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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?
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! --
5. Make it speedier.
I vote for this especially. I use OO on my WinXP laptop, and sometimes it loads so slowly I miss MSFT Office.
Not that I miss it much, but the load times feel long.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I have only one suggestion: stop trying to be a better MS Office than MS Office (which OO never will be, for several unavoidable reasons) and start trying to provide key functionality better than MS Office does, with a different interface if necessary. Seriously, it's not that hard a target!
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
On the positive side, it's not all that much slower on slow computers. It's usable on a 266 MHz G3. I don't think it's fast on any computer.
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.
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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.
So... do you have anything in a human-readable format?
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!!
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.
You are right about LaTeX. It doesn't try to beat word processors at their own game--and why should it? Unix text processing has a much longer history than WYSIWYG word processors.
Similarly, Ledger doesn't try to beat Quicken or MS Money at their own game. It uses a completely different paradigm (the command line, and a plain text data file) and does it very well. Gnucash, on the other hand, plays the Quicken and MS Money game and, I would argue, does not measure up.
But Gnumeric really is an Excel clone, just as OOo Calc is an Excel clone. I'd argue Gnumeric is a better Excel clone than OOo Calc, but it's still just an Excel clone. Can you name me an open source spreadsheet-like program that is not an Excel clone? What this would look like, I don't know. I've often wondered if there is a "Unix way" to do spreadsheets--that is, a way to put data in a plain text file and then do analysis on it.
The other big "office suite" programs--word processing, email--have Unix alternatives that use a plain-text paradigm. The spreadsheet, at least to my knowledge, has no such Unix alternative. The closest things I can think of are awk and Gnuplot, but unlike LaTeX's ability to replace a word processor, I can't imagine using awk and Gnuplot in place of a spreadsheet.
Maybe open-source is doomed to try to emulate Excel?
Penny - plain text accounting
Really? I'm a LaTeX freak, and I was really impressed with Office 2007. The whole blue color scheme is a little strange, but the interface works beautifully. It's pretty, it's fast, it's organized in an intelligent way, and it doesn't try to "personalize" the menus. I can even use my mouse wheel to scroll through the tabs on the ribbon. I don't see how it could possibly considered inferior to OOo, which is pretty much a cheap clone of Office 97.
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Or just that the groupthink and/or drive from Sun (who pay for the vast majority of OOo development) currently tend towards emulating Microsoft.
I look at it this way: the biggest OSS success stories, IMHO, are Linux and Firefox. They have successfully displaced a worthwhile amount of market share from an established, commercial competitor, something few other big name OSS projects can claim to have achieved so far. And they didn't do it by trying to be Windows and IE, they did it by trying to be a good OS package and a good web browser. I didn't switch to Firefox because of its similarities to IE, I switched because of the differences, from the overall design philosophy (simple main app, plug-in culture) to the subtle UI touches (unobtrusive find bar when I hit Ctrl+F).
Word, in particular, is crying out to be overtaken by a piece of software that provides WYSIWYG cuteness for the masses but makes it easier to create serious documents. Word should have no market: it should be being beaten for those who only write letters and to-do lists by simpler and cheaper tools, for those doing basic DTP by the low-end DTP packages, for those writing heavyweight long documents like books by typesetting packages or high-end DTP, and for the countless users writing diverse documents with a bit of structure and formatting by... an application that no-one's written yet, which is why we still use Word at the office.
I'm sure I'm not the only person who programs, writes lots of different kinds of document, and has had many ideas for alternative document creation tools. IME only, the main activities for a word processor user in a typical office are:
Other activities common among more knowledgable users are:
and
Power users also do things like:
I have never yet seen a business taking anything like full advantage of the automation interfaces of any word processor, nor any effective use of abominations like WordArt and not much of Equation Editor.
From my own experiences, then, I might guess that a good writing tool (in the sense of being quick and easy for users, and producing high-quality documents) would focus on letting power users set up document structure and formatting, and then presenting a vastly simpler interface to actually edit the document: almost a "fill in the blanks", with simple commands for things like checking spelling and word count. Let people apply predefined formatting and structure (based on things like what power users would call stylesheets, not randomly applying bold, all caps, double-underlined, centred, hand-typed numbering, etc.). Let them insert cross-references, again with predefined appearance. Have the software automatically reuse key text, so typing something in the "title" area on the front page automatically updates the headers as well, and changing a heading automatically updates the table of contents; this is one of the most common "unprofessionalisms" I see in documents, and it's not like it's rocket science!
Basically, put the focus on what the user is writing, with simple interfaces for the common tasks everyone needs. Then leave things like the details of formatting and document structure to the power users who can
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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)
OK, here's an immediate reply, right off the top of my head after reading your post. What's more, I'll only refer to the word processing component. I bet I get to ten within two minutes.
I think that's ten, and I basically haven't stopped typing for more than a few seconds between each.
As for how I'd fix them, well, I gave some description of how I'd organise a document preparation tool above. I wouldn't try to fix them with OOo Writer in its current form, because it has too much baggage: IMHO, you need a fundamental change in approach and UI priorities.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
At present, it appears as though the free software community has little in original ideas when it comes to a commodity application. Even Firefox has its roots in a non-free world. But I am convinced that it is caused by the circumstances, and not by the nature of communal software development process. Many ideas were generated by the private interests, and they are good ideas, and we need free implementations of those. As the free software movement gains momentum, we will see it winning in all areas where its products compete directly with non-free software. It has been shown again and again, most strikingly in the case of Linux vs. UNIX. And it is especially obvious when the idea is original, like with TeX, Emacs, P2P applications, and languages.
Are there commercial Python, Perl interpreters coming out soon? Surely we could benefit from (very expensive) interpreters implemented by professionals, as opposed to a bunch of disorganized hacks? Apparently not.
Once we close this gap (which was created artificially through the copyright laws) we will finally see the free software movement generating most new ideas. Of course, there still will be people posting nonsense like "the community is going the wrong way because they do not implement my wildest dreams, but settle instead for something useful to most of us" (that goes to the root, not parent).
Spreadsheet 2000 is certainly a different concept in the realm of spreadsheets.
Mod parent up! If I had mod points... grr! As the the above poster stated, it's FREE. Who cares if it's missing a few features or takes a bit longer to load. I'd personally rather spend that extra $400 on something a bit more tangible (or just pocket it). I could even donate a few bucks to OO and still have a load of cash left over.
Thank you Sun and the Open Source Community for a great piece of software. Your hard work is well received and appreciated!
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
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx