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? :-)

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?

[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.

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

[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 ?

[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 ?

[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.

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.

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?

[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?

[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.

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?

[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?

[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')

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

[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

[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...

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.

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.

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.)

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

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]

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.

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?

[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?

[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..

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?

[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

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 .

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.

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.

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.

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

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...

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!

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.

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: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).