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.

Comments

.torrent

[defy god]

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.

Release Notes

[chill]

Apparently the submitter has an aversion to useful information, like release notes.

64-bit support?

[jkloosterman]

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?

Re:64bit?

[nine-times]

Yes, the installer asks whether you want to enable automatic updates, and it's easy to enable/disable after install, too.

Public domain clip arts

[Lord Satri]

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.

http://www.openclipart.org/
http://www.wpclipart.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Clip_Art_Library

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.

Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers

[mspohr]

I don't know what the problem is with size. If you open one application such as Writer, it takes about 43Meg. When you open a second application such as Calc, it moves up a few megs. If you open everything (Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw), it uses a whopping 59 Megs! This doesn't seem excessive to me.

I just did a comparison with MS Office XP and it takes about 30 Meg each for Word and Excel, Powerpoint only adds another 8 Meg. Total for the three of about 65 Meg.

BTW, the startup time seems longer for the MS Office apps (I don't have either suite "pre-loaded" for fast startup).

Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers

[Schlemphfer]

The trickle of power used to keep its RAM warm doesn't compare to the amount of power (and cash) saved by running such an old laptop.

Cash maybe, power almost certainly not. Unless your Pentium 3 processor sips less than 31 watts of power. That's all the Core Duo requires.

Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers

[nine-times]

My response, point by point:

Why doesn't apple do that?

Good question. To be fair, I can understand if Apple doesn't want to do it, given that NeoOffice competes with both Apple's iWork suite and Microsoft Office for OSX. Apple want to sell iWork, and they're afraid of losing MS Office, so giving a whole lot of support for NeoOffice might be a bit dicey. You might argue that Apple should ditch iWork and start over with OpenOffice as a base, but Apple would likely feel that they'd need to make too many changes for that project to be worthwhile, create a permanent fork of OOo, and finally rebuild Pages and Keynote on someone else's terms. It doesn't sound probable.

However, as an Apple customer, I would be in favor of any support Apple would be willing to provide to the guys at NeoOffice.

It's not like anybody else is going to benefit from neooffice.

I think it's worth noting that you could make the same argument about the Windows port of OOo. No one will benefit except Windows users, so why doesn't Microsoft do it? Of course, the truth is that we all benefit from having cross-platform support for the applications we use. It means we can move between platforms with a minimal learning curve, and rely on common formats and features.

If not apple how about the mac users themselves.

Well, yeah, what do you think NeoOffice is, if not Mac users doing it themselves?

Re:OOo not keeping up

[stoolpigeon]

they aren't a big news item in the release. if you go to the site you will see that this is the case. but here on slashdot a story was run about the template/clip art contest. when the contest complete the winners were available for download but not all submitted entries. today i was checking to see if all submissions were available to download and saw that they were - and a new version of the suite as well. so i figured i'd write (and submit) a journal entry about both at the same time. that's my decision and not anything you'll see the OOo folks doing.

Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers

[Ant P.]

For me, the builtin PDF export function in OO.o is its killer app. It's saved my ass several times now.

Re:my failed attempt to evangelize

[aaronl]

I find that even my accounting department has no trouble doing everything they need to with OpenOffice Calc rather than Excel. This isn't to say that there aren't missing features, or poorly implemented features. It is, however, a perfectly usable, functional, and powerful program. It is well known that charting support is poor, though. The next version of charting will be much improved.

If you still want to use OpenOffice, and need to do fancy charting, you can use Graph on Windows, or gnuplot on anything. Do your chart in one of them, and then import the PNG files to your document. It isn't the most simple and elegant method, but it does work.

This is the OpenOffice Chart module that is under development:
http://graphics.openoffice.org/chart/chart.html

Re:Here's your business case

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

But what you describe is a management problem. If management (a) hires dummies, (b) doesn't train the dummies, and then (c) gives the dummies tools that aren't making them any more productive (but do look pretty) then.... Ooooh, shiny!

Alternatively, management could bring in tools that will actually help staff to do their jobs, and ignore whingers who want to play instead of doing useful work. Yes, that might just do it! :-)

Re:What Mozilla is so great and OOo sucks?

[managementboy]

As I remember (having worked for the StarDivision before it was bought) StarOffice 5 was quiet a rewrite from 4, allowing it to run better on Linux, OS2 and MacOS.

OpenOffice is not written in Java

[Marcus Green]

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.

Re:My Suggestion to OO Developers

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

OK, I'll play. Mr AC, I think you have missed my point on several counts, so I'll elaborate.

1. Documents templates are underpowered in Word. Sure, you can create a document and save it as a .dot file, and you can stuff a few styles and wotnot in there, which is a good start. But when a user creates a document based on that template, they can still edit anything they want, including inadvertently/unknowningly. I want a system where the guys designing the documents need leave nothing but a "fill in the gaps" exercise for their colleagues, without relying on a hideous combination of obscure field codes, macros, document protection and the like to approximate it. As an aside, if we're talking about an integrated Office apps suite, a framework for using these documents as part of established processes wouldn't go amiss either, though that's not quite the same issue.
2. Neither Word's styles nor the OO stylist have even close to the power the concept should offer. Word these days can't make up its mind whether a paragraph style applies to paragraphs or characters! OO's styling UI doesn't even provide a keyboard shortcut for "cancel extra styles and revert to default". Hint: if I tag a block of text as emphasised, and another short phrase within that block as emphasised again, and your styling system can't deal with the common English convention of setting the extended block italicised but the inner phrase in Roman, then your styling features are underpowered. If I can't define style families so that the first item, last item and middle items of a series each have separate characteristics (e.g., borders and spacing) then your styling features are underpowered. If I can't set up relationships between styles, so that for example a paragraph starts with a drop cap and then sets the first line in small caps, then your styles are underpowered.
3. Numbered lists have a notoriously clumsy UI in Word, and it's very awkward to do things like breaking out of a list temporarily and then restarting it. That's not even getting into the frankly bizarre way that the list presentation is defined. OO Writer is similarly impaired in the user-friendliness department. The number of bugs in this area in both products is pathetic, as anyone who's written any sort of extended formal report can probably tell you.
4. If you think the kind of ToC creation in Word and OO Writer is powerful, you simply aren't in the game. Try setting up two tables of contents, one for the chapter headings with a brief description of each chapter under it, and one detailed. Get them to update automatically, without any of this users-playing-with-fields rubbish. Make sure users can actually get the cursor above or below them to insert other content without using obscure keyboard tricks because the UI is broken. Make sure the formatting can do the kind of professional layout seen in published books (which doesn't normally mean using ............ leaders with tight spacing in whatever font happens to be in use for the current line's text).
5. You've acknowledged this one so I won't go into detail.
6. No, I don't want it to write my papers for me. I just don't want to have to copy and paste my document title in four different places, and then find they're out-of-sync later after we adjust the title because I didn't update the right field before printing. See also use of chapter/section/table entry titles in headers/footers, construction of tables of content and indices, etc.
7. If it were as easy as you say, the anecdote I gave in another post to this thread about a colleague losing nearly an hour trying to work this out would not have happened. A lot of users just don't appreciate the difference between linking and embedding among all the unnecessary complexity presented, and once a graphic is in a document, it's stupidly difficult to determine whether it's linked or embedded.
8. The reviewing features are clumsy, with comments stuffed down the side of a page, an awkward annotations s