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OpenOffice.org 2.3 Review
Peace Frog writes passed us a link to an in-depth review of the newest version of OpenOffice. Instead of just the normal bug fixes, 2.3 has added several new features. Examples include: "A bunch of new and enhanced features like restoring the user-defined movement path in Impress and applying better default print settings in Calc. Check the release notes for complete information from OpenOffice.org. A significantly different chart tool. New extensions provided by Sun and other vendors. You will need to run 2.3 for the extensions to work. Read more about the new extensions on the OpenOffice.org web site." The general impression from the review is that the OO team is doing an excellent job of responding to feedback from previous releases.
My blog
To try to change this from simply a troll to a constructive post, why not mention the things they coded wrong this time? I'll start:
* Not having a user definable number of columns (instead sticking with the old 256).
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
OO 2.3 is now powered by energy harvested from Cory Doctorow's ego. Current benchmark's indicate a 50% increase in load-time. Sweet!
You seem to give the impression they did this time.
Still doesn't use native widgets. Until they fix that, it can't replace AbiWord let alone Microsoft Word.
At the very least it would speed up the widgets, even if actually editing anything remains slower than molasses in the Antarctic winter.
The thing that made Microshaft Word the market winner was the integration. Regardless how much developers hate OLE, it did the job. You could take a data object from any other app and throw it in and it kind'a worked. It was not anywhere good enough from the perspective of a professional, but it was enough as far as Joe Average was concerned.
What continues to make OO on non-windows platforms a losing proposition is the lack of such APIs. Even if the GUI and underlying libraries supports them OO continues to do things of its own (not surprising considering Sun's involvement). KDE embedding and full integration, gnome integration, etc. There are present in a very rudimentary fashion. As a result OO continues to be limited to a universe of its own. This hinders both its development and the development of third party aps like Dia. It also at the end of the day puts it firmly into the niche proposition area. Until this is resolved this is exactly where it will belong. Sad...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
What about videos? Under linux at least i am still unable to integrate a video in an impress document. It lets me select a file but will just display an icon, impossible to play anything, whatever the format of the video is. I try to promote OOo as much as i can around me but frankly i lose a lot of credibility because of this kind of problem.
I think this is unrelated to 2.3, but I was excited to see yesterday that Novell now has an OOXML Translator for OO.o. I was going to have to buy Office 2007 for my fiance soon because she needs to open .docx files that are emailed to her regularly. Now I don't have to bother.
Whatever you say about Novell, I appreciate their work.
No, but it is too bad you have no clue what developing and releasing a project the size of OO involves.
If you had any class whatsoever, you'd be thinking that it is nice that this free project is being improved (not to mention released in the first place), and as such provides you with an opportunity to leverage other people's work to reduce your own workload.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Nor does microsoft word...
Surely the use of native widgets would make cross platform apps much harder to develop...
That said, could they write a cross platform back end, and then a frontend for each supported system?
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AFAIK there is at least java integration. I found about this when I was searching for a simple open document spreadsheet parser to extract, replace data from cells. Somehow, it feels like VB6/Office integration (sorry, I have no recent experience of this).
Stupidity is the root of all evil.
Mod parent up. Ive had the same issues with a company-wide rollout of Thunderbird replacing outlook. While 99% of the people have switched (its been a couple of years now), the #2 question (right behind "where's my calendar?") has been "how do I drag and drop this embedded mpeg movie that I stuck into a powerpoint slide onto my email? nono, in with the words not an attachment." ... as much as that "tight integration" turns the stomache of any IT guy worth half his paycheck, the users expect it even if it doesnt work very well.
Native to what? Gnome, KDE, Windows, Mac? Your OS of choice may not be others. In fact, there are a lot more windows users out there. Should they use MFC? I'm not so worried about the native widgets, I'll bet they would render fast if X11 weren't a monolithic memory whore. In linux, I have noticed more freezes and runaway CPU cycles due to X than any application. Except maybe flash.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Terrific package. It's the only office product w use. We use tons of features and rarely have problems. But.... Finally, after months of dishing out gobbledygook, someone has decided to explain the new features in plain English. Keep it up. If they are serious about this project they won't slip back into this: http://development.openoffice.org/releases/2.3.0.html which is all we've had until very recently.
I for one appreciate the fact that Open Office is there as an option. It is being run on every system in my home with no complaints. Thanks to all of the people working on it.
"Should they use MFC? "
No, Never, No WAY... I have used MFC and it stinks on ice. It is buggy and just a terrible frame work. We just found a new but in MFC that would cause our application to crash when it got on unexpected message from a touch pad driver. Yea the driver had a bug but MFC shouldn't have crashed from that message. So you should stay clear of MFC even on Windows.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
OO has a weight problem.
I've always thought that a fork at OO 1.x would be good, as 2.x was where it got really fat.
Well IBM forked at 1.x. It's called Symphony.
But I cannot find any source of any part of Symphony.
This is an apparent violation of the LGPL.
Perhaps they are sending patches to open office, but that does not really satisfy the LGPL. The source of changed LGPL Symphony code must be publicly available.
The parent troll conveniently ignored the fact that OO was a commercial product, sold to sun the subsequently open sourced. OpenOffice.org didn't write the original code, neither did Sun. Marco Börries at 16, dropped out of high school in Germany to establish 1984 to sell Star Office under the corporate name Star Division. The fact that it is still around today and competing with Microsoft is an amazing feat in itself.
So I love OO and have started using it as my primary office suite at home. But it still falls short when it comes to rendering and printing docs and having them look the same as in MS Office.
