ever increasing number of localised languages. Go grab your version!"

Comments

Why don't they release a patch?

[n0dna]

Doesn't ~75mb seem a bit stupid every time there is an update?

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[advocate_one]

well, you could always download the source code and keep up to date yourself using CVS or whatever system they're using... the builds are just for the convenience of those who lack the ability/resources/knowledge to do it for themselves... of course, if you're stuck on dialup or no net connection at all, then tough... 75MB takes me 3 minutes to download...

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[Pneuma ROCKS]

Yes, I don't intend to spend so much time downloading and reinstalling the whole thing just to get some minor (and a few major) updates. Call me when there's a real major change, maybe version 2.1. They should take a page from Firefox 1.5 and do automatic patching. All the cool applications are doing it :).

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

well, you could always download the source code and keep up to date yourself using CVS or whatever system they're using... the builds are just for the convenience of those who lack the ability/resources/knowledge to do it for themselves...

Such as about 99% of office suite users, you mean? :-)

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[kisielk]

Doesn't FF still download the entire package whenever there is an update? I'm pretty sure even the autoupdater downloads the whole install, but I could be wrong...

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes it does. As far as I know, all the auto-updaters are replacing the entire package of the things they are updating. Even gentoo's emerge system downloads the latest source code by default (or used to since I haven't used gentoo since ubuntu 5.04) and you had to actually work at changing it to do patches (and that was a pain and a half) and even then the recompiles off the patches did funny stuff if you didn't do a full clean beforehand.

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[jsight]

Hurray for being wrong on all counts! :)

Firefox's auto-updater has been incremental since 1.5 (admittedly a recent release).

And Gentoo sends most security updates and some other updates as patches as long as you keep the original files in /usr/portage/distfiles. Admittedly, major new versions (and sometimes minor upstream releases) get pushed down as completely new packages, but patches are not uncommon even in the default system.

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[makomk]

Gentoo users can also use the (unofficial) ddeltup, which allows you to download just a (binary) patch from the previous revision to the one you want, instead of downloading the whole file. Unfortunately, it doesn't work for the OpenOffice binary package (the patch is larger than the original file, due to compressed data in the RPMs that make up an OpenOffice release).

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[stefanlasiewski]

This used to be the case with the 1.0 line. This was changed in Firefox 1.5 so that updates could be incremental and small.

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[26242]

hahaha. thats EXACTLY what i was thinking. god, why not just make a patch or something?!

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[drsmithy]

Even the mere distribution of binaries, in the Open Source world, is looked up with suspicion by True Believers.

The idea of binary *patches*, is bordering on blasphemous.

/Hyperbole

//But only just

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[Ed Avis]

Yeah, that's just what we need, a hundred and one different auto-update systems, one for each application. Two words: yum update.

Re:Why don't they release a patch?

[xenoterracide]

yeah but those of us using gentoo will have to wait a month before the revision is marked stable. kinda like firefox 1.5 still not stable how long has it been out? (shakes head) gentoo used to be better. @#$% microsoft for taking the maker.

Thanks for the info

[Bullfish]

I appreciate the info about the update, but it's not really worthy of a story posting. I am sure a bunch of games and other software had additions today too.

This is useful info though. Perhaps Slashdot could make a software update page for things like this rather than posting them on the main page. It would also avoid the inevitable dumbass comments that spring up when these things happen.

Re:Thanks for the info

[vain gloria]

I appreciate the info about the update, but it's not really worthy of a story posting. I am sure a bunch of games and other software had additions today too.

How can you say that? This isn't just any old update, this is the very first one!

</breathless fanboyisms>

Re:Thanks for the info

[Anonymous Coward]

You're quibbling over 1-2 seconds to recognise and ignore a software story every couple of weeks?

Not that it shouldn't be impossible, but I bet you spent more time posting this than you'd save in a year of scrolling on by...

Re:Thanks for the info

[Bullfish]

Yes, dammit, I'm quibbling. Actually it was a suggestion. As well, freshmeat is devoted to open source (which is great as a repository for that). Other sites cover things, but a central update site for both open source and other software as well could be handy.

If people like this stuff on the front page, fine, but usually the first 50 comments about such things are whines, and not fine ones either.

Re:Thanks for the info

[Dammital]

I'm one who considered the post newsworthy. OO.o is an important app to me; I just rolled 2.0.0 out to my wife's and daughter's MS-Windows machines, and Gentoo-emerged it on my home and work systems. (Takes a lonnnnng time to compile on a 350MHz P-II, let me tell you. I'm not looking forward to doing that again!)

May I suggest that you try one of the RSS aggregators? Liferea (e.g.) will reduce those posts to one-liners for you.

New features ? Why ?

[dom1234]

I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office. Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Cutterman]

Taking your points in reverse order:

From my recent experiences in converting a small business to OOo - No, most of the current incompatibilities involve fairly esoteric corners of the suite that the average office drone, creating/accessing simple documents, is unlikely to meet.

Remember that current MSOffice formats are closed proprietary formats - compatibility has to be achieved by laboriously reverse engineering Microsoft's "secret sauce". That OOo have reached the current degree of compatibility is an extraordinary achievement. Winkling out the last small incompatibilites will eventually be done but MS makes it as difficult as it can.

Although the OOo interface is designed to make it easy for people to convert, it isn't a clone and this makes people nervous about switching. After a day or two of actual use they have reorientated themselves and are fine. After a week or so they've forgotten about MS.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[hswerdfe]

1. Pivot Tables in Excel are easier to use then OO.org data Pilot.
2. Excel has a Text to Column Feature, I have never found in OO.org
4. OO.org is dog slow Linux, faster on windows. but still slower then Excel.

note 90% of the time I need a Spread sheet I'm in Linux and use OO.org any way.
but still, it would be nice to have these features

Re:New features ? Why ?

[morgan_greywolf]

I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office. Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?

No. And I wish people would put this red herring to rest. OOo's MS-Office compatibility is very good, and it's even better with the 2.0.x releases. The compatibility doesn't have to perfect. Heck, speaking of perfect, when MS Office took over, it did so by including imperfect compatibility for the two major reigning apps of the day: WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3.

The are lots of reasons why people haven't switched to OpenOffice. But not all of them -- and in fact most of them do not -- have to do with file format compatibility.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I bet that a lot of people would switch to OpenOffice w/o *any* MS compatibility if OpenOffice was simply a *better* product.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[jonadab]

> I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office.

You'd have to pinpoint specific points of incompatibility. At this point, I would have said that support for the Word and Excel formats was good enough, and that instead effort should be put into features, or into support for other popular formats (MS Works, AppleWorks, Word Perfect, MS Publisher, ...)

> Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice?

In a word, no.

I know of three major reasons why people don't use OpenOffice... The most obvious is lack of familiarity: people don't use what they don't know about. Perhaps more important is lack of bundling: it doesn't come pre-installed on computers. I'm pretty sure compatibility with MS Office isn't a major selling point for WordPad, but yet it continues to be used by more people than OpenOffice. Similarly, MS Works has only very marginal compatibility with Office, much worse than what OpenOffice has, but it's used by a lot more people, because a lot of OEMs bundle it. Third, there's the brand name factor: Microsoft in general and Word in particular is currently the big brand name, so people use it for the same reason they use Ziploc bags, although some competing brands are both better and cheaper.

Perceived incompatibility may be a factor for some people, but it is certainly not the only reason and probably not even the primary reason why people don't switch.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[dom1234]

From my recent experiences in converting a small business to OOo

When trying to convince my friends to adopt open source software, their decision is made in about 30 seconds, just the time to try to load a ".doc" file. If it works, they will pay a bit more attention. Otherwise, they will stick with their illegal copy of MSOffice.

Converting a business after some manager has accepted is a completely different matter. The conversion is part of their work, they will accept at least an hour of time spent for it, and that is if they ever have the choice.

compatibility has to be achieved by laboriously reverse engineering

I never said it was easy. This is why many many efforts must be put there.

it isn't a clone and this makes people nervous about switching

This may be sad, but I think my girlfriend is rather concerned about not being able to open the PPS document with a joke or cute kittens she receives by email anymore.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. ...
2. ...
4. ...

Does OO.o have the same auto-numbering bug as Office?

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Bert64]

Msoffice is also full of ridiculous bugs..
You`l notice bugs in both apps if you use them extensively.. The problem is, microsoft often simply refuse to fix bugs.. or don't say anything at all, especially if the bug is in a rarely used feature..

As an example, if your counting lines in a macro, lines with bullet points are counted differently, this is unintuitive and has existed since 97, and still isn't fixed.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sad, but true. According to this article (traslated by Google), the Brazilian house of representatives has just switched back to MS Office, and the main reason is compatibility problems with MS Office.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[lahvak]

People don't switch to OO because it is full of ridiculous bugs. There's no other reason!

That doesn't make sense. People are happily using MS Office which is also full of ridiculus bugs.

I think the reasons for people not switching are quite obvious:

1) OO is not singnificantly better to justify the switch.
2) OO user interface is sufficiently different from MS Office to make people uncomfortable about switching.
3) OO is significantly slower.
4) Many companies have their workflow based on MS Office documents with bunch of macros, VB and other crap. That stuff isn't (and probably never will be) completely compatible with OO. That's where the incompatibility kicks in. Of course thay will have to rewrite everything at some point anyway, because it will become incompatible with newer versions of MS Office, but I expect they will hang on the stuff as long as they will be able to.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office.

I'd rather 99% of the effort went into anything but MS compatibility. It's a battle they can't win; OOo will never be a better MS Office than MS Office (unless Microsoft actually goes backwards in a future version, of course, which isn't beyond the bounds of possibility).

What I want isn't a clone of MS Office, it's a good quality word processor that does some things better than Word, or a good quality spreadsheet that helps me do more than I can do with the same effort in Excel. In past discussions, I've mentioned several areas that are important to significant numbers of users and where no current office suite is really doing a good job. Of all the office software in the world, something like OOo should be best placed to capitalise on this opportunity in the market, yet it doesn't. Why? Obsession with MS Office compatibility, I'm betting.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[just_another_sean]

Without knowing the details I may be wrong here but isn't adding new features to bullets and numbering and mail merge all part of making it more compatible with MS Office? These features will make MS documents easier to open in OO (bullets) and add feature compatibility that MSO users expect (mail merge).

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Arnos]

I think another reason a lot of people don't switch is due to Impress not having dual monitor/presenter mode. Since Teachers/Professors/Presenters use the dual function- it is moot for them to get BOTH Ooo and MSO since they need MSO for slides.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[k12linux]

Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?

At this point I'd argue marketing has the most to do with it. Many many businesses buy what their local vendor is selling or what they've heard about. The local vendors haven't had OOo pushed down their throats weekly like they have MS-Office so many don't know it exists. Also many of them can't figure out how to make $$$ selling OOo so why would they want customers to use it much less even mention that it's an option?

Many many people have never heard of OOo and don't even have any idea that alternatives to MS-Office/Word exist in any fasion whatsoever. Heck most people don't even realize that Word isn't the only word processor on th planet.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[hal2814]

Maybe because OpenOffice's main goal isn't to replace MS Office but to be the best office product available? It's open source software. There's no worries about going out of business or posting profits or anything of that nature. They don't have to compete with MS. They just have to compete with themselves. If the people who are working on this project don't feel like spending every waking moment tracking every little nuance of the MS Office file formats, I can't blame them.

