OpenOffice 2.2 Released

xsspd2004 wrote with a link to a Desktop Linux post about the newest version of OpenOffice.org. Bug fixes and the usual changes can be found in the project's release notes. The developers are using the turn of phrase 'a real alternative to Office 2007', hoping to win over some folks not too thrilled with the commercial software's new look. "Overall, version 2.2 should appear better to users thanks to its support for kerning, a technique that improves the appearance of text written in proportional fonts; kerning is now enabled by default. OpenOffice's PDF (Portable Document Format) export function has also been enhanced with the addition of the optional creation of bookmarks feature, and with support for user-definable export of form fields. A quick look at the release notes also reveals that many minor bugs have been repaired in this new version. Most of these appear to relate to the Calc spreadsheet and Base database programs."

Comments

probably

[wizardforce]

maybe not yet but this can easily be fixed by using an open standard. hopefully Microsoft's plan to get a closed source one won't happen. but then isn't a clsoed standard an oxymoron?

Re:probably

[pr123]

Has anyone had success inserting .eps (epsi) figures which have no preview figure? I have found that I am unable to: 1) View such figures, 2) Print such figs. 3) Export such figs to pdf If eps figs can't be supported, OO is virtually useless for tech papers. How about the draw outputs...There was no capability to export to eps so such figs could be imported into other apps.

Re:probably

[gweihir]

OOffice is compatible with MSOffice in that is has problems handling EPS. Under Linux it works usually, by using GostScript to render the graphics. However the same documents do not display EPS on MS platforms.

Made me stick to LaTeX for all my technical writing.

Side note: No MS-Office Component can handle EPS, despite of what some people claim. Some can handle EPSI, which is EPS with an embedde bit-image for non-EPS capable applications.

It's nearly unusuable.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 1 GHz Athlon system with 1 GB of RAM, running Ubuntu Linux. I just tried out this release, and it's damn slow. It's not due to a lack of memory, either. The top command shows I consistently have 300 MB free, and the machine isn't swapping.

This is pretty bad. It takes three to four seconds for the menus to appear, even after opening them several times. There's a noticeable delay when typing. It actually reminds me of college, when we had to use the teletypes connected to the DEC PDP-whatever, and there were 45 other users connected.

Anyway, does anyone know what might be causing these problems? KOffice runs just fine, as done AbiWord. I know my system isn't the fastest, but 1 GHz should be more than sufficient for an office suite. I haven't used previous versions of OpenOffice, so I don't know how they compare to this release. Regardless, I am not impressed. Could these speed problems be due to OpenOffice's supposed use of Java for certain tasks?

Re:It's nearly unusuable.

[andy314159pi]

Microsoft Word on Mac with a super dual core intel has an irritating delay. I can type significantly faster than it can display. This is problematic because I work past errors because the don't display until I'm sometimes a few words down. I am guessing MS word is faster on its native Windows. But the point is, even in the 21st century here, typesetting programs are still slow. Who'd athunkit.

Re:It's nearly unusuable.

[zubernerd]

Microsoft Word on Mac with a super dual core intel has an irritating delay

Office Mac 2004 (I'm assuming that's what you are using) was compiled for PowerPC, therefore the Rosetta PPC emulation layer is executing the program. Even the best PPC emulation can come close to but is not going to match the "real thing". (http://www.emaculation.com/ppc.php) I run MS Word for Mac 2004 on a G3/266 (OS 10.2.8 w/ 384MB RAM) and it is fairly snappy. Using the MS office suite on Intel based macs will get better when the next version comes out, since it will be a Universal application ("Fat binary").

Re:It's nearly unusuable.

[nexex]

It's MicroSoft...you will be paying again.

Re:It's nearly unusuable.

[nine-times]

On the Mac? First, you don't want to use that on the Mac. Try NeoOffice instead. That will keep you from having to run X11. Second, for all the nice things I would want to say about NeoOffice, it's not exactly snappy.

Really, I use NeoOffice. I've donated to the project. I'm grateful for all the good work they've done. But even the Intel-native version doesn't run any faster than Word 2004.

Re:It's nearly unusuable.

[OECD]

I am guessing MS word is faster on its native Windows. But the point is, even in the 21st century here, typesetting programs are still slow.

Arggh! Word is a Word Processing application. It is NOT a typesetting program!

Word is centered around getting you the info in the doc, it doesn't care much about how it was displayed on the originator's computer. Fair enough, that works when you're just worried about the info. If you're at the point where you care about design, Word fails it. By design. (You should have the info in some other program at that point.)

Sorry, but that sort of confusion makes my life hell (but also keeps me employed.)

Re:It's nearly unusuable.

[TheRaven64]

There is a Carbon port of OO.o in development. It is not quite finished, but it was shown at FOSDEM, and is surprisingly fast. The current plan is to port it to Carbon, and then gradually move to Cocoa. Some people from Apple, apparently, recommended this to the team as the best way to port an existing C/C++ codebase to OS X.

Re:It's nearly unusuable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Try this:

File -> Tools -> Options -> Memory

Increase the values of: Use for OpenOffice.org

from the default value to something like 64MB or more.

YMMV.

Re:It's nearly unusuable.

[ZakuSage]

Are you running AMD64 Linux? I used to on my Sempron 1.6 GHz 1 gig DDR and OO.o would be beyond slow. Since I switched to x86 Ubuntu, OO.o has run far, far faster. With quickstart on (which really only uses a minimal amount of memory), Writer will launch in about 4 seconds and everything feels really responsive.

Equation editing in Open Office

[andy314159pi]

I stopped using OO because the equation editing is really difficult. I'm sorta dumb, so I wasn't able to pick up the jist of it. In my own defense, I can use TeXmaCs without any problem so I was able to figure that one out. But for interoperability with Word, OO is the only option on Linux, so I don't generally use TeXMaCs unless I really want something to be pretty. But in any event, I hope they work on the equation editor in OO and then I'll switch over.

Re:Equation editing in Open Office

[SCHecklerX]

I haven't used the EE in OO (heh) lately, but from what I recall, it is very much like what was in word perfect. You are able to actually TYPE equations instead of having to click-click drool and hope for the best. Take the time to read the help files on the equation editing language in OO. You'll wonder how you could have ever done it any other way :)

Re:Equation editing in Open Office

[CastrTroy]

I like it a lot more then the EE in MS Word. I like the fact that you can type the equation. In MS word, you are forced to click on stuff, and even with a lot of practice, it still takes about 10 times as long to enter a complex equation in MS Word. With OO.o, once you get some practice, you can enter very complex equations very easily.

Re:Equation editing in Open Office

[TheRaven64]

OpenOffice, like LaTeX uses the standard AMS representation for mathematical notation. The only difference is that LaTeX uses \ as the escape character, while OO.o uses %.

It was a pleasant surprise for me when I switched to LaTeX and found I already knew all of the equation syntax.

Re:but

[Colin Smith]

MS Office isn't 100% compatible with MS Office...

HTH

Nice :)

[teebob21]

The kerning issue should help OpenOffice immensely. Most of the folks that call me asking for a "real" word processor after they bought their bottom-dollar Dell have complained that many of the fonts "look funny". Personally, that was my only complaint about OO. Many times, during an edit, I would try to delete that small space between characters thinking I had fat-fingered the space bar while typing.

To the first poster: No, I assure you it is NOT 100% compatible with all the bells, whistles, proprietary hidden tags, and closed formats of Office 2007. Nothing short of MS switching to ODF will allow that to happen. It WILL however, produce .doc documents that are readable by those still stuck with no other option than MS products. It will also allow you to read the flood of .doc-only documentation out there.

Hmmm, methinks we need more ODFmentation in online manuals. The switching by several European goverments is a good start....

Re:Nice :)

[Blakey Rat]

Sorry, regardless of what your workflow is (or "should be", although I'm not an elitist jerk to tell other people how they should be doing things), bugs like that should be fixed. Also, as a good philosophy, applications should be adapted to users, not the other way around... look at how Excel killed off other spreadsheets for a perfect demo of how this should work.

Equations still aren't fixed

[Gertlex]

When I read what was new in this version a few days ago (and it's the only main thing I've read to be new about this release), I expected the most obvious fix to be in the equations objects. Every computer* I've seen has had some sort of problem rendering and often even printing a document with equations in it. It still isn't fixed. The workaround for this, however, is exporting to PDF.

I've never had any other sort of display problem with OOo. It's still a good program.

*All Windows machines... The one time I opened a .odf file on OOo in Linux, the formatting was entirely different from what it was on Windows and I had to back to a Windows machine...

Re:Equations still aren't fixed

[daeg]

As a slight rebuff to your comment that rendering was completely different. We run OOo in Windows in the office to create documents and insert placeholder text, then run them through an automatic python script that decompresses and alters the document (mail merge, basically, but slightly more complex), then automatically generates PDFs hundreds or thousands of times per day. The only difference between Windows and Linux (RHEL4) that I have really seen are sentences breaking at different words and fonts in general appearing slightly larger, but not horribly obvious unless you're an anal retentive perfectionist.

I've been extremely happy with the 2.1 version of OOo, and I can't wait to try out 2.2.

I do wish their revision log were better written, though...

Re:Equations still aren't fixed

[niiler]

My big thing as a scientist is that it would be nice to have equations display ON THE GRAPH. It's really hard to suggest this as an alternative to students in lab classes when it doesn't have even this basic feature.

On the other hand, this is/has been my only real complaint for years. I use it exclusively, but then, I'm a geek.

Re:Equations still aren't fixed

[Gertlex]

I'd forgotten this problem... I had it last semester. I assure you my professors had no qualms telling us to put the equations on the graphs. Conversely, I had qualms to tell them that OOo can't do that. General solution, especially since campus computers all have Office, is just to import the graphs from excel. Worked. Usually...

Re:Equations still aren't fixed

[Hooya]

are you using the UNO bindings? we do something similar with about 1000+ documents on each run. and found that after about 100 or so documents, OOo stops responding. so we had to put a nasty hack of killing OOo after evey 50 or so documents and restarting it. this was OOo 2.1. i'd love to hear what your experiences are...

So have they fixed...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

So, I have just two questions:

Firstly, does anyone have a useful, user-focused summary of the new features, instead of the cryptic mess on the development site?

And secondly, have they fixed PDF export bug in Writer that we were discussing here the other day? The bug database suggests not. :-(

Re:How do other heavy Java apps perform?

[SirTalon42]

OpenOffice is not Java 'based'. It does have Java sprinkled all around (like the help system requires Java I believe, and it uses several other languages as well (I think OpenOffice uses at least 11 different languages, counting all compile time as well as run time...).

OpenOffice isn't what you'd call a pleasant experience to hack on (some might blame the closed source roots where it would mostly be the same group of developers for a long period of time that are paid to work on it).

Re:How do other heavy Java apps perform?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not well. I'm using JDK 1.5.0_09, for the record. I'm also using the OpenGL pipeline for Java 2D, since I heard that can lead to speed improvements.

I did try to use NetBeans recently, and I found that it was terribly slow, too. Worse than this release of OpenOffice, even. So maybe you're right.

I don't know much about the architecture of OpenOffice, but why do they need to depend on Java? Couldn't they rewrite those portions in C++, or some other more performant language?

Open Office

[Henry V .009]

Because she does all the real work at our workplace, we set up the secretary's home computer for her. She wanted an office suite, and we put Open Office on it.

Just yesterday she was telling me that she doesn't like it and wants Microsoft Office (for Word and Excel). Open Office is slow and ugly, according to her, and the default font size in Writer is way too small.

Re:Open Office

[geekoid]

So, who did you hire to replace her?

Re:but

[TopSpin]

Ya but is it 100% compatible with MS Office. Cause if its not I can see why a lot of companies would think twice about making the switch.

While I agree with you about companies not switching, remember that there are other vectors for OO success. Where I am, in the world of VC funded startups and contractors, OO has become a defacto standard; nobody here pisses away money on word processors or spreadsheets. It all leads to PDF anyhow. Microsoft's stuff is too expensive, isolated to one platform and a security problem. OO is cheap, fast, portable and more than sufficient.

