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OpenOffice.org 2.1 Released With New Templates
Several readers wrote in to mention the release of OpenOffice.org 2.1. It includes support for 64-bit Linux and a number of other improvements, including multiple monitor support for Impress, improved Calc HTML export, and automatic notification of updates. Also, all of the templates and clip-art that were submitted for the template contest are available to download.
been compiling and running OO in 64bit on my gentoo system for the past few months?
1. Make it stable on primary platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OSX)
2. Make native binaries on Linux AMD64 and Mac OSX.
3. Increase compatibility with all version of MSOffice.
4. Make it less memory hungry.
5. Make it speedier.
Everything else can wait.
I'll be here holding my breath.
Can some one tell me how good it is?
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
I can't find anything to clarify if this new release of Open Office 2.1 includes (or needed) a patch for either of the two recently discovered vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and Microsoft Word (one was a Zero Day bug, the other just announced today).
Does anyone know if it also existed for:
a. exported WinXP/2000/98 DOC files from Open Office (since I use Open Office on my Win XP laptop and frequently export in DOC for other people);
b. imported Word DOC files (in other words, was there a vulnerability if you only had Open Office and imported a DOC file to then save as ODT)?
c. specifically WindowsXP machines - in other words, was it patched in the Open Office 2.1 for WinXP version?
Thanks! I've pretty much stopped using Word except at work in favor of Open Office, but recent news has been concerning me on these aspects, and I can't figure out if they were real concerns or not.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
only a bit better than linking to their direct download links...
http://distribution.openoffice.org/p2p/ torrents for Linux, Solaris, and Windows.
A Mac OS X version of 2.1 does not seem to be available yet.
hackers of the world unite!
Of course removing the Java dependency may be a good start.
I teach physics lab courses at a community college. In the past, we'd had a lot of problems where students made a graph in Excel at school, took it home, and were unable to open it in Excel at home because it was an older version. I figured this was a natural situation in which to evangelize for open source. I got OOo installed on all the Windows computers in the labs, added instructions in the lab manual, and urged my students to use it, explaining the reasons.
Well, basically it was a failure. Given the choice, they all use Excel. In fact, even the ones who don't know how to use a spreadsheet already have generally chosen to use Excel rather than learning OOo. It doesn't matter that I go out of my way to try to help them if they show interest in OOo. In fact, many of them seem to read the OOo instructions, but apply them to Excel -- which works, most of the time, since OOo is such a total monkey copy of Office.
I would like to be able to say that their behavior was just irrational, but honestly I don't think it is. Actually there are at least two common graphing tasks that are extremely difficult to do in OOo. (1) Adjusting the scales on the axes. Sometimes it works, and sometimes, no matter how many times I click on the right place, it doesn't work. (2) Fitting a line and displaying the equation. This is dead easy in Excel, but unless they've improved OOo recently, it requires a mystic incantation (typing two different non-obvious, complicated formulas).
My wife's reaction when I suggested trying OOo was that she wasn't interested, because she'd tried importing complex Word documents, and sometimes it lost some of the formatting. Well, actually, this is an extremely rational reason not to switch to OOo.
Find free books.
Apparently the submitter has an aversion to useful information, like release notes.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
OpenOffice in my opinion is simply a clone of MS Office suite. Instead of trying to mimic MS' product. It should innovate. Try things. Risk things. Experiment. Do something crazy. Remove all features that isn't useful or doesn't add to the experience and add features that rock. Don't let feature creep come in. Don't worry if the competitors got this many features. Until OpenOffice finally have a reason for me to use it(Such as killer UI or killer implementations of features), I will continue to use other word proccessor.
Geeks like to think that they can ignore politics, you can leave politics alone, but politics won't leave you alone.-RMS
To save you some time, here's how it works: you click through to tell it you want an OSX version, then you tell it powerpc, then you tell it English. Up pops a form asking you what system (um, I said OSX), what version (well, duh, I got here by asking for this new version), then what language (um, English, as I just clicked), and ... presto ... it's not available. Try other versions, languages, ... oh, jeeze, these are also not available.
Yeah, whatever. I think maybe I'll just wait a while -- maybe a year or a decade -- until it has a normal OSX interface and it's actually available and (one hopes) working.
Meantime, MSWord is really quite compatible with MSWord, so I'll continue to use that. And LaTeX is still here, for technical writing.
currently the cost of Sun Microsystems purchasing Star Division and StarOffice and open sourcing it all. :-/
IMO, if they're gonna include JAVA, what OO uses should be compiled to native code and then let any extension/addon/etc which would use JAVA be interpreted and have an option to compile those too.
JAVA isn't bad, it's just not for everything.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
OO.o has run well compiled for amd64 since the 2.0.3 release, and builds have been available at ftp://ftp.openoffice.cz/ for quite a while. Will OO.o release an *official* 64-bit build for this release? (I could not find one on the main download page) If not, what has changed to make amd64 supported?
I never thought clip arts were important, maybe because I don't use them, until my wife (yes, even on /.) really required Clip Arts, and since I'm the pseudo-geek-of-the-house-using-open-stuff-whenever -possible, I had to find public domain clip arts.
y
http://www.openclipart.org/
http://www.wpclipart.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Clip_Art_Librar
My 10 minutes search on the Internet two weeks ago gave no that much interesting results. Only now I can understand how OpenOffice must also, somewhere amongst the priorities, continue to add clip arts and templates.
Animoog.org
From the article:
An user contacted by Wired News who spoke on the condition of anonymity said that while he was optimistic about the prospects of the Linux operating system and noted how his unit had a capable IT support staff, he was not too happy with OpenOffice. He said he missed MS Office, even though it is designed by a company run by people he considers to be "thieves." "(OpenOffice) is complicated. It is atrocious," the Gendarme said. "We save money but the advantages of its use are not terribly clear."
It's time to realise that Abble's products are the biggest abomination these days. Just say NO to the dumb iAbble way!!
--
make install -not war
What is this JAVA you speak of?
Did you mean Java?
With a version of Calc that allows for normal naming. I hate not being able to use dashes, underscores, and other non-alphanumeric characters in a spreadsheet's title.
When will OO get the menu ribbon? It sure is nice to have a good free competitor to Office 97 out there...
Who modded the parent Insightful? Please respond here with your reasoning!
My new blog
I think it's down to the fact that Open Office is not natively a Gnome app. Firefox and Thunderbird are similarly memory hungry and similarly cross platform.
In KDE the word processor apps and web browser are around 1/3 of the memory allocated and I reckon it's largely down to much tighter integration with native libraries.
These are arguments against Firefox, Thunderbird, open Office and for native equivalents like Abiword, Evolution, Koffice, Konqueror etc. Konqueror is particularly impressive.
Deleted
OOo development is not keeping up. It's a sad thing when templates and clip art is a big news item in your new release.
For too long I have had to put up with very unstable software (I mainly use Word and PowerPoint, though now I use Keynote for presentations and love it). Word does not seem to like working with tables, footnotes and graphs. Nor does it seem to like documents longer than 30 pages, or paste and copy within a document, or work nicely between it and Excel (almost 100% crashes on my machines and I have tried all kinds of remedies... not looking how to fix it, don't even suggest it as I don't have it installed anymore).
My writing is rather boring, Times New Roman, 12 pt. double spaced, an occasional simple table and an image or two. I try not to use footnotes, but do so once in a while. The documents are nothing extra ordinary, yet Office consistantly crashes, not only on one machine, but on three. I have used both 2004 and Vx--same thing.
OpenOffice finally is to the point where I can use it and not miss much (wish it had better EndNote integration, but I am ok with it as is as long as it does not crash and wipe out my document). So far it has proven to be very stable and I have been using 2.04 on a Mac for several weeks.
While I can understand the reluctance to switch, Word in its last few major revisions was never too stable and very few technical writers (of which I was one for several years) would use it for anything but the simplest of tasks. Back then (and still today, though it is showing its age... Adobe are you reading this?) FrameMaker, even with its archaic UI, was the choice based on its stability and the fact that it could handle very large documents without much problems (something I would never consider on Word... and hopefully never have to again--Good riddence to Microsoft!! And thanks all of those who have made OpenOffice what it is today).
Finally 100% free of Microsoft!! (Mac OSX 10.4.8, and Kubuntu on PIII laptop)
And vi keybindings for the... the vi people.