Open source isn't about some anti-MS BS. It's about being able to do what you want to with your software. If you don't like this particular product or how it works, you are free to make the changes you would like to it. Does OO not handle something about the MS file format the way you would like? Then fix it.

In my workplace most documents that we send out that were formerly Word docs are now PDFs (and our one client who actually wants it in Postscript). And all of our Excel docs have always really been CSVs. Office interoperability doesn't affect us too much.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[dickeya]

I agree. I bet half the people who comment on MS file compatibility have never used the 2.0 version or RCs leading up to it. Compatibility is at a completely different level. My resume, which used to have awful import artifacts in the 1.x line, comes into 2.0 perfectly. That can't be said about other versions of Word. It maintains the header across multiple pages, non-standard margins, bulleting is preserved. I save changes and open it in Word and it is still fine. I've got tons of Excel sheets that open great in Calc, no formula problems or anything. The only thing I can't figure out is a suitable way to get Ctrl+D (fill down).

I think 2.0 is great.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office.

You seriously think you can throw *all* developers on improving compatibility with MS Office? How many of non-paid developers will respond with "screw you" and will switch to another project? How many of paid developers will start looking for a more satisfying job? I would.

Working on compatibility with any product is not for everyone and working on compatibility with MS Office is a never ending job.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Red Alastor]

No, 3 was profit !

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice is 100% a Sun Microsystems project. It is all about attacking Microsoft. Take your opensource fantasyland crap and shove it back up your ass.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[phiala]

2. Excel has a Text to Column Feature, I have never found in OO.org

Table: Convert: Text to Table

might do what you want.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[jonfelder]

Actually, compatibility does have to be 100% perfect. I really want to switch users over to Open Office from Microsoft Office, but it's very difficult to make a case when they open documents and they don't look right.

Version 2 is a lot better, but it's still not good enough. On all new machines, I install Open Office, but I'm inevitably asked later to install Microsoft Office because some document they try to open doesn't work right.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

Touché.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Risen888]

What documents? What kind of marginal esoteric functions are you trying to convert?

I'm sorry, but I'm sick to death of this. I have used OOo from 1.14, and have never once run into a problem converting .doc files. Spreadsheets used to be a pain, but since 1.98, I've had no problems. Granted, I don't user PowerPoint, so I can't speak to problems you may run into there.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Spaceman40]

You forgot one other reason: the average person doesn't know that OOo exists.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Getzen]

> Perceived incompatibility may be a factor for some people, but it is certainly not the only reason and probably not even the primary reason why people don't switch.

It is for me... and it isn't "perceived". There are enough real quirks in the translation for me to make the switch to OO. It is, in fact, the *only* thing holding me back. The MS translation *must* be nearly perfect for me to switch.

Getzen

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to point out individual features to dismiss OOo Calc in favour
of Excel.

Apart from the performance advantage, which one can measure using a wall
clock on large spreadsheets, Excel beats OOo Calc any time when it comes
to macro programming. Compare Excel's fairly useable VBA IDE to OOo Calc's
abomination. Compare Excel's comprehensive and easily accessible help
to OOo Calc's 1000 pages long obscure PDF guide making references to Java
and C++. Sometimes I suspect the people responsible for OOo Basic have never
seriously used VBA, despite the fact they tried to copy all the syntax.

The sad part is that it's not something to be fixed overnight. The whole
point of easy (read: suitable for end-users) programmability seems to have
been completely missed by Calc's developers.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[emlprime]

I use pivot tables in my job extensively, and I've spend a good deal of time messing with data pilot. The lastest iteration is much better than the previous one. You can now drag around dimensions, double clicking on dimension names. I just found subtotalling.

Here are my annoyances:

1. You have to right click and go into Start to edit too many things. Double clicking on the headers in the actual data pilot table should bring up the options like it does in the Start view.
2. Arbitrary filters should be available from the data pilot table. The filter thing is actually more intuitive than Excel's, and less prone to errors, but a list of items dropped down from the header should be able to build a condition for you.
3. Double clicking on the intersection of fields should open a new sheet with only those records that fall into that intersection. This is incredibly useful (and one of the main reasons we use pivots). Once you've identified an intersting segment, you want to see the items in that segment to look for further detail.
4. Fields in the data area should have sticky 'data types' assignable. This could actually be done better than Excel. Once a field is given a particular type and format (ie, comma separated number with no decimals), it should stay that way for the duration of the pivot. If you drag the field in and out, it should remain in the same format and data type. This would be much better than excel's current behavior and would possibly tip my boss' opinion.
5. The data pilot wizard should give an option to create the pilot in a new sheet.
6. One of the more powerful featurs of pivot tables is pivot charts. You can actually pivot the chart in chart mode and see the visualization change. I know you can do this with the numbers in the pivot, but sometimes you notice something in a graph that you wouldn't see otherwise.
7. Date grouping is very advanced in excel. You can right click on a date and tell it which elements of the date to group by. I can change a monthly report to a quarterly report in about 4 clicks. This saves needless reproduction of date fields.

When data pilot gets these features, it'll be a viable competitor with Excel's pivot tables.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[CableModemSniper]

I use pivot tables in my job extensively,

Every time OO.o comes up on /., someone mentions pivot tables. Could someone, please please tell me what the heck pivot tables are, and what they are used for?

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Risen888]

Nitpicky point: There are approximately zero unpaid developers working on OpenOffice. It's pretty much Sun's show.

I do agree with the main thrust of your post, however. I personally think they're focusing on compatibility way too much, at the expense of adding features that MSOffice doesn't have, which is the real way to win an application war. Ask the Gmail team how much they worry about Hotmail.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[jonfelder]

Why are you sick to death of this? The fact that you are sick of hearing it, means that you probably hear it quite a bit. Don't you think it's possible that perhaps MS Office compatibility isn't as good as your limited experience may suggest it is?

Someone mentions that they often encounter documents that OOo won't open correctly and you flip out? Just because you don't encounter problems, doesn't mean other people don't. We often have research reports with 100s of pages with lots of graphics, graphs, and formatting elements and they don't always render quite right. Powerpoint, which you admit you don't use, has a long way to go. Lots of animations don't work, templates don't always load right, etc. In calc, there's often problems when macros are used.

I'm glad that OOo works for you. I wish it worked for us, because if I could get everyone switched to Firefox (a pretty easy sell), Thunderbird, and OOo...I could pretty much dump Windows here altogether which is my ultimate goal.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[mobilebuddha]

MS office compatibility is the -one- reason i'm not using openoffice at home.

I've got MSDN subscription, so i have a choice of running either ms office or the openoffice. There's a policy of using MS office in the office and if i'm doing work at home, it must be 100% compatible. If it's -anything- less than 100%, i'm not going to risk it by sending an XLS file to an EVP of a client and have him/her go: "i can't read the file because it has gibberish."

On the other hand, i've tried multiple times to have my SO to use OO, she's okay with the interface, but a few times that she tried to use OO's equation editor, once we open the file in MS word, it also displayed gibberish. this happened in 1.2.x and in one of the 2.0 RC versions (not sure which RC version, just one of them). She made the mistake of sending that as part of her semester project. It took me calling the professor and literally 30 minutes to convince the professor that she actually used openoffice instead of MS office and thus the equation didn't look right. After this incident, she has de-installed any openoffice app and will no longer use anything BUT MS office. She has also told all of my buddies wives/GFs to stay away from OO. If anything, this incompatibility is the downfall of OO, at least in my household and amongst my friends.

I don't have a solution for the openoffice folks, unfortunately.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[dosguru]

I can't seem to ever get a client to picke up OO, since it's not MS they are scared of change. We keep adding it to potential bid packages and keep hoping it'll help us out. MS's marketing has so many businesses by the balls that people are scared of anything but what they are selling.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Risen888]

Sorry, maybe that last post was harsh. What gets my goat isn't people reporting they have problems, but people saying they have problems and not going on to specify what those problems are. It seems that every time there's an OpenOffice article, there's at least 50 such comments. I totally believe you have unresolved issues, not trying to say otherwise.

I did say I don't use Powerpoint, so yeah, I don't know about compatibility there. To speak to your point about large reports with graphics and other such goodies: I work for an architectural firm, so our graphics are all line-drawn, CAD stuff, they convert very well. Other graphics, I don't know, maybe not so good.

Anyway, just wanted to clarify myself. Not trying to be a troll here or invalidate your experiences.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[mobilebuddha]

wrong. we use office products to send documents to other people. if it was just for myself, i'd never use word. excel maybe.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it doesn't. In Excel it is possible to take a column and split it into multiple columns by delimiter or offset.

The function you describe isn't even part of Calc, it's in Writer.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[emlprime]

A pivot table is a primitive data cube. (I'm sure that helped). Basically, given a table of data with different dimensions (factoids), you can come up with aggregate groupings to analyze different segments of your population.
So say you have a group of customers with these dimensions:

• accountnumber
• gender
• state
• activity
• countOfPurchases
• totalPurchasesInCents
• latestPurchase
• tenureOfMembership
• averageNumberOfItemsPerBasket

Each customer gets one row in the table. The pivot allows you to cross section this data. You could, for example, put gender across the top and tenure of membership along the left side with countOfAccountnumber (aggregate of accountnumber) to see whether males or females tend to stay with you longer. You could change the count to a percentage to see this normalized across different genders.
You could put in both a sum of items and an average of items per order to see if your customers tend to buy more all at once, or in smaller chunks. You could pop in latest purchase and see if this trend is increasing or decreasing.
You could do all of this with SQL, but the pivot table makes it really fast and convenient. Even PHB's can use them in our company, and often find interesting pivots.
The most common uses that I've seen are using pivots to isolate:

• Large churn segments (customers leaving in a big group)
• Seasonal buying patterns (patterns grouped by month to see that X happens every December
• Campaign analysis (Have isControl be a dimension and compare data based on whether or not they were control)

Hope that helped.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[platypus]

I know of three major reasons why people don't use OpenOffice...

I know a fourth one:

Warezing.
Many people don't have to decide between paying hundreds for MS Office and the free Open Office, because they are using an illegal copy of MS Office.
If people's only choice was between living with some incompatilites or shelling out that much money, many would decide different.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[ozmanjusri]

2. Excel has a Text to Column Feature, I have never found in OO.org

You can get that here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group _id=87718&package_id=104183

Re:New features ? Why ?

[richlv]

i do not use pivot tables/data pilot, so i am not sure i even understood completely all your points - but have you tried searching for these thing in issuezille and commenting/voting in them ? and, if not found, submitting new issues, of course :)

Re:New features ? Why ?

[CableModemSniper]

Ok, that did help thanks. Its kind of symptomatic of the whole spreadsheet as a database thing though, isn't it?

Re:New features ? Why ?

[Chuq]

She made the mistake of sending that as part of her semester project.

Is there any reason she didn't send it in PDF format? With the "export to PDF" function being built in to OO, I would have thought it would be ideal.

Re:New features ? Why ?

[mobilebuddha]

yup, one of the requirements -> doc file only.

How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[HishamMuhammad]

I guess the fact that OpenOffice gets coverage in the Olive-XP-colored "IT" section can only be a good thing.

As an OOo user living mostly in the academic world, I have a question for those in the "corporate, IT world": how do you perceive the inroads OpenOffice has been making? How does upper management reacts when OOo is pointed as an alternative? Is it working satisfactory as a Microsoft Office alternative?