How OpenOffice fixed my Word doc

[wronzki]

True story - I had a Word document that had somehow gotten corrupted. It was a large file but not huge - ~60 pages, a bunch of figures, ~3 MB in total and it took Word several minutes to open. I opened it in OpenOffice, resaved it as a Word doc, and whatever was broken got fixed - Word could now open it in seconds.

Re:How OpenOffice fixed my Word doc

[The Great Pretender]

Been doing that for other people at my company since OO v1. The other thing you can do, or could do, is open a Excel spreadsheet with password protected cells in Calc and just uncheck 'protection' then re-save as an Excel file. Really helps when the original spreadsheet designer has left the company and something needs changed.

Re:More than money

[vux984]

It's gonna take a lot more than just saving some money to make people consider switching.

OO's word processer and spreadsheet are pretty much on par with Microsoft. If those are the only components of office you regularly use, you probably shouldn't be shelling out for MS Office, period.

I can't speak to OO's powerpoint equivalent - I hear its decent on its own, but not as compatible with MS as it should be. So if you need to create and present powerpoint its fine, but if you need to share power point with others its not as good. (Although OO is free so there is nothing stopping the people who you need to share with from getting their own copy - this may or may not be practical depending on who you have to share with. Conversely if you only need to view other peoples powerpoint stuff then you can use MS's free powerpoint viewer.

The real OO killer in business is Outlook. Businesses essentially buy outlook and get the rest of office for free. And outlook is tough to unseat, there aren't a lot of great alternatives, especially once you start looking for groupware features, calendering, and PDA sync support.

But for home users, where most of them are on webmail/gmail/msnlive/whatever, outlook express, or are just using outlook as POP3 client, OO is a great alternative.

That said, even in business Office isn't unkillable -- Exchange web access is rapidly reaching the point of unseating outlook, PDA sync is becoming wireless direct with the server, and if outlook takes a fall then evaulating Office v OO becomes a much more level playing field.

Meanwhile, in the home market, Microsofts increasingly aggressive anti-piracy moves are finally starting to shift people away. It used to be that everyone had a pirated version of Office at home, but as these become more of nuisance to use, users are starting to open up to alternatives instead of shelling out for office or fighting with Genuine (dis)Advantage.

But I think the biggest thing OO needs is some advertising to build some brand awareness and credibility. Couple that with a pre-installation deal with the likes of Dell or HP and they could make some serious inroads.

same experience here...

[Anonymous Coward]

Startup in California I'm contracting for...

$2 millions in funding (first round). I visited their office. 30 employees, 29 Windows machine, 1 MacOS X machine, 30 OOo installations, 30 Firefox. Why spend money on an Office suite that brings nothing but lock-in?

With the level of inefficient inertia plaguing big companies, I expect these to be amongst the last to switch. Though, well, some are leading the way (e.g., Peugeot-Citroen switching 20 000 desktops to Linux)

Re:More than money

[LaughingCoder]

OO's word processer and spreadsheet are pretty much on par with Microsoft.

Well, I can't really comment on the word processor, but I can say definitively that the spreadsheet is a far cry from Excel - especially the graphing feature, which is very poor. As I understand it, the whole graph subsystem of Calc is scheduled for a ground-up rewrite, which substantiates my claim. So, if you require graphing capabilities in your spreadsheet, it is best to avoid Calc and use Excel.

I disagree

[geek]

I think OpenOffice can do the plugin thing better than MS can. Just look how multi platform plugins work for Firefox. The OO team can make cross platform plugins that work pretty seamlessly if they tried. MS will be locked into doing it on Windows only. I could be wrong of course but I don't see how MS can do plugins better than the OO people, especially consider OO uses open API's and formats. I would find OO the much more appealing option if I were a developer.

Re:How do other heavy Java apps perform?

[Qwavel]

> OpenOffice isn't what you'd call a pleasant experience to hack on
> (some might blame the closed source roots where it would mostly be
> the same group of developers for a long period of time that are paid
> to work on it).

I would blame the fact that it is a very diverse and unique code base. It is mostly C++ but it is not based on any common libraries. Even for their GUI they decided to completely go it alone, which means that they make no contributions back to any libraries, and learning to hack it is very hard. At one point they considered switching to standard libraries but then didn't get around to following through. And then they started adding Java everywhere they could.

Re:2.2 - It does have one outline mode

[Anonymous Coward]

It does have one outline mode and it's been there since the early versions.
Just double click on the page number on the botton of the screen and
select "Headings"; you will have buttons to show/hide levels and
promote/indent sections, move sections, etc.

Document exchange with Word 2003 and below...

[JimMarch(equalccw)]

I'm running the Ubuntu Feisty Beta with OO2.2 and I exchange fairly complex Word docs with others, including legal pleadings and other hairy stuff, and I'm having no problems whatsoever.

Disappointing - can't even install

[jginspace]

Glad this is finally available. I checked the website periodically and noticed the release date slip from 14th March to 24th March to 28th March ... and then a bit more.

Anyway I still haven't managed to install.

On running the install it complained there was no disc in my CD drive. I closed it - it had a Hiren's boot disk in there - installation proceeded. Why on earth is it insisting on the CD door being closed?

Then the install tried to clean up my OO 2.0 install. (I'm using 2.1) It asked for the location - in my temp folder - of the OO 2.0 install files. Of course they were deleted long ago - they were in temp folder - where OO 2.0 put them. I pressed cancel thinking the installation would handle this gracefully but ...

No, install was aborted. Still haven't checked out OpenOffice 2.2

Re:In Defense of Microsoft Office 2007

[fermion]

As a person who sometimes writes a lot, one reason I love OO.org is the simple yet elegant master document feature. I am sure someone will tell me how to do such a thing in MS Office, but I used MS Office from the inception to MS Office 97, and was never able to get something like the master document to work. OTOH, the first time I used OO.org several years ago, I was able to immediately make the master document work.

MS Office is great for writing memos or doing spreadsheets that would be better done in perl or C, or creating gratuitous presentations, but for the kind of work that I do, MS Office as not been in the lead for many years now. All eye candy aside.

"Linux" category inaccurate

[massysett]

Come on Zonk, why is this categorized under "Linux" with a Tux icon? OOo is cross platform--runs on Linux, Windows, and OS X (even if it does take X11 to run under Mac.) I'd even be willing to bet that there are more Windows users of OOo than there are Linux users of OOo.

Following the same logic

[ClosedSource]

Q: Is that new version of Windows called Windows ME, 100% stable now or should I switch to Linux?
A: Why bother, Linux isn't 100% stable either.

The issue when deciding which to use is their relative compatibility.

Numeric keypad still unusable in Calc

[sgent]

Calc is the only spreadsheet EVER (since Visicalc) that doesn't allow the start of a formula entry using the + sign -- making numeric keyboard use for spreadsheet junkies almost impossible.

This has been a bug (submitted by myself and many, many others) since before 1.0 came out.

Re:Numeric keypad still unusable in Calc

[LaughingCoder]

And another thing ... it uses semicolons instead of commas to separate fields in things like IF statements. Very irritating. I use Excel quite a bit and the few times I've tried Calc it drives me crazy with its different syntax.

And don't get me started about the graphing function. Here's a fun parlor trick. Using Calc, make a couple of columns of about 2000 numbers each. Then highlight them and graph them as lines. Be prepared to wait awhile. Go get a coffee. Maybe read War and Peace. And no, your computer didn't crash even though the UI is frozen ... give it time. Voila ... you are now rewarded, after a looonnngggg time, with a crappy looking graph (the default Xaxis labels are "ROW ROW ROW ROW ..." - who thought that was a good idea?). Try the same thing on Excel. The graph appears instantly and you don't have to fiddle around with it to make it presentable. The graphing feature in Calc is pretty bad.

Another parlor trick with Calc. Save those two columns of numbers as a CSV file. Exit Calc. Change the CSV file to read only. Now open it with Calc. Try to graph it again. Note how it lets you highlight and select graph... and then .... nothing. It appears to ignore you. Try it again. Same thing. Try the same file in Excel. It will warn you the file is read only. Graphing works fine.

And STILL no OpenType support on OS X

[Teilo]

I do not understand why this is. Freetype has supported OpenType for ages. The Windows version of OpenOffice supports OpenType fonts. Why is this so hard to implement universally in every port of the product?

I realize that the Windows port uses the Windows font API, and thus provides the ability that way. NeoOffice does the same on OS X. Yes, it's not so easy to use OS X Core services from X11, but why not switch to a decent type library like FreeType that already has the support? Not robust enough for typography? I just don't get it. You would think this would be a priority.

OOXML

[nileshbansal]

Is OpenOffice planning to include OOXML translator anytime soon. It is required, as more and more people are now using Office 2007 (and they are sharing their documents with us Linux users).

Re:How do other heavy Java apps perform?

[Dionysus]

Well, considering it started out as a commercial application from Sun, and is still mostly supported by Sun, is it really that much of a surprise to see such a strong Java tie in?

That's wrong. StarOffice was developed by a company called StarDivision in Germany in 1986. Sun didn't enter the picture until 1999.
See here

Comma is the decimal separator in Europe

[MrBoombasticfantasti]

it uses semicolons instead of commas to separate fields in things like IF statements. Very irritating. I use Excel quite a bit and the few times I've tried Calc it drives me crazy with its different syntax.

In most European countries the comma is used as the decimal separator. Three thousand dollar and twenty-five cents would be $3.000,25 (not $3,000.25 you might be used to). In a locale that does this Excel uses the semi-colon too.

Re:Comma is the decimal separator in Europe

[dodongo]

In most European countries the comma is used as the decimal separator. Three thousand dollar and twenty-five cents would be $3.000,25 (not $3,000.25 you might be used to). In a locale that does this Excel uses the semi-colon too.

That's it. I'm not using Open Office until someone in their organization can explain to me why they hate America.

Re:Price doesn't matter

[yoasif]

It was said earlier in the thread, but I think it bears repeating.

"You can't fight the future".

As OO.org or other, more nimble alternatives (like KOfice 2, which is coming to Windows) get better and better, it will approach (and perhaps even overtake) Microsoft's functionality.

Look at what happened with IE6; Firefox and Opera aren't just arguably better than IE6, they are a lot better. Obviously Microsoft put some money into making IE7 better, but Firefox and Opera are still better at rendering CSS web pages.

I'm sure as OpenOffice and KOffice get better, we'll see investment (in the form of code, or programmers, or money) from companies that are friendly to open source (IBM maybe?), which will increase features and code quality.

Would someone be willing to use a product that is better than a product that costs $351 (for the "Standard" version), and is free?

I'm sure they would.

Microsoft is already at it's peak, it has nowhere to go but down.

Give OpenOffice (or the lighter (but less feature filled, but prettier and more elegant feeling KOffice) out. Think of it as Firefox, back when it was called "Phoenix".

Re:How do other heavy Java apps perform?

[jbolden]

Java apps by in large are 3-5x slower than the same apps written in C++. That's because:

1 -- C++ gives you access to low level routines and these are used to improve efficiency
2 -- C++ is inherently faster because of its more C like defaults
3 -- Java tends to create longer chains of function calls because of the way the libraries are architected
4 -- Java is running on a JVM not on the hardware and thus adds another layer of calls

Its perfectly correct to blame Java for being slower than C++. The fact that there exist fast Java apps doesn't mean that Java apps on average aren't substantially slower.

Re:NeoOffice not as bad as you suggest, IMO

[drjzzz]

My experience with NO has been positive. I used OO.o with X for about 9 months on a dual-core Macbook (and many years on linux). I loaded NeoOffice to use the mac remote for a presentation. It does seem a little slower but it is very usable. I like the ability to switch between apps with the apple-tab (can't do that with OO+X). It was absolutely solid for preparing and presenting a 3 hour lecture with 160 slides, including many data tables, figures, some ppt imports, and some animation. I think I'll stick with NO instead of going back to OO.