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>

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 ?

[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 ?

[Spaceman40]

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

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?

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?

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.

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.

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: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.

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: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...

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 .

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

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...

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

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.