Your conclusion is fundamentally flawed: it does not follow that there exist a community of programmers working on something just because a lot of people would benefit from it. For a start, that would require a significant number of programmers (a) to appreciate the need, (b) to collaborate in order to produce a solution, and (c) to be willing to do so for little or no compensation if you think they're going to write it as OSS, and (d) to be willing to do so in an apparently crowded market with a dominant commercial player, established OSS projects as competition, and a user base who have been demonstrated for the most part to prefer paying Microsoft for their offering year-on-year rather than investigate alternatives that might suit them better.
Of course there is. A gazillion people use Word in this role every day. Word isn't very good at it, but most people don't appreciate that because they have little experience of anything else in recent times.
That doesn't change the fact that at a videoconference last week, with several relatively senior members of staff from all around the world and with very limited time available, we wasted upwards of five minutes while the expensive external consultant leading the presentation tried to get his bullet lists in Word to look consistent using Format Painter (which kept turning his text into Greek). He did the same thing the week before, too. Leaving aside the opportunity cost of that time, the cost to the business just to pay all those people to sit around and watch the consultant getting his document in a mess a couple of times was probably $500. In a smart document editor, his new bullet point would have just dropped into the list and formatted itself nicely the moment he typed it, or at worst required a click or two to say "this paragraph is a new item extending the list above it".
At the same company the week before, I spent most of an hour swapping e-mails and calls with a colleague on the same team who couldn't work out why a document with an included image looked fine on her machine but didn't work when uploaded onto the network for others in the team to see; this turned out to be a linking vs. embedding problem. The cost to the business for the time for two of us to fix that and the resources we used in the process was probably $200, and again that excludes the opportunity cost for our time, the time lost as I got back to my own work after the interruption, and so on.
These little things punctuate the daily lives of countless office workers around the world, wasting $100 here or $1,000 there. Those two anecdotes come from just my personal observations of one team at work over the past couple of weeks, and probably total $700 of loss to the business. This is more than enough to send the culprits on a basic training course, or to buy a couple of licences for better software. As the saying goes, if you think training is expensive, try ignorance. Likewise, a smart craftsman with good tools will tend to get better results faster than a low-skilled worker with inadequate tools, even if the latter doesn't realise what he's missing.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
And I just started emerging it on Gentoo 2 months ago...
:/- spoon(_).
How about spellcheck support in windows? It works fine in linux, but for some reason getting it to work properly in windows is very confusing.
Anyone notice any improvements (or can offer pointers)?
Something to consider before bashing "clones."
You say clone. However, maybe they only share their similarities because they have found what might appear to be most effective way of solving the problem at hand. Or at least the most effective way that the most people are familiar with without having to spend a long period of time learning how to use software that does the same thing as other software they already know how to use.
After all, one could argue that linux is just trying to emulate Windows (Lindows anyone?). Certain games are played certain ways because people don't like having the rules changed.
It works the same way, but has a lot of advantages.
.doc, .xls, .pps, etc. It's better at M$ formats than M$'s own software! I've even recovered a bad file to save it and use it in Word.
Just a few examples I've witnessed myself:
a) Oo.o opens files M$ Office won't -- I mean
b) It's more safe than Office software. I frequently use Oo.o to open files which might contain exploits, as I trust there are has far less viruses for oo.o.
c) It's better. Now and then I have to resort to Oo.o, even if I have Word/Excel at hand, simply because I know it will mean a lot less trying to make things work out right. With Oo.o, it's like 1-2-3-solved. With M$ Office, it's waddling through useless help files.
HTH.
And no I cannot imagine what it would look like with this description
Sent from my desktop computer
Three words:
About f***ing time!
God knows how many times I could've used this in the past...
1) why does it always ask me to accept the sun/gpl or whatever license it is. I've had to do it for every single version I've run. It's also asked me whether i'm a "registered" member every single time!! ..this is why excel is better
2) when printing presentations in handout mode how do i set the # of pages / handout?!
3) the options for setting the data vectors for charts in calc are worthless
I look at what's been done here...who knows how many endless hours of coding, several different platforms supported, an entire clone of the MS Office suite. What basically amounts to a very large commercial software product offering.
For free.
What's the benefit? It's FREE people! You don't have to spend a dime on it.
It'd be nice to hear a kind word or two in appreciation every once in a while instead of a bunch of ingrate whiney bitches.
Tried to use OOo bug report site but gave up..
1. In Impress, please add the ability to insert tables.. tables, not spreadsheet acting as tables.
2. In Impress, please add the ability to insert inline formulas
3. In Math,the direct graphical editing of formula is broken. This is mainly due to the undocumented curly bracket {} feature of grouping expressions without displaying it (the curly brackets). I practically have to type everything using the text entry box whenever I write equations.