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[gregarican]

Although this study is over a year old, it estimates 14% of the large enterprise market as having adopted OpenOffice. Just as Gartner studies are said to be Microsoft-biased, perhaps this study might be biased in the opposite direction. But it's a favorable indicator nevertheless to even view the number of Openoffice downloads that are recorded. It's making progress...

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in my part of the corporate world, the answer is little to none. When government customers require things to be delivered in MS formats, and you're doing 100+ page documents with figures, tables, cross-refs, TOCs, etc., there's a bottom line that you don't take a chance on OOo being pick-your-percentage compatible, you just use the real thing.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[s31523]

OO is a great alternative for simple documents and spreadsheets that most corporate users do. Start getting into bigger more advanced docs and the compatibilty rears its ugly head... I prefer delivering my documents in .pdf form. My last job we used .pdf documents because we had to archive all our stuff and do peer reviews with "signatures" and the digital signatures in Adobe were great... Getting Adobe's .pdf writer to work is something I haven't looked into but might help the cause!

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[Bert64]

OO can already output pdf's natively..
As for bigger more advanced files, you won't have compatibility problems if others in your company are also using OO.. And any correspondence outside of your company should be going as pdf, html etc.. Less risk of metadata or other crap too

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[chewmanfoo]

dude, OO saves to pdf just fine.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[Bert64]

Unfortunately you can still have problems whatever you use..
If the people your corresponding with use a slightly different version of office to you, then you will have compatibility problems, especially with complex files.. These problems can often be worse than the problems you'd have with openoffice.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[Slackfumasta]

When I brought the idea up with management here, they were extremely receptive to it. For us, there really is no strignent requirement that we use MS Office, except that we use Outlook as our messaging client.

My thought process was that once we implemented MS Exchange in Q1 2006, which provides MS Outlook with each CAL, we could abandon MS Office altogether except for those few people who either develop the integration part of our product with MS Office, and perhaps a few people who, for compatibility reasons with external contacts, might need to keep MS Office around.

We are a small business with just over 60 employees. OOo is very attractive to us for several reasons. First is the cost; while we don't have to 'pay' for OOo, I will be pushing for a donation to the project, which will still end up being far less than it will cost us to continue purchasing MSO licenses each time we add employees. We have always purchased OEM licenses of MSO with new computers, so we don't have software assurance to provide free upgrades to the new version of MSO, so upgrading will be a very expensive prospect for us. Second is that we have built support for OOo into our own product as well as MSO, and because we use our own product in house, it means that OOo can be inserted into the evironment relatively painlessly. Third, well...there is some feeling of getting off the MS teat wherever possible.

Anyway, it could very well be that we will be using OOo rather than MSO by this time next year. I can't guarantee it, but it is a direction that I would like to go.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[s31523]

Awesome! Did not know that! I agree, any released document should be .pdf. The security is better, there is less risk of modifications to the document and it really is something that anyone can view. We used .pdf so that we could do electronic reviews and go to a paperless type environment. Our requirements for paperwork meant we had to archive all this stuff and an 8 meg word document could easily be parsed into a 500Kb .pdf file. Thanks for the tip!!!!

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[shokk]

We don't touch this OOo crap lest some incompatibility creep in and embarass us with our customers. Interfacing with customers is one area where I expect business does not play as fast and loose as the open source world would wish. Business is just now getting around to adopting Linux as a server platform after it has been out for over a decade. Don't expect OOo to be adopted any quicker. I expect in seven years to see articles in IT trade rags exclaiming about this precious new free office suite Open Office 10 that they have discovered and how it is so 5VV337 and better than any other. While Firefox is young and popular in the IT world, its rate of adoption seems to have hit a wall.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[platypus]

First is the cost; while we don't have to 'pay' for OOo, I will be pushing for a donation to the project

Better yet, put some money back in case you want to pay someone to add features you need or fix bugs.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[cduffy]

We don't touch this OOo crap lest some incompatibility creep in and embarass us with our customers.

You actually send editable documents to your customers? Eww! Do you have some tool that takes out the change history and other metadata? I've always found it preferable to just send PDF.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[BobKagy]

I keep running into things that require the MS Office API, not just the .doc or .xls format. I presume OOo doesn't replicate that.

The latest tool I've run into at the office actually requires Office 2003 or later.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[Anonymous Coward]

I will post anonymously as there are many reported cases of MS representatives strongarming upstream institutions. And we don't want them coming either directly to us or our governing insitution (we are a government institution).

We have been pushing Openoffice.org for several years, and recently have made some progress. We will roll out oo.org on more than half of our machines (other have MSExcel macros and other dependancies) with full support as the only office suite, including training.

Main objections so far have been :
+ workers are not familiar with it. this will be addressed by training;
+ it is slow, and takes a lot of RAM. this is partial;y improved in 2.0 (and we are upgrading our machines anyway);
+ possible compatibility problems. this is exactly what is brought in this discussion :)
Because of extreme amount of MSOffice both around us and legacy documents, this support must be as good as it is possible. And users of oo.org will keep their documents in MSOffice formats. So, yes, compatibility is important for migration.

Overall situation has changed a lot in last few years - a lot more people have heard (or even tried) Openoffice.org, offering to use it is not earning you surprised looks, now it goes "well, if we can deal with compatibility and training issues, see clear benefits - go for it".
And i think it is a positive change.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[shokk]

Yes, when you are going back and forth editing a document for things like contract negotiation. You do no collaboration with your customers? PDF doesn't lend itself well to that.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[hzs202]

As an OOo user living mostly in the academic world, I have a question for those in the "corporate, IT world"

I too am an OOo user in the academic world and I was wondering about how the inability to create user-forms in OOo and some other limitations importing VBA into OOo has effected the practical use of OOo (particulary Calc and Writer) in the office environment?

I thought these limitations would have discouraged companies from using OOo as opposed to M$ Office even in light of Open standard promises and the economic benefits from utilizing OOo.

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[cduffy]

You do no collaboration with your customers?

Well, no, I don't. Sometimes they send me specs for a preexisting system we need to integrate with, and I'll send back issues wrt the system not meeting specs, or questions about places where it's fuzzy, or so forth... but in no case do I find myself editing their documents, or them editing mine.

For the business types, what you suggest may be a very legitimate concern -- but I'm engineering; my closest contact with 3rd parties is working on integrations as above. (And yes, that's pretty much the split -- OpenOffice is used on the engineering side of the house, MS Office by management).

Re:How is OOo doing in the IT world?

[shokk]

Ah, unfortunately our engineers receive no such shielding so it's one Office suite for all, and all for that one.

What's happened to open source numbering?

[Spril]

We complain that the marketing people took over the numbering at Microsoft and other companies--like Oracle "10g" when there was no a, b, c, d, e, or f.

Now open source is pulling the same stunts--Firefox went from 1.0 to 1.5, and OpenOffice squeezes new features into a 2.0.1 release.

Whatever happened to the standard that major feature releases increment the first number, minor feature releases increment the second number, and tweaks and bug fixes increment the third number? What is the point of numbering releases "2.0.1" if you're not going to follow the standard?

And who are the marketing people who have taken over these projects who think that version numbers are a marketing tool, and not a way to convey useful information about the extent of the changes?

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[IANAAC]

We complain that the marketing people took over the numbering at Microsoft and other companies--like Oracle "10g" when there was no a, b, c, d, e, or f.

I can't speak for other pieces of software, but the "g" in Oracle 10g actually stands for something. It's not just from a series of letters.

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[HishamMuhammad]

Whatever happened to the standard that major feature releases increment the first number, minor feature releases increment the second number, and tweaks and bug fixes increment the third number? What is the point of numbering releases "2.0.1" if you're not going to follow the standard?

Well, because it's not a standard, really. The kernel x.y.z scheme used the odd/even y for stable/unstable; now the x.y.z.w scheme (with a pretty peculiar usage of -rc) is different still. While a number of projects use the scheme you described, I find it easier to remember examples where they don't.

Even if it was a standard, minor and major features are subjective terms. Now, if the numbering scheme took ABI and API compatibility as a parameter, that would be a good thing to 'standardize' to (as in, "z number upgrades are binary compatible, y number upgrades are source compatible" (and then you need to specify if compat is backward and/or forwards)).

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed.

major.minor.bugfix

It should be called 2.1.0 if they add features.

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[HaydnH]

IIRC: The g in Oracle 10g stands for Grid (as in grid computing).

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[Pxtl]

I imagine these were just features that were slated to go in 2.0 but didn't quite make the cut for testing reasons, and are just getting squeezed out now.

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[Matt Perry]

Whatever happened to the standard that major feature releases increment the first number, minor feature releases increment the second number, and tweaks and bug fixes increment the third number?

There is no such standard. Some developers do follow what you outlined but certainly not all.

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[tongue]

I'd number them based on how significant the code changes are. For example, if the majority of the code for the new features was already present and merely was turned on in the new version, or perhaps it was waiting on a bug fix before being turned on, then that's a pretty minor release, hence the 2.0.-->1--

Doing a minor version increment every time you add a new feature that doesn't significantly alter anything in the way the software is used is just plain silly.

Then again, so is arguing over version numbers....

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[robyannetta]

We complain that the marketing people took over the numbering at Microsoft and other companies--like Oracle "10g" when there was no a, b, c, d, e, or f.

The "10g" in the Oracle versioning scheme means "Version 10, Grid enabled"

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[the chao goes mu]

Don't forget Solaris: 2.4, 2.5, 6, 7, 8. Interesting counting there too. (Not to mention that uname still calls Solaris 8 'SunOS 2.8')

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[cduffy]

So Firefox's new release should be 1.5u, because its spiffy new user-visible feature is the non-sucking update support?

If Oracle 10g were a release intended to be *only* used for grid computing (such that everyone else just used Oracle 10), it would make sense. Since this isn't the case, it's completely bogus.

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[cduffy]

Yes, but that's only sensible if there were a simple "Oracle 10" for folks not doing grid computing. Since there isn't, the "g" in there is useless marketing fluff, and thus abominable.

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[assassinator42]

They do the same thing with Java. It's called Java 5.0 and Java 1.5. I think someone in Sun is not good at coming up with version numbers.

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[drsquare]

Abominable? It's a bloody name. This is the SECOND time you've commented on this in this thread, almost exactly the same post repeated a few pages down. Did you get fired from Oracle or something?

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[cduffy]

The observation was made multiple times in the same thread, by different parties. I don't know about you, but I only check old threads when I receive a message that there's been a response to my post -- so I'd only have had an opportunity to discuss the point with one of the two individuals making the observation had I not responded twice. You'll also note I killed my +1, so as not to annoy folks by having my post made twice. I've never worked with Oracle, but I have been a company during its transition from engineering-driven to marketing-driven, and it wasn't a pleasing experience.

And yes, it's a bloody name -- indeed, that's what this entire thread is about. What things are called impacts how people think about them, and much information can be inferred by a name -- "10g", for instance, infers to those not in the know that it was preceded by Oracle 10, a through f. This obvious inference is false -- and that the marketers would lead a good many people to make a false inference just so they can choose one feature to point out is, indeed, a shame.

Re:What's happened to open source numbering?

[nbvb]

Actually, Solaris 8 is SunOS 5.8. (just as Solaris 10 is SunOS 5.10)

But thanks for playing.

Remember our history:

SunOS 1.x, 2.x, 3.x, 4.x
and then SunOS 5 became Solaris 2, and "retroactively" SunOS 4.1.3 became Solaris 1.