It's not a huge issue I guess, but it's certainly the reason that I still need to have MS Office installed in a VM. Highly over the top but a necessary step until OO can render stuff faithfully. My wife, for one, will not switch until it displays word docs correctly.
Is this just me having this problem as I never see other people complaining about it.
Version 2.3 and this crap STILL goes on. Start up Calc. In Calc choose "File -> Open", pick a .txt file that's a CSV or tab-delimited data file. WTF? WRITER opens up with your data file in it? If I wanted it in Writer I'd have OPENED it in Writer. What the hell good is that?
X11 isn't monolithic anymore, it was modularized starting with version 7.0. my personal memory usage for an idle X desktop dropped by almost 100 meg with either xfce or gnome when I switched, almost a year ago now as I recall.
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
I don't see anything in the Wiki or the Review yet about them fixing the problem of only supporting 65,536 rows in Calc. Anybody have an idea about that?
Yes, I do use more than 65,500 rows in Excel on a weekly basis to manage reports for people.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
YHBT. HAND.
Is he the hero that will finally liberate us from HypnoToad? My prayers have been ...~~@@~~
ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNOTOAD!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Native to what?
.Net; they all boil down to the same things in the end.
The system it's running on. When on Windows, it should use Windows controls. When on OS X, it should use OS X controls. When on Unix... well, that's a sticky case. Ideally it would use either Gnome or KDE controls, but this isn't really realistic to expect, so pick one.
There are frameworks that will do this for the most part.
Should they use MFC?
Who cares? The comments about widgets is from the end user perspective. Windows API, MFC,
Huh, I thought it was a relatively funny post, almost like he's a phb.
A pretty minor bug, me'thinks. There's a perfectly good accepted extension for comma-delimited files, it's called CSV.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Astroturf bingo number 4, claimed for A03.
Yep it still has trouble mind melding with someone who obviously cannot figure out that the file extension for csv files is in fact ".csv" and not ".txt".
Got Code?
/quote> That's not a valid excuse.
The integration in OO.o is too smart for its own good sometimes.
My beefs with OO.o presently center around Calc and speed. Calc takes over a minute to launch on my computer, and I have one spreadsheet which I converted from Excel (now in OO.o format), not terribly complex, which will freeze up for about 30 seconds when performing relatively simple calcuations.
They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a number of closed issues in the OOo issue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."
The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.
Personally, I hold out more hope for KOffice, which is built on KParts. If KOffice 2.0 is as good as the developers say it will be, I will be switching.
Palm trees and 8
This is very similar to the whole Java AWT/Swing issue. Java applications that use AWT/Swing don't quite fit in on any desktop. (except the theoretical all-Java desktop)
Yes, yes there are skins that look something like Windows or Mac, but they are just skins, and when you use them for a while you find that the widgets and controls aren't quite right for the platform.
There is a reasonable solution for Java in SWT which (no surprise here) uses native widgets on many platforms. It has a fall back AWT binding, but I have never heard of anyone using that.
I don't know, what they did to OOo, but when I upgraded from the 2.0.2 to 2.3.0, the performance of the Writer dropped dramatically. I have a document, which contains 20 500x500 pixel images distributed over 30 pages. The scrolling from one page to another is awful. It takes from 5 to 20 seconds to switch from one page to another. This delay seems to be pretty random but consistent at the same time, because it doesn't matter if I already have visited both pages and I'm working between these two pages, the delay still varies between the 5-20 seconds each time. I didn't have this problem with the 2.0.2 version. Now I'm considering downgrading back to 2.0.2.
You totally misunderstood the problem and gave a very bad response. He does not care what the extension is used at all. He wants to use Calc to edit csv files. It won't let him do this. Excel can easily do this. So can any reasonably made spreadhseet program. Not being able to open up a CSV file is sort of like making a word processor that can not open up txt files. I.E. CSV is to spreadsheets what TXT is to word processors: the simplest format that logically makes sense to save text in cell structure. Use new lines to indicate new rows, and comma's to indicate new columns. Why would he want to do it? Because at heart csv is the easiest way to send someone spreadsheet type data if you don't know what the proper format for their program is. Any spreadsheet program needs to be able to read in csv formated stuff. It also should be able to things in that format.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
I wonder if IBM would be so kind as to donate (D)SOM to Linux et al. Don't know what it would take, but it certainly worked, as opposed to (D)COM.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
It's still a deal-breaker, for me. If I have to go through every formula in e.g. an old Excel template, and change several of the commas to semicolons to get the template to work in OO, it's annoying. If I then send the spreadsheet to someone who opens it in Excel, and these functions no longer work (need to change the semicolons back to commas) it's beyond annoying. It's a deal breaker. WTF??? This isn't even the case with every formula, that I've noticed - but enough. Try e.g. :
=AVERAGE(A1;A3;A5) vs. =AVERAGE(A1,A3,A5)
Now, just imagine this problem propagating across large spreadsheets with much more complicated, inter-related equations. WHY is this even an issue? What was the compelling reason to do things differently, here? It breaks compatibility, and doesn't add anything useful, as far as I can tell.
Come on. From the perspective of the developer, nothing is free. Time has value, if nothing else. One can spend it in ways other than developing software. But to the user, in this case the software is available at no cost, and that is the sense I was using "free" in, as I think you (and everyone else) know very well. The fact that software costs the developer something, and then is given to the end user, is precisely the reason that any reasonable person would see value in, and be positive about, such a transmission of work product.
I certainly would if they gave it to me without charging me money, yes. I might think so anyway, if it saved me more than it cost me.
Heck, I think it is nice when there's a new and/or improved GIMP or Photoshop, and these, each in a different sense, compete for attention with one of my my own sources of income. It isn't all about who makes more money or higher sales / distribution numbers. To a large