Thanks.
I got my (mine mine mine) first "PC", a MacSE, with Word 4.
I was so excited that I seat down and actually read the manuals, cover to cover.
It is stunning what I can still do with Word. Word really hasn't changed in any necessary way since Word 4. I can do sections, stitch multiple documents together, field codes, all that from Word 4. I can create far more complex documents in Word 4 than OO will let me come close to creating. (OO still has ZERO support for sections and styles, and their line numbering support is horrid).
Also, back then GE used to have full manuals for the asking. My Excel manual (which MSFT doesn't give you anymore) has tons of information and has a lovely personalized "GE" cover. Really, GE specially printed their manuals from MSFT to have a GE branded cover. They had those types of manuals for EVERYTHING they had a volume license to. The MS-DOS 6.2 manual is fantastic.
However, the one thing MSFT seems to do every single release is change the keyboard mnemonics. And Office 2007 is obviously a case of punishing the knowledgeable experienced user, in order to glitz up the UI. They can have a ribbon bar if they want, but to not even give me the option of a menubar is just asinine.
Holy fuck, just in time. I'd just about reached the limits of what my 32-bit word processor could do.
Wat a sec, actually I haven't even reached the limit of Super Scriptsit. Who the hell needs a 64-bit word processor?
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
It looks like you're writing a suicide note. Would you like to use a standard template?
"Personally I think spreadsheets are the most dangerous software on the market. "
..... Excel.
.csv's and decommissioning the the Dells.
We do outsourced Unix and Oracle DBA work for a medium sized mining company and in the last couple of years set up a Prod DB and Apps tier plus a Test/Dev db plus apps, four nice new Dells running RHAS. They've just been taken over and the parent company wants to move the data off these boxes. The DBA telling me asked me to guess what and I said, O no, MS SQL and he laughed and said, O no; worse..... Acess!?! I winced. No, much worse he said.... I was thinking 16 bit DBIII as he told me
So in the coming months we have a job dumping the lot into
Believe it or not, but sadly a true story.
Just Another Verbose Asshole?
Ugh, please don't invite me to your meetings, dude... ;)
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
let's just start putting up articles for any new goings on with sourceforge projects too.
talk about the great open source hype.
Powerpoint can do 16:9 now.
:-)
Also common is 16:10. Some displays can rotate, so we need also need that: 3:4, 9:16, 10:16.
Arbitrary support would be good.
Let me say how to deal with mismatch: letterbox, letterbox-like but shifted up or left, letterbox-like but shifted down or right, stretched (with or w/o maintaining aspect ratio for images), cropped...
Also, don't crash when I try to force this via badly editing the XML.
But if I did that, my mod would no longer count.
...
Shit.
Choosing the ordinary English version (not the en-US) of the torrent gets you the Polish version.... argh!!!! and the non-torrent version gives you a file not found error... oh heck, email to webmaster time...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Mozilla's essentially started from scratch.
OOo's code derived from StarOffice
If OOo hopes to compete with MS Office the way Mozilla competes with IE, OOo needs to start from scratch.
Ok, longish reply, but I feel I need to get a message out...
.eps files, which integrate perfectly with LaTeX, which creates wonderful .ps output. It's also remarkably stable in quality and format (it's ascii based, which is always human editable).
:-( ;-), but openoffice, though XML based, cannot handle XML based SVG at all. Neither does it support its own ODG format for including pictures! The handling of pictures and captions is very confusing and unpredictable as well.
In the real world, there are several different workflows for creating documents, some require pictures, some require cooperation with others, some require extensive version control and change tracking, some require cross platform compatibility, some require all of these and more.
The problem with almost all wordprocessors I've tried is that they're not workflow oriented, they just have a document format and try the best they can to accommodate a user interface around it that immitates something that the developers know/like. This doesn't help the world create better document workflows or better document creators!
For my thesis, I used LaTeX and Xfig (and make), this worked ok, but it's not for everyone. Xfig is an old program with a horrible user interface, but it produces wonderful
Currently, I'm trying to work with OpenOffice.org and Inkscape to create a similar sized document, in cooperation with several people, some of whom refuse to touch openoffice and send me word files with visio images
Openoffice doesn't work with SVG files though, and has very limited change tracking. Inkscape is a wonderful vector editing program (though it has some GUI quirks, as most FLOSS has
In order to have a fully functional document editor (in OO writer) in the real world, it must handle including pictures properly, it MUST support its own ODG format and it SHOULD support SVG fully (at least for display and printing).
