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?

[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? :-)

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

[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.

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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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 ?

[Spaceman40]

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 .

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.

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.

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: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')

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: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).