--DM

Open Office

[moberry]

My room mate the other day had a power point presention for a report due. He was going to go to the library at 5am to type this thing up. I was like.. Why? He said it was because he didnt have powerpoint. I gave him a crack Office 2003 CD and told him power point was there. He said he would never use software he didnt pay for, and gave it back. So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite. He asked me what that was, I took him to my desktop, and showed it to him. 20 minutes later he was making a power point in open office.

Re:Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

That was the most boring story I've ever heard in all my life. and I'm not usually given to superlatives.

Re:Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

I dont think anyone cares what you think... eat shit and die.

Re:Open Office

[AeroIllini]

I gave him a crack Office 2003 CD and told him power point was there. He said he would never use software he didnt pay for, and gave it back. So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite.

You offered him an illegal copy of Microsoft trash before you pointed him to openoffice.org?

What are you, new?

Re:Open Office

[gormanly]

But what did the Impress-created slide show look like when he opened in PowerPoint?

I use OOo all the time, but only Writer, Calc and Draw, and these are great for my own work, but they still mis-render many documents sent to me. Anything important I usually end up having to get a Windows user to print out for me, as OOo just doesn't cut it. Some things are even worse than in the days of Star Office 4 (pre-Sun takeover) and MS Office 97.

This really sucks, as I'm quite a rabid Free software advocate and have nuked more Windows installs than I can count...

Re:Open Office

[meringuoid]

So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite. He asked me what that was, I took him to my desktop, and showed it to him. 20 minutes later he was making a power point in open office.

Now, come on. Your story was plausible up to then, but you blew it. 20 minutes isn't even enough to open OpenOffice, never mind download and install it...

Re:Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

It looked just like a Powerpoint created slide-show. :) Only better!

Re:Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Then you need to stop stepping on your network cable. I can download and install Open Office in less than 5 minutes.

Re:Open Office

[mspohr]

I use Impress for all of my presentations and at the meeting they inevitably are displayed on some other computer running MS PowerPoint. I've never noticed any problems... they look great.

Re:Open Office

[Ironballs]

Is it possible to get a copy of a proprietary software WITHOUT paying for it?

Re:Open Office

[hughk]

Ah PowerPoint is one of those nasties that isn't 100% compatible. I got caught out when my daughter needed to animate some slides and PP doesn't understand Impress animations at all well (at least under 2.0.0). The PC connected to the projector (in the Uni lecture theatre) only had MS Office so I (having an O2K license) had to redo the animations on the slides. Static slides seem to be fine though.

Re:Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

I use openoffice, and I've never had issues opening openoffice-made powerpoint files from pp, the troubles start when you wanna open a powerpoint presentation done in powerpoint in openoffice

Re:Open Office

[mattwarden]

Then he tried to load it onto his professor's laptop for his presentation, and it barely worked. His professor didn't understand why it looked so crappy, even though he tried to explain, and the professor knocked down his grade a bit for poor presentation quality.

Re:Open Office

[RandomGuySteve]

Interestingly enough, I too had a presentation due the other day, and I don't use unpaid software either. I made a very lovely slideshow in Open Office Impress, and was finished well before the presentation. I burned the presentation to CD as both the Open Office file and the PowerPoint file. At the presentation, on opening the Powerpoint slides, my presentation was completely mangled in MS Powerpoint. When my professor asked about why it looked like trash, I said it was because I used Open Office and that it was not on the presentation computer. He did not care. I had to kill all my graphics, making my presentation very boring.

Then later, I had a spreadsheet due in the same class, and the OO Calc file, when converted to Excel, was loaded with errors. I had to send the professor a copy with values only, instead of the original intent of my work, which was to make it adaptive based on its equations.

Long story short, I think those calling for better compatibility are completely right. As long as MS Office is considered the default method of doing business, and the people who use Open Office are not able to move in and out of that world seamlessly, Open Office will remain unused for serious work.

Re:Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Flyingwhitey/IFWM, I presume?

Re:Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

Does openoffice have a standalone "player" that would play it's impress presentations? That would be the easy solution to situations like this (Powerpoint has a player like this).

Re:Open Office

[Noksagt]

I elsewhere commented on how poor the PowerPoint Viewer is (OO.o is FAR better).

There is less demand for a simple player for OO.o impress, as you can get the full-blown Impress for the same price (and both diskspace and bandwidth are relatively cheap). Being able to export to PowerPoint format also means you can use the PowerPoint Viewer (though, as I said, you wouldn't really want to).

There used to be a StarOffice player, but it was discontinued. I suspect that clever people could just write XSLT transforms to dump your presentation into whatever stand-alone format you want.

The "Export to PDF" feature is quite useful to make read-only, portable copies of any OO.o-generated content (though you may lose embedded animations).

Re:Open Office

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the point here, is that when I go to conferences and they present you with a laptop to load your slides onto, they WILL NOT let you install software (ie - install OO.o). However, if I had an Impress Player (single .exe) then that would let you run it straight from the cd. Hell even if you could make a build of all of OO.o into a single executable that didn't need an install procedure that would be just fine.

Re:Open Office

[mikefe]

Now, come on. Your story was plausible up to then, but you blew it. 20 minutes isn't even enough to open OpenOffice, never mind download and install it...

Hmm, my torrent download of 2.0.1 finished in less than 10 minutes. Are you saying that OOo takes 10 minutes to install?

New features in minor updates

[tronicum]

Even if this are minor new features I would like them to implement new stuff only with major updates. This updates changes the GUI, imagine you deploy a Open Office version within a company network and minor updates (that might be required due to a bug) change important dialogs.

Many people will call IT support to get information for such minimal changes that have big impacts.

I like to have such improvements, but only within "real" version increments.

Re:New features in minor updates

[BenjyD]

Exactly: IMHO, .0.x updates should be bugfixes only, with no new features. It would certainly make distro upgrade much easier.

Shortcuts?

[dmcooper]

Is it possible to have the Windows Shortcuts such as CTRL - C and CTRL - V integrated in OpenOffice? It's frustrating when trying to use at home and my regular shortcuts don't work...

Re:Shortcuts?

[Anonymous Coward]

I just tried those shortcuts with OO.org 2.0 (Win32) and they work fine.

Re:Shortcuts?

[dmcooper]

Weird... I've got the OpenOffice 2.0.0 version and they don't work. Is it possible that they were unintentionally disabled? Or maybe because I didn't install Java with it?

Re:Shortcuts?

[codepunk]

No you probably got some key logger bullshit installed on your owned windows machine that is capturing the content of the clipboard.

Oooh, markers...

[jonadab]

> Plus, a new keyboard shortcut permits the user to return to
> a saved cursor position.

Sounds like markers in Emacs, especially the way I have them set up (wherein, hitting the key that I have bound to switch to the last saved position takes note of the current position so that it can be used next time, so that I can easily switch back and forth between two positions; it is, or course, still possible to set as many additional markers as desired).

Now, if OpenOffice will just get grouping-symbol matching like in Emacs, and the ability to split the window and easily look at two positions in the same file at the same time, and a more flexible system for customizing keybindings, and a better system for recording keyboard macros, ... maybe eventually we could get to the point where it's easier to type up text in OpenOffice directly than to type it in Emacs, then copy and paste into OO for final formatting.

Re:Oooh, markers...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Sounds like markers in Emacs

Sounds more like the use of Shift-F5 for an almost identical purpose in Microsoft Word.

A Decent Draft Mode

[Schlemphfer]

There's one thing OpenOffice.org lacks that both Word and WordPerfect have: a draft mode where you don't have to see page breaks and unnecessary layout visuals. To me, this seems like such a basic and important feature. My needs for formatting and fancy features are practically nonexistent--I just want to concentrate on my writing.

OpenOffice Writer does offer a "web layout", but it's just not the same.

I use OpenOffice all the time to dash out letters and so forth, but when I need to concentrate on my writing I always fire up WordPerfect. Lack of a good draft mode is all that's keeping me from using OpenOffice Writer exclusively. I'm sure tons of other writers feel the same way. And I can't imagine implementing this feature would be difficult.

Re:A Decent Draft Mode

[Mitchell Mebane]

You mean like View -> Web Layout?

Re:A Decent Draft Mode

[Anonymous Coward]

Lack of a good draft mode is all that's keeping me from using OpenOffice Writer exclusively. I'm sure tons of other writers feel the same way.

Providing support for a SME law firm, among many others, I get to see lots of people using WordPerfect. They're up to WordPerfect 12 for the most part but, I had a massive nostalgia attack when I saw WP5.1 actively in use the other day. Granted, these aren't novelists they are lawyers, paralegals, law clerks and secretaries but, I don't remember ever seeing anyone using draft mode. I've never seen my Word users using draft mode either. Unlike you, I am confident that the majority of my users prefer WYSIWYG to draft mode or anything else. Why would you dislike WYSIWYG? I bet your a former Tex man.

Re:A Decent Draft Mode

[Schlemphfer]

Draft mode in WordPerfect is WYSIWYG. But they strip out the useless graphics showing page breaks. When I'm in the middle of rewriting a 25 page book chapter, I don't care at all where the page breaks are, because the whole thing is going to be typset later anyway. In WordPerfect, I don't have to keep track of my cursor skipping up and down from one page to the next and then back up again as I rewrite a sentence fifteen times. That useless page break information is hidden from me.

Whereas in OpenOffice, the only way to hide page break graphics (which are the most irritating thing in the world to deal with if you don't care about pagination) is to go:

View>Web Layout

And then the resultant view becomes a complete disaster...starting with the fact that the width of your text line doesn't reflect your margins, but rather just expands out to your window's width.

Re:A Decent Draft Mode

[cellocgw]

I absolutely agree, and have had an open bug report at OOo for a couple years now. It's issue 4914 if you'd like to add votes.
To respond to a child post: yes, there's WebLayout view, but it doesn't really do the job; doesn't display page breaks, for example.
One of the features I really like in MsoftWord (bet you didn't know this one existed :-) ) is the ability to display the Style for every paragraph in a column to the left of the text area. This is only available in NormalView, and you have to set a variable in the Prefs under View/StyleAreaWidth.

Re:A Decent Draft Mode

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice Writer does offer a "web layout", but it's just not the same.

Re:A Decent Draft Mode

[Anonymous Coward]

My major gripe with Web Layout is the fact that it removes margin-linebreaks, destroying the appearance of a book-page, which I like to have when writing.
What I do as a work-around is, I change the indent after text by dragging the little grey triangle on the right side of the ruler to the left, giving me acceptable line-breaks.
I saved this as the default style, so the program starts up in this mode every time.

-Bernhard

Every time....

[Anonymous Coward]

Just yesterday I burned the OpenOffice cd, this always happens to me....

To make OpenOffice faster

[shreevatsa]

I just read this somewhere; thought everyone might find it useful --
Go to Tools->Options->OpenOffice.org->Java and uncheck the "Use a Java Runtime Environment". (AFAIK, it doesn't break anything I use.)

Re:To make OpenOffice faster

[antdude]

Thanks for the tip! I don't use the extra features that require Java and I can easily turn it on if needed.

Re:To make OpenOffice faster

[TheoMurpse]

What the parent fails to mention is that this is supposed to make OOo load faster.

got some nice features on there

[Anonymous Coward]

Looks like this will be the next big thing. I like some of those features.
 

Is the update worth it??