One problem with OOo is that a lot of bugs (over 2700) are assigned to bh (Bettina Haberer from Sun) and some of the problems I mentioned are among them and have been open for over 4 years:
- 5038; Outline numbering lacks commonly-used abilities (may 19, 2002)
- 6191; Right-click accept / reject changes (jun 27, 2002)
I'm sure there are more and of course, not just for this one developer (It's not my intention to pick on Bettina, it's just an example)
For openoffice to progress, it needs to promote developer activity on open bugs and issues, they weren't reported for nothing! To leave such bugs open for 4 years is not respectful to the reporters of the bugs or the users of openoffice.
Sorry for the long post, I just needed to get this off my chest, so thanks for reading...
-Simon
Just a stupid old idea (borrowed from what happened a few years ago, when Gecko started as a lightweight replacement for Netscape): has nobody yet tried to strip down OOo to the bare essentials (so it will look like NotePad!). Maybe this stripped down OOo gains some speed.
not trolling, but shamelessly protecting my karma just in case:
during my last bi-decadely forray into trying to use linux i installed some version of open office, think it came with the distro and it would let me do anything untill i browsed to an address source, it might actually have said "address book" but in any case: why? what for exactly? never mind the fact that i've never used an address book on any platform, when sending somoene an email i just find an email from someone i want to email and hit reply, or memorise their addy.
Every time OpenOffice gets a story someone says it is written in Java. I just want to get the pre-emptive comment that only a few components of OpenOffice depend on Java and it is possible to run OpenOffice on a machine with no Java whatsoever with very little loss of functionality.
With a version of Calc that allows for normal naming. I hate not being able to use dashes, underscores, and other non-alphanumeric characters in a spreadsheet's title
Apart from editing, saving and printing I have never met anyone who uses half the feetures in msOffice. was I would be happy (Score:5, Feeture fud)
davecb5620@gmail.com
A Gendarme contacted by Wired News who spoke on the condition of anonymity said, Wired
Why need to be anonymous, it's not as if Linus is going to get him fired.
was The main problem (Score:5, Mod Troll)
davecb5620@gmail.com
I agree with the moderation, the title is overrated (and syntactically wrong).
Apologies to OOo developers as I rephrase to "Why Mozilla is so great and OOo not so great?"
"I actually use OOo all the time. It's still very annoying - when I need to layout some complex documents"
If you want to preserve layout don't use either msOffice or OO use LaTeX or LYX a GUI front end. Even transfering a word document between different machines is problematical as the formating changes depending on the installed printer.
"Calc doesn't have many features present in Excel - analysis, graphs, etc.... I mean, how hard could it be to add an interpolation feature?"
The one feeture it does have is it actually does the sums correctly, unlike Excel.
Browse OpenOffice forum, post top msg to slashdot.
was Re:my failed attempt to evangelize (Score:1)
davecb5620@gmail.com
"OpenOffice sucks because it does not have my critical feature! Until it does, I'm sticking with Ami Pro!"
"OpenOffice sucks because of a serious bug that those commie hippies haven't fixed yet! At least when I file a bug with Microsot, they get right on it! Sometimes, they will even patch the bug 10 times. THAT, my friends, is professional service!"
"OO sucks because it doesn't appeal to my aesthetic values at all! I'm going back to EMACS for all my office needs!"
"The curse word 'Java' appears somewhere in the installation! I want to be free, I'm going back to Microsot Woid!"
"OO sucks because it takes so long to compile! How in the world do those Windohs users find the patience?!"
"OO is grotesquely bloated! I installed it and it used more than 0.02% of my hard disk, forcing me to move some crucial porn and tunes to my NAS box!"
Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
Did anyone else see this Google ad just under the Slashdot story?
Download Openoffice
Complete Office Suite, Save $200! 100% Compatible - Download for $47. www-openoffice.com
You forgot to mention one, but...
I like the ones that complain about lack of macro support (claiming there is none at all), when the majority of used functions have already been implemented allowing most macros to run just fine.
Change is certain; progress is not obligatory.