[Rac3r5]

I went back from Open Office 2.0 to 1.1.4 because 2.0 was a memory hog. Does 2.0.1 fix these issues?

Re:Is the update worth it??

[mspohr]

I haven't experienced the "memory hog" with 2.0

I just opened a small text file with OO.org and it takes up all of 13Meg. The same file with Winword uses 34Meg.

YMMV

Re:Is the update worth it??

[Anonymous Coward]

We suck, but we don't suck as much as that guy?

Re:Is the update worth it??

[Spaceman40]

My editor takes 6M with a small text file. And it's not even the console version.

Re:Is the update worth it??

[alexborges]

I have 30 users on a ridiculously cheap server (500 DLS WHITEBOX). I plot memmory all day for it and openoffice is by far the best behaved of the apps we run there. Firefox is the worst, then comes evolution, then the fucking rhn-applet of rhel (which is impossible to turn off for all users at once) and finally, openoffice.

NOOO!

[COMON$]

MS's automatic Bulleted lists are a damn annoying feature. #1 reason I prefer notepad as my text editor. Dont bring it to Ooffice. Dont know about you guys but I actually was taught proper formatting growing up. Which wasnt too long ago.

Re:NOOO!

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize that automated bulleted/numbered lists is easily disabled via AutoFormat options... right?

Re:NOOO!

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont know about you guys but I actually was taught proper formatting growing up. Which wasnt too long ago.

That's great! Unfortunately, you missed the lessons on apostrophe usage and sentence structure.

Re:NOOO!

[COMON$]

This is slashdot, I dont have 2 use proper formatting here, oh wait, you must be new.

Re:NOOO!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Dont bring it to Ooffice..."

See, this is the problem. Very few people will ever take a product called 'Ooffice' seriously. ;-]

--

Re:NOOO!

[sasha328]

Why was the parent modded "Funny". This is actually insightful. "auto formatting" and such should be OFF by default.
Remember people, just because "you can do it" doesn't mean you should.

Re:NOOO!

[cduffy]

This is slashdot, I dont have 2 use proper formatting here, oh wait, you must be new.

It would seem that you're new -- Anonymous Coward has been here since Taco first implemented accounts. Paying attention to how you present yourself via your spelling, formatting and such would be appreciated: Lots of folks don't, but they're making themselves look like morons.

Re:NOOO!

[COMON$]

We need a sarcasm modifier in this forum.

Re:NOOO!

[TheoMurpse]

you must be new

Don't you mean, "You must be GNU"?

Longest to compile from source?

[amightywind]

I compiled that beast on my Gentoo machine two weeks ago. It took 5 hours on an Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of memory. Surely it is the longest compilation for a single package in the free software world. Don't get me wrong, the OO folks do an amazing job and it is impressively multi OS. But even the gnome-base only takes a fraction of the time to compile. Is there another source package out there that takes longer to compile?

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[omeg]

Well... Gentoo. :)

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[TubeSteak]

That might be more about your compiler than their source code.

If the compiler isn't optimized for your Athlon XP 2800+...

We usually assume that these types of things will work right, but any /.er should know better.

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[JediTrainer]

Why don't you look into ccache? I've been using it, and it can be particularly useful when updating packages that you've compiled already (assuming some of the source files are unchanged from the last version).

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[amightywind]

GCC was bootsrapped and all of the programs on the machine were compiled using -O2 -march=athlon-xp. Nothing out of the ordinary. The Linux kernel builds in just a couple of minutes from scratch. I really think it is the immense complexity of OO.

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[Bert64]

OOo takes a good few hours on a dual opteron 250 box aswell..
If you use the official build process you'l only use 1 cpu, but using the build scripts from go-ooo.org you can get a multithreaded build going, which is much faster..

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[TubeSteak]

So the compiler is fine, but the build script isn't optimized for the CPU.

Seems a little shortsighted of the 00o people.

Is there a specific reason they go with a single thread?

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[starwindsurfer]

Yea, but you wont belive the preformace diff, I dont see that much of a preformace problem on my HT P4 3Ghz.

I personaly belive that after they get and can keep the compatability, then they will start tightening up preformance.

Actualy, that what I think the google devs are there for, Abstract out the functions and make the GUI load quick on a web site while the backend stays running. Can anyone say "Client/Server model Office app"?

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[TeknoHog]

I use distcc and ccache, but in this case I just emerged openoffice-bin.

Re:Longest to compile from source?

[Bert64]

Well, multithreaded builds can often break..
But i imagine they expect the majority of their users to run precompiled versions...
OOo's build process is actually quite modular however, so you can rebuild small parts of it manually if you need to.

Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[NtroP]

We'd REALLY like to ditch MS Office on our Win2K3 Terminal servers, but the last time we tried to use OOo, it failed miserably - only one person at a time could use it, unless each user had their own entire copy of the App in their own home directory - which is really stupid.

Has anyone been successful in getting OOo to run well in a Windows terminal server environment?

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[SOBToneloc]

At the company where I previously was the Sys Admin for 3 years, I did have success using OO 1.12,1.14,and 2.0 on our Citrix Farm. It was pablished as a seamless application, but it ran fine in a full desktop as well. We were using Win2k Terminal server running Metaframe XP at first, and then upgraded to Presentation Server 3.0, and then finally just before I left last month we moved the farm to 4.0. We had about 40 concurrent Citrix OO users running right alongside Citrix MS Office XP users. Don't get me wrong, there were a couple small hiccups here and there but all inall it was and still is a huge success. Were using roaming TS profiles of course, and then made sure that we installed OO using the network switch for pre 2.0, and for 2.0 made sure we chose "Install for Everyone" during the wizard. I had thought about getting all fancy and using one of the custom scripts to pre-answer all of the little setup questions, but time never really allowed me to. And for new users it was just as easy to just go through it for them as I was setting up the rest of their profile anyway. When an upgrade came out we always had the users choose "install a new profile" rather than the "upgrade you profile". It had the best outcome. Since our users had been using OO 1.1x for about 2 years when 2.0 was released, they were very happy and outspokenly appreciative for the new look and functionality. Yes, I know as IT staff we probably would prefer to stay as vanilla as possible when it comes to Office apps, btu the funding wasn't there for 40 Office licenses, OO was and still is a lifesaver for that small company. They have about 80 employees.

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[meosborne]

At my previous employer we supported 100's of folks using OpenOffice.org 1.x under Terminal server (NT 4.0 w Citrix MetaFrame) with no problems at all. OOo 2.x should be even easier to run this way.

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[Bert64]

That's very strange, but most likely has to do with windows primarily being a single user OS..
I've successfully used a single installation of openoffice on linux, solaris and macosx machines with multiple simultaneous users and no issues whatsoever.. It even shares a large chunk of the app's memory space so it's more efficient..

But another thought, if your not going to be using msoffice, is there any other reason to keep win2k3 and not switch to a unix os? I've participated in and watched penetration tests on windows terminal servers (including citrix) and NONE of them have failed to gain full administrator privileges. Unix fares much better because it's actually designed to be a multiuser os.

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[nexxuz]

this might help you

http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/17/23 35221&tid=185

http://www.pcc-services.com/kixtart/scripts.html

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's very strange, but most likely has to do with windows primarily being a single user OS..

You have no idea what terminal services is, do you?

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[tokul]

Have you read OpenOffice 1.x or older StarOffice install documentation? There are multiuser install options. setup.exe has -net option.

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are an ignoramous.

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[00lmz]

I don't know about Terminal Services, but last time I checked, the instructions for multiuser setup worked well for my computer with more than one non-admin user. But that's the instructions for OO.o 1.1...

Ahh, found it... Do you believe you have to get the 2.0 setup guide from CVS??? In the PDF it seems that the 2.0 installer has a checkbox to Install for: "Anyone who uses this computer (all users)". Hopefully that will work for you, seeing that 1.1 worked for me.

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about Terminal Services, but...

Then why are you responding to a question that was specifically about Terminal Services? Because you're a fucking moron?

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well it works just fine in the 6 server 400 workstation w2k3 terminal server setup I deployed in my school. Earlier versions worked ok as well - all we did was install using add/remove programs ie term server installation mode - no switches added. Have been using OO in this (and w2k term server previously) for over 3 years - still have some random freezes, still have moments when it is sluggish, but it just gets better each time!

Re:Does it work with Terminal Services Yet?

[Bert64]

I know exactly what it is, a kludge to enable multiuser use of what was always designed to be a single-user os. Sure they can kludge in support for multiple users, but it was never designed that way and you can still see areas where such design shines through..

For example, shared memory only works with DLL's and not with executeables, so when you load an app several times through terminal services, the dll's are loaded once but the binary is loaded once for each user.. Unix systems will share the code segments of the initial binary too, and only have a per-user copy of any workspace memory..
The windows approach makes sense in a single user environment, where you're unlikely to run the same program more than once, but several different programs are likely to make use of the same libraries. Had windows been designed for multiuser use, they would not have designed it this way..

Another example, c:\ being writeable by any user by default, and the way windows resolves paths.. Try creating "c:\program.exe" on windows, and when some programs (including default windows apps) search for "c:\program files\something\something.exe" the way windows tries to resolve the path (a nasty kludge to handle filenames with spaces and not needing escape chars) it will end up executing c:\program.exe, there are plenty of references to this on google..

Also, search for "windows shatter attacks", an example being: http://security.tombom.co.uk/shatter.html
look at how the windowing system is designed, do you really think anyone designing a multiuser environment would design it this way?

Yeah, here's an idea.

[Anonymous Coward]

This is useful info though. Perhaps Slashdot could make a software update page for things like this rather than posting them on the main page.

Or they could make a dedicated site with a fitting name. Freshmeat, for example.

And then they could make a slashbox for it. How cool would that be?

It would also avoid the inevitable dumbass comments that spring up when these things happen.

At your service .

Bwe!@$

[WeblionX]

Already?! I just installed 2.0 after a harddrive crash. Geez...

Linux and OpenOffice

[ndtechnologies]

That's weird....Fedora released OOo 2.0.1 about a week and a half ago. It was in my updates repo, and I snagged it ASAP. Luckily since I have 3 Mb DSL, it won't take too long for me either, but for those that don't have it...that really sucks.

suggestions

[hswerdfe]

notepad
gedit
emacs
pico

all of the above will allow you to view your document without useless formating...:D

Feature Bloat?

[Andyham]

First off, it is a nice application when it works right, and when you have the time to download such a huge beast.

I really wish they'd fix the bugs it has rather than introduce new features. I find it's "feature" or automagically changing fonts particularly maddening. Here I am typing away in Helvetica and halfway through the sentence it suddenly changes to Times New Roman. That really pisses me off.

It seems I have not been able to find a decent free word processor among the more popular ones available for Linux.

AbiWord is great, when it doesn't crash. OO is great when it doesn't magically change fonts, and provided you have the time to download it, etc. The best one I've found is the one you have to pay for (I forget its name, but it's made by a German firm - Maybe Softmaker?). And they are all too willing to sell you additional fonts. Fonts!

I for one will not be downloading this incremental release with feature bloat. Too much time for so little gain.

Re:Feature Bloat?

[Kimos]

First off, it is a nice application when it works right, and when you have the time to download such a huge beast.

~100M isn't much for an entire office suite, considering what you get. Is MS office still on one CD?

I guess if all you use is the word processor, might be nice to be able to download just parts of it rather than the entire package, but IMHO they have more important things to develop.

Re:Feature Bloat?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

~100M isn't much for an entire office suite, considering what you get.

Perhaps, but it's my entire broadband download quota for the day, and I'm not willing to spend that on a .0.1 upgrade when I've already got the .0.0.

Re:Feature Bloat?

[CheeseTroll]

I'm not familiar with download quotas, but could you start downloading around 11:30pm, so the entire download spans two days?

But I do agree with the gist of your post - 100MB is a lot for a .01 upgrade.

Re:Feature Bloat?

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

My ISP package includes 3GB of downloads a month, or around 100MB a day on average. I can use more if I want to, but they charge a higher price for a higher threshold, and since I don't need it 99.99% of the time, I don't want to upgrade. It's a money thing, not a time thing.

Re:Feature Bloat?

[ejp1082]

First off, it is a nice application when it works right, and when you have the time to download such a huge beast.

It just took me five minutes to grab it from bittorrent in the background while I was reading the comments here. Coincidentally it finished just as I got to yours. The install was maybe another minute. Yeah, it'd be nice if they'd just released a simple patch... but unless you're on dialup, I don't see the big complaint.

I have to agree with you on the things that it does "automagically" though, it just serves to piss me off. Why does the program think it knows better what I want to do than I do? IMHO, the OOo team would do well to focus on just making a *good* word processor, rather than trying to clone MS Word and all its flaws (and between the two of them, I think MS Word is the better program, OOo just manages to be a "good enough" replacement). Right now, it's like if Firefox had simply tried to clone IE, rather than building a better browser.

It seems I have not been able to find a decent free word processor among the more popular ones available for Linux.

Well, I guess there's always writely... it's cross platform and at least you can't accuse if of being feature bloated.

Re:Feature Bloat?

[Anonymous Coward]

Where in Europe do you live that has a broadband quota of 100 fucking megabytes?

Re:Feature Bloat?

[mattyrobinson69]

you didn't mention koffice. i use that at home and at work, and its fine.

Agreed in part

[Solr_Flare]

While I do agree that having a software update section would be preferable, it is important to keep in mind that, next to operating systems, office software is the most commonly installed and used software on any non-server computer. As such, updates to office software carry a bit more weight, especially since you have much larger deployment issues to deal with in a business setting.

Makes O3 better too.

[Anonymous Coward]

And what's more, the more work they put into compatability the better the OpenDocument-in-Microsoft-Office stuff the OpenOpenOffice guys are doing too will get too. Or at least, as I understand their "OpenOffice SOAP Server" idea anyway.

A little birdie says that they already have a working server, and that I "should listen out for a big announcement as soon as the media gets back to work after New Years".

I don't want to get my hopes up too much, but here's me hoping that means I can send odf files to Office people now. :)

It breaks the database and a whole lot of stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Java gets used quite a bit in OpenOffice.org. In OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 Java was used for the following:

1. The Report Autopilot

2. JDBC driver support for Java-based databases

3. XSLT filters

4. BeanShell, the Netbeans scripting language, and the Java UNO bridge

5. Export filters to the Aportis.doc (.pdb) format for the Palm or Pocket Word (.psw) format for the Pocket PC

In OpenOffice.org 2.0 Java is additionally used in

1. Many parts of Base, the new Access-like database application; in particular the file-format which is a HSQLDB database

2. The media player, which adds movie and sound clips to documents

3. Mail merges to e-mail, which also require Java Mail

4. All document wizards in Writer

Re:It breaks the database and a whole lot of stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

...stuff noone gives a shit about.

Going well for some, not for others

[bradleyland]

Some of my clients are extremely pleased with the transition to OOo. Others use software such as law firm management and accounting software that interfaces with office through the MS Office API. These people are, unfortunately, stuck with MS Office for the moment.

Why was th parent overrated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry but it is the truth.

Seems to be an inappropiate mod as it was both on topic and is whe our organization does.

Re:Why was th parent overrated?

[Risen888]

Well, I didn't mod the comment, but here's my take.

Parent came across as saying "oh me oh my, it's not what we're used to, whatever shall we do?" Reactions like that are the only reason Microsoft maintains a dominant market share. (Oh, come on, like they get by on the strength of their products...)

I wouldn't have downmodded it myself, it's not really worth wasting a point. If I had, I would have tagged it "flamebait."

Re:Why was th parent overrated?

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent came across as saying "oh me oh my, it's not what we're used to, whatever shall we do?"

He asked what the current status of OO was in the IT world. I told him what it was for my employer.

Granted, people may not like the answer or reasoning behind it but hey, I don't make the decisions I am just a programmer who backs up the IT people.

Great stuff

[codepunk]

OO is the greatest thing since sliced bread.... We now use php to generate odt formatted documents straight from the web servers and OO in headless mode to auto generate three formats odt, pdf and doc...

Keep it up team we love OO...

Re:Great stuff

[LibrePensador]

Would you be willing to publish the code that does the php to odt generation out there?

Re:Great stuff

[codepunk]

Of course but it is childs play anybody can do it...

Create a document in open office and put some tags in where you would
like your form fields to be displayed. Now unzip the resulting document
and use this for a template. When a form is submitted do a directory copy of the document contents to a temp location then using replace input the field elements into content.xml . Next have the php script zip the temporary directory back up with a odt extension.

You can at this point you have a odt file which can be read directly with OO and or you can make headless call to a OO macro to convert it into nearly any imaginable format.

I managed to pull it off with only about 20 lines of php...

Not good enough

[Schlemphfer]

I want styles too. It's useful for me when composing to see chapter and section headings. Word, WordPerfect, and OpenOffice all handle these quite nicely with their Style features. They'll get stripped out when I typeset but it's nice to see these things when composing and when printing out drafts.

I've used my share of text editors in the past, but I prefer writing books in a WYSIWYG environment. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this threat, the showing of page breaks really gets in the way if you're writing a book that will later be typeset. It's not relevant information and should be turned off...and both Word and WordPerfect allow this. If OpenOffice allowed this without entering View>Web Layout hell it would become my main word processor, since all things being equal I'd rather write books and articles on my Mac than have to run WordPerfect under XP.

What about "Find Next"?

[ThePhilips]

Is it only me who is missing "Find Next"?

Seems like OOo people over-ab-used GNOME on their desktops...

Cursor to saved position !?

[gabbarbhai]

If you got excited as I did about the cursor to saved position feature, you're in for disappointment.
This is not the emacs-style C-SPC and C-U C-SPC moving in the cursor mark ring. It is just a way to set the cursor to the last insertion point in the writer.
Don't waste bandwidth downloading if that's what your'e after.

Use LaTeX...

[Hakubi_Washu]

Probably best in an environment like LyX. Any other semantic-only system where you don't have to care about layout will do (LaTeX, HTML, DocBook, etc.). I always recommend these for anything longer than a letter.

Re:Use LaTeX...

[Khelder]

Emacs also has really good support for LaTeX, including outlining, collapse/expand, spell check, and click-on-output-in-previewer-to-go-to-source (sorry, I know there's a name for this feature, but I can't remember it).

Or if you're an Eclipse fan, there are also plugins for it for editing and building LaTeX.

Re:Use LaTeX...

[feijai]

I'm an old-time LaTeX user and let me tell you, LyX is god-awful. It manages to join the programmability and context-independence of Word with the WYSIWYG of TeX. In other words, it succees in merging the worst features of the two. And it's slow too, with a terribly unprofessional looking GUI.

Re:Use LaTeX...

[Hakubi_Washu]

Well, I prefer writing "by hand" too, but compared to other pseudo-WYSIWYG editors (e.g. practically everything producing HTML-output) LyX is very good. It doesn't hide the structure, allows to include arbitrary LaTeX commands, while still offering a GUI that's a perfect (IMHO) mixture between old-school UNIX applications (compare to XFig) and a modern WYSIWYG system. "Slow" I cannot comment on, on my 3400+ system even a few thousand pages (of output) aren't...

OO will always be second place

[GruntboyX]

I suppose i am going to get flamed, but OO will always be second place, not because of the products quality, but because of its marketing. The average computer user doesnt know what OO is. If you stick it on a store shelf for 5 bucks, next to Microsoft Office then average soccer mom, or college student will be intriqued. Not to mention if its in a Box and comes from a name brand store than it will have a little more prestigue. I think firfox could sweep the market if they did the same thing. The problem is that the idea that software should be free gets in the way. Because to place things in a store, someone has to manufacture it, also the store has to make a profit off it. Yes the interent is great, and you can find both of these products for free. But does the average user no where to find them. Does the average user have any idea what they are? And when looking at the websites for these products, does the average user see anything that makes them scream i must have it and wait it looks like a secure product. Marketing is everything and for open source to become big they have to break away from the idea that the interenet is there only distribution source.

Re:OO will always be second place

[Anonymous Coward]

I suppose i am going to get flamed

You deserve a good flaming, but not because of your point- which is at least well thought out.

You deserve a good flaming because you did not even bother fixing obvious problems with your posting, thus detracting from an otherwise thoughtful posting: 'i' -> 'I' Have more respect for yourself. Captilize that 'I'.
' products ' -> did you mean ' products' '?
'doesnt' -> "doesn't"
'intriqued' -> 'intrigued'
'prestigue' -> 'prestige'
'firfox' -> firefox
'interent', 'interenet' -> 'internet' (wow, a slashdotter that cannot spell internet!)
'user no where to ' -> 'user know where to'
On top of the obvious misspellings, your sentances are so poorly formed that it hurts my head to read them. I'm no grammar nazi, but at least try to get your sentance structure as intelligible as the point that you are trying to make... Please?

Re:OO will always be second place

[aika]

Do you think that the lack of marketing and brand recognition could be helped if if Sun made more of an attempt to show that they helped get the OO.org foundation going? Or do you think this would hurt the fact that OO.org is a mostly community driven effort, thus giving all of the praise TO Sun instead of the community? I see it as a catch-22 either way you look at it.

Re:OO will always be second place

[gardyloo]

On top of the obvious misspellings, your sentances are so poorly formed that it hurts my head to read them. I'm no grammar nazi, but at least try to get your sentance structure as intelligible as the point that you are trying to make... Please?

        I'm no spelling nazi, but please learn how to spell 'sentences'. ;)

Call me when...

[bsytko]

... the the patch against software crap comes out. OO is slow, bloated, and buggy. 'Nuff said.

Re:Call me when...

[Anonymous Coward]

don't don't stutter stutter

doesn't say 2.0.1

[youta]

Has anyone noticed that the upgrade installer and the apps->about do not show 2.0.1 anywhere?
It only says 2.0

Very annoying.

Re:doesn't say 2.0.1

[Risen888]

I noticed that too. I had to actually go back and check my path to make sure I was installing it in the right place.

Re:Where's the envelope barcoding...

[halivar]

Probably waiting for your monetary/code contribution to finally show up.

Nifty

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me know when they have a format painter. Makes work with Resumes SO much easier.

Re:Nifty

[temcat]

"They" do now, but it does not (or does not always) copy numbering. Which bugs me as hell, since this is what I use quite often.

Re:Open Office ( a joke but)

[Maxo-Texas]

It took me just under 6 minutes for 2.0 from first link click to download.
The download took under 30 seconds so I suspect Time Warner had a local copy cached.

75mb is nothing on a cable modem these days.

STILL- it would be nice if the stopped doing this crap and had a 1.2mb patch.

An enhancement I would find useful...

[Anonymous Coward]

... would be support for Quattro Pro .wq1 spreadsheets so I can
import them into OOo.

And you think this is a new trick -- why?

[greginnj]

And who are the marketing people who have taken over these projects who think that version numbers are a marketing tool, and not a way to convey useful information about the extent of the changes?

Probably the children or grandchildren of the people who called the first release of dBase "dBase II" back in 1981 to make it sound like it was a mature second release and not a risky 1.0 product.

Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose...

Re:And you think this is a new trick -- why?

[rjforster]

There is also Hewlett Packard's first product, the HP 200A from back in 1942. Deliberately numbered to make it appear more mature.

Is (Linux) Brochure Printing fixed yet?

[pastored]

In the Linux version of 2.0, Brochure printing is broken. AFAIK, it depends upon the ability to set orientation in the Printing > Options dialog... but that option doesn't exist in 2.0. I had to backup to 1.9.121 just to get my brochure printing ability back. In short, I'd *love* to upgrade... but I won't be doing so until I know that I can print my brochures & booklets.

Re:Is (Linux) Brochure Printing fixed yet?

[znerd]

Yes it is. I checked. It disappeared when I upgraded from OpenOffice.org 2.0.0 to 2.0.1.

Saved cursor positions? Amazing!

[Stormbringer]

Plus, a new keyboard shortcut permits the user to return to a saved cursor position.

Not that I'm not very glad that OOo is here and getting better, but...

this catches them up to WordStar 2.6 on CP/M, circa, what, 1978? (^K1..9 to set one of the markers, ^Q1..9 to go there, ^Qv to get back to where you were before a file operation). Yay team!

Eh?

[GuildPort]

Where's my OpenOutlook clone thingy? Don't the perfectly enlightened open source types need e-mail in the office, too? You're a strange asshat, Charlie Brown!

OO.o Impress is better than MS PowerPoint Viewer!

[Noksagt]

Office applications aren't an essential component on our analysis machines at work & we choose to run OO.o on all of them for the rare time someone needs to use them. We recently had a meeting with the company that writes our analysis software & wanted to show both live demos and presentations on one box. Because all of the people from that company & many of our own people were running MS Office on their own machines, I thought temporarily installing the gratis MS PowerPoint Viewer would be a wise move--I had heard of compatibility problems between MS Office & OO.o and these would be intricate presentations with embedded graphics and equations.....

All of which the PowerPoint Viewer completely choked on, leaving boxes with red Xs through them. Since OO.o was already on the machine, I opened the presentations in it & they all looked great!

who is the real idiot

[codepunk]

GNU barcode and a simple macro...now who is the real idiot.

Good News...

[tolendante]

I've been using OpenOffice.org for my primary work office suite for over three years now and I'm very, very happy with it. I have students that turn things in in the most obscure, dated formats imaginable and I've only had, maybe, six or seven times out of say 1000 assignments that I wasn't able to open the file and work with it. Of course, if students just understood how to do a "Save as.." command, I wouldn't have to worry about it.

Re:Good News...

[assassinator42]

But if they save as text, the only universal format, they lose the formatting, right? By the way, was one of those formats Microsoft Works? I see Open Office can't open those, and I'm not sure how well Microsoft's other word processor does at opening them either.

Re:Good News...

[tolendante]

Yep the Works files are the problem. Even MS Office can't open some of the Works versions! I ask the students to Save As.. Word 97 or html (or WP 5.1 if their program doesn't support the others). I have dozens of word processors on my PII 300 in the garage (which at one time was my main computer for class work) and all of them but a few, including Works versions from 95-2002, have the ability to save as older Word and WordPerfect files. Unless someone is still running a DOS box, they should be able to save as one of those files. Heck, I'm running Word Perfect 5.1 on my only remaining DOS box, so I have a computer from the early 90's that allows me to meet the class requirements. Admittedly though, I'm not sure about the popular Linux WPs. I've only used the OO.org that is included with the Knoppix Live CD (or, maybe DSL).

As far as formatting goes, I'll forgive some formatting errors as long as they don't obscure the intent of the student's writing. Online courses are still a relatively new phenomenon and I try to remain flexible.

Re:Good News...

[jonadab]

> I have students that turn things in in the most obscure, dated
> formats imaginable [...] Yep the Works files are the problem.

Wait, MS Works formats are the most obscure, dated formats you can imagine? Wow, either you just got into computers in the last decade, or you have no imagination whatsoever. Haven't you ever had a student hand you a 720k Mac-formatted floppy with a Claris Works document on it? I would have thought that would actually *happen*. Things that I would not expect to happen today, but that might have just a few years ago, include a 5.25" DSDD floppy with a PC Write document on it, or maybe a WordWriter file, or perhaps an Apple-formatted 5.25" SSSD floppy with a /// EZ Pieces document, or possibly something from the Tandy or Commodore world. If you'd asked me to imagine an extreme case, I'd have said something about an early-model Brother dedicated electronic word processor.

Microsoft Works? That's practically mainstream. I think I even still have an old copy of version 4 sitting around someplace (not that it would likely run on a modern OS).

Re:Good News...

[tolendante]

Oh, I can imagine the like--you should see some of the documentation styles my students still try to use, but you need to look back at the post I was replying to. I've had things turned in in most of the formats you've mentioned and other obscure formats, but it was the Works files that failed to open in OO.org in the past two years. Mostly people have stopped with the other weird stuff over the past half decade when computers dropped to "everyone can afford them" prices. My first batch of students in the early 90's were using Brother typewriter/word processor combos and the like, but I didn't allow students back then to turn in floppy copies--it was hard copy only back then.

Dear OO.o: Please look at Lotus SmartSuite...

[davidsyes]

And STOP spending so much effort lending credibility to ms orifice. Lotus SmartSuite and a user interface that is quite enjoyable to me.

For example, I'd a few years ago written to you and asked you to LOOK at and USE SmartSuite to enhance what you keep claiming as document insertion/linking.

In Lotus WordPro, when I create a master document that has material OWNED by others (or, by myself) and which should NOT be bastardized by a master file format/style, I simply go to the menu and select Create/Insert document. I can link it or merge it. BUT, most conveniently and extremely smartly done is there is a TAB atop the document. I can name that tab, irrespective of the file's real name. The insterted document that is linked (vice merged/inserted) is ALSO given a tab. Soon, my document has chapters that are nicely arranged and rearrangeable by TABs. EACH and every tabbed section KEEPS its own formatting and style and is not turned into a mess.

More important and the stuff above is this:

When I insert a LINKED document, each section does NOT **ram up** butt flush with the lines of the previous document. That is extremely important when creating documents, estimating pages, and looking at formatting, whether in print preview or in file layout.

Oh, and Lotus has had that feature for about 10 years now.

Is OO.o or is StarOffice going to take 10 YEARS from the date of this posting to effect the changes?

Please, in OO.o and SO, allow the user to MOVE the tabs to any side of a document. Yeh, it's cosmetic, but nice.

Please, stop curly underlining the mis-spelled words a-la ms. At the very least allow the user to choose word color hilight/hilite the selection or underlining it.

Please, allow the user to context edit text even when the properties palette/dialog box is present. This would save steps and make for much faster speed-typing and editing instead of constantly having a modal box obstruction speed typists such as myself.

Also, I'd LIKE to see WYSIWYG print previewing in OO.o/SO that is a live view of the fonts and formatting, not blurbs or tiny printing.

And, let us have some color touching to the borders. I HATE gray with a PASSION. It reminds me of ms orifice and blurb. I like Lotus WordPro's yellow and gray blend, tight, crisp icons, and snazzy/cool interface.

Until you remedy those niggles for me, or for users like me but who don't complain and just silently avoid OO.o/SO, then I'll keep using Lotus SmartSuite in Win98 in Win4Lin.

I applaud your code and successes, but there's GOT to be a way to get around visual patent issues. First, try by ASKING Lotus for some concesseions in the name of helping OO.o & SO & SmartSuite gain traction and help other FOSS projects in the same area.

Please?

Re:Dear OO.o: Please look at Lotus SmartSuite...

[KevinColyer]

I can heartily agree with you. I was a very happy WordPro user and tried vainl;y to make it run with Wine etc. I've switched to Linux now and actually really like OpenOffice. I miss the swift and slick WordPro approach but I am so glad that OO got the styles right.

I wish IBM would opensource this product asap. There is much to gain and even if they simply bolted OpenDocument onto it I would like it! Infact if they can keep the speed they have a winner!

Actually my wish list for WordPro is:
Linux version
OpenDocument
The nifty convert to PDF (and niftier email doc as PDF!!!)
Multi-languages (in Belgium I have to use French, Dutch and English, often in the same documents)

Sigh...

Re:Dear OO.o: Please look at Lotus SmartSuite...

[higuita]

please post this in the OO mailling list and feature request/bug track...

even if some guys know about this, most people didnt, if its documented, at least new developers cam read it and change work on it

Re:Dear OO.o: Please look at Lotus SmartSuite...

[davidsyes]

I DID (not yelling at you, mind you, but I feel profound disappointment, enough to want to light a cig and down a few cups of sake and risk missing work tomorrow). And, with much heartbreak, it seems they (or the team back then) got territorial (remember the days of: This is OUR thing; we don't have to be embracing...?)

I know the **code** has improved, but every single time they released OO.o, I crossed my fingers and gave it a try. Every time, I found they made NO significant, meaningful improvement in the areas I recommended, begged, cried for changes. Every time, I want to pound my desk into splinter when I feel ignored as each release eviscerates me when the screen time after time shows they obviously never LOOKED at and USED Lotus Approach as a user. Maybe it's because Lotus has maybe under 5% of the market. Maybe they're afraid of IP lawsuits. Maybe they're afraid to just **ASK** IBM if a collaboration would be nice and sweet for a few years.

Every time, I wanted to take my laptop (which died months ago) into Sun's and Star Offices offices and show them the Lotus WordPro and Lotus Approach projects I do which can NEVER be done in SO/OO.o the way they are.

Every release, I download and try it, just to keep my Libra scales balanced on integrity. It TEARS ME TO PIECES that it seems to me they operate in a vacuum.

Base took too long to get out the barn, and it can't EVEN touch Lotus Approach-- at least in the past pre-releases. Lotus Approach is an award-winning database that exemplifies what END-USERS need and want, not what dorks and geeks and nerds THINK the end-user needs or wants. I don't know what focus group Sun and OO.o are using, but they need to FIRE them. Lotus SmartSuite would be the perfect focus group. Then, just offer IBM an offer IBM wouldn't refuse, all for the sake of propelling Linux forward to the END-USERS.

I guess, to be balanced, I'll grant Sun & OO.o THIS possibility: They're evolving sloooowwwly. Slowly enough to buy time that IBM might actually not give a shit what Sun and OO.o rip from SmartSuite. By then, -if they take 5 more years to mimic what I NEED that exists in SmartSuite, it won't matter because Win4Lin might be part of the Kernel, or Wine or Cedega or something else will render my tears dry and moot.

I bitch and moan, but not out of selfishness. SmartSuite is a very, very good product. By many accounts, it ought to be neck and neck with orifice, yet IBM and Lotus persist in limiting it to corporate sales, and I hardly EVER see it in Fry's anymore, much less MicroCenter. Worse, IBM and Lotus let the code slip into "maintenance mode", and even as it is with mostly pre-1999 code, it would have been great if IBM/Lotus delineated what was IBM/Lotus-owned and what wasn't, and then donated the code to FOSS teams to improve it and allow IBM to reap some of the code.

Instead, StarOffice took off, reinvented the wheel, cost us time, spawned into orifice-mimicking OO.o, and we still have half-baked features floating under a name or description that defy logic (my logic, I'll admit). I even showed some hackers/speakers at the Linux/Open Source convention in Portland in 2003 Lotus SmartSuite and a couple databases and forms I made. They were "wowed" a bit, yet nobody of rank and power seems to want to lend Lotus some cred. Probably there is fear that Linux-ized SmartSuite will gut OO.o.

Well, IBM/Lotus and Sun/OO.o ought to collaborate and spawn 2 or 3 products to various markets: Corporate, Small-Business, Non-Profit/Home and GeekLand, with necessary variations in the licensing and such.

All that good code (IBM/Lotus-owned as well as the private-party-owned code that is licensed to IBM/Lotus just languishing, going to waste...

How fitting and funny: word image is: "justness"...
I want to cry...

Re:Dear OO.o: Please look at Lotus SmartSuite...

[jonadab]

> Lotus SmartSuite and a user interface that is quite enjoyable to me

Reportedly, it also gets rave reviews from a high percentage of its other users, possibly even from both of them.

I'm not saying that it shouldn't be looked at; plenty of obscure things have ideas in them that are worth looking at. BeOS, for instance, has some interesting features that other OSes *still* would do well to look at. ITS had (optional) file versioning built in at the filesystem level, a feature I would really like to have in Linux. TOPS-20 had a very innovative integrated help system that nothing since has really equalled. And so on.

However, while I'm sure Lotus has some nifty ideas in it, I think you also need to understand that if the developers of some other software don't implement these ideas, it's not because they have some kind of personal vendetta or blind spot regarding Lotus. It's just because Lotus is, in a word, obscure (except for 123 for DOS, of course, which is not so much obscure as just dated). And if you think that because they don't implement the ideas that you plead and beg for each release if means they have a personal vendetta or blind spot against you, then you obviously have no idea how many thousands of users plead and beg for features each release. You and the other three people pleading for features from Lotus are getting drowned out by tens of thousands of users pleading and begging for features found in relatively more common software, such as Emacs, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of braindead and inspecific comments to the effect of "Please, for the love of all that is sane, make it more like Word!" Then there's the "You simply must stop adding any more features until you reduce the memory footprint so it will run on my Pentium 60 with 3MB of RAM" crowd. Et cetera, ad infinitum, ad nauseam, a veritable deluge of pleading and begging. A vaccuum? Please. The developers are closer to operating in a wind tunnel than a vaccuum.

You can stop checking each release to see if it magically transformed into Lotus. It didn't. It won't, unless you and the other Lotus ObscureSuite user write the code. I'm not saying this is the ideal scenario, but it is a reality you must accept, unless you are willing to put in the work required to change it (which means writing the code).

Gnumeric Plug

[Noksagt]

OO.org is dog slow Linux, faster on windows. but still slower then Excel.

note 90% of the time I need a Spread sheet I'm in Linux and use OO.org any way.

OO.o on my Linux is faster than MS Office on my Windows on the same machine.

Gnumeric is even better (more featureful & those features WORK) than OO.o Calc & is faster still, so that is what I use. The win32 port has come a very long way. It isn't as good as the Linux version, but I find I use it at least as often as MS Excel. You might give Gnumeric a try on Linux!

Nope, your wrong

[bogie]

Updates can be as little as a few hundre KB. That's the entire point of the new update system.

Re:Nope, your wrong

[kisielk]

Well, as someone pointed out, it's a new feature in 1.5, which I had just recently switched to, through using the auto-update mechanism no less :) So I *used* to be right ;)

Linux, again?!

[Anonymous Coward]

After everyone's bitching, they still put OpenOffice articles in the Linux section. Do the eds even read the comments?

kewl

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks, mate. your short list just convinced me to disable Java in OO.o

Check this out!

[stlthVector]

I think this dude likes OpenOffice - I'm not sure how the 360 fits in.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item =8245651352#ebayphotohosting

The text is amusing!

The Samba guy rules

[amightywind]

Yes. ccache and distcc would both be good options for this. Those are outstanding programs. In fact, I think the ebuild can readily be modified to use it for incrementaal builds. I'll have to check it out. The samba guy (Andrew Tridgell?) that developed them is amazing. He has samba, ccache, distcc, and rsync to his name. Not bad. I am surprised he has not won the FSF free software award yet.

Re:The Samba guy rules

[oncebitten]

Yeah, now that I have distcc and ccache up, things are much nicer for long compiles.

Right now I have a spare sparc and my laptop in the distcc cluster crosscompiling. I used Dan Kegel's crosstool to build the tool chains on sparc and cygwin.

Unfortunately, that doesn't help the java and install parts of OO (which seems to spend a lot of time generating what looks like NLS stuff).

It always did...

[Phatmanotoo]

...at least with 1.1, we never had any problems whatsoever. Both W2000 or W2003 as Terminal Servers (don't know about Citrix). Just install the base installation with "-net", then let each user perform the "user" (or "workstation") installation part themselves. In latest 1.1 versions, this "user" installation wizard would automatically start upon the user logging in.

How good is the HTML output?

[guanxi]

I'm often asked for a simple WYSIWYG html editor, and I wonder if OpenOffice would do the job.

First, is What the designer sees the same as What the various browser users get? i.e. Does the page look the same in Open Office as it does in Firefox, Safari and IE?

Second, how clean is the code, esp. for editing in a text editor?

Re:How good is the HTML output?

[16K Ram Pack]

Have you tried Nvu?

Personally, I prefer my HTML autogenerated/manually created, but I had a play and it seemed OK.

Re:How good is the HTML output?

[guanxi]

I made one simple site from Nvu in January, to try it out. It was buggy, crashed frequently -- maybe just my bad luck -- and I don't think the interface was ready for the end users I have in mind.

I'm just looking for a word processor interface that will output decent html. I know Word can output html, but it doesn't look the same in Word and in Firefox.

Re:How good is the HTML output?

[jonadab]

> I'm often asked for a simple WYSIWYG html editor

Just say no.

HTML was not designed to be created with a WYSIWYG editor, and there are fundamental reasons why it should not be.

Among other things, the semantics get lost with a WYSIWYG editor, as the WYSIWYG editor has no way of knowing, from the fact that you made the font such-and-such, whether the content of that section is a header, just another part of the document that happens to be emphasized, or what. You made this phrase italic, does that mean it's a title of a work that should be placed in a cite element, or are you using the italics just for emphasis, or perhaps because you like the way Georgia looks in italic? The software doesn't know. Did you indent this because it's a definition, or because it's a block quotation, or just because you wanted it layed out that way? The editor can't tell.

Furthermore, WYSIWYG implies things that the web is not designed to guarantee, things that in practice will break the instant somebody looks at the page on a different computer. Will the typeface really look like that? (Does the user even have a typeface *called* Arial? If so, is it from the same foundry? Is the hinting the same?) Will the line really wrap between these two words? (Haha.) Is what you see *really* what you get?

Now, an HTML editor with a *preview* feature would be okay. But true WYSIWYG, like in word processing, is fundamentally incompatible with the web.

Re:How good is the HTML output?

[guanxi]

Interesting, and while I agree to a point, I'm not sure we can't have both worlds:

• As for semantics, every word processor I know supports it and encourages its use. The 'right' way to use Word is to use Styles for formatting.
• The WYSIWYG issues are the same in word processing, and people manage with that: The font issue is not unique to web pages: If you e-mail a word processing document to someone who lacks the right fonts, it will look different on their computer. In fact, unless you use PDF, you'll find line wrapping and pagination vary on different computers, often due to printer drivers. A web page is more likely to be viewed on different computers, of course
• Actually hand coding HTML is just not realistic for most users. Even if they don't use 'styles' and screw up other things, better something than nothing at all.

Now, given all that, I'd still prefer an html-specific WYSIWYG editor that addressed these issues.

Re:How good is the HTML output?

[jonadab]

> As for semantics, every word processor I know supports it and encourages its use.
> The 'right' way to use Word is to use Styles for formatting.

The word processors support that in *theory*, but in practice the interface doesn't work very well for that, and so vanishingly close to everyone ends up using word processors the ''wrong'' way, i.e., in a standard WYSIWYG semantics-are-irrelevant fashion.

> The font issue is not unique to web pages: If you e-mail a word processing document
> to someone who lacks the right fonts, it will look different on their computer.

Word processing is designed for printing on paper. What happens when you send it by email is about as relevant as what happens when you try to display it on a dumb terminal. (Yes, I know there are people who send word processing documents by email. There are also people who send cellphone text messages while driving. People *do* all sorts of inane things.)

> Actually hand coding HTML is just not realistic for most users.

Perhaps you would like to explain why it is unrealistic?

Impress Viewer/Alternatives (and Portable OO.o)

[Noksagt]

when I go to conferences and they present you with a laptop to load your slides onto, they WILL NOT let you install software (ie - install OO.o)

Why not export to PowerPoint or PDF in that case? Or bring your own laptop. The PowerPoint viewer is not standa-alone, by-the-way & must be installed.

Hell even if you could make a build of all of OO.o into a single executable that didn't need an install procedure that would be just fine.

Ah! Just put Portable OO.o on a usbstick or CDR!

No TELUGU version yet?

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprising that TELUGU (Italian of the East), the largest spoken Dravidian language, and the language spoken by majority of the Indian techies is not yet available for download.
http://te.openoffice.org/

Guess the Telugu software techies in USA should do more than just minting money, and forming associations.

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?cid=14181474&sid=1 70151

http://www.telugutanam.com/italianofeast

If you use the Office bean

[Flying pig]

you can use Java to find the fields and replace them directly without needing any temp files. It is easy and fast. Can you do this in PHP? (just curious)

Re:If you use the Office bean

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to introduce you to my friend Turing Completeness. Turing Completeness, meet Flying pig. Flying pig, Turing Completeness.

Impress me..Please!!

[micromegas]

I've forced our high school to migrate to OO. I've withstood buffets from everyone ...students, staff, admin. I can rely on writer, calc and base...but what the kids want these days is powerpoint..impress is the bastard step child of OO and if they really wanted to have it make deeper hits at M$Office, turn impress into something impressive

Ooh!

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it Ctrl-K [n] and Ctrl-Q [n]?

This was really useful.

Ooh, the memories!

No Mac OS X 2.0.1 yet.

[Liet Hacksor]

Once again, OS X is being given short schrift with this release. 2.0.0 never made it past RC3, and all the download links still point to it with not even a link to a 2.0.1 RC or Final.

I need it in order to solve the 0.05pt/0.50pt lineweight issue. (issue 52047)

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=5 2047

Been waiting a long time to say this...

[coolGuyZak]

BUUURRRRRNNNNNN!!!!!

My life is now complete. Thank you COMON$.

Not much improvement in the interface

[BenjyD]

I'm sure there's been a lot of work on the backend, but the interface in Writer doesn't seem much improved over 1.1.x. No direct manipulation or even preview of formatting changes, styles gallery doesn't display a preview of the formatting of each style, formatting dialogs are modal, same odd text boxes jumping around the page behaviour as Word...

I really want to like OO.org 2, but the developers aren't making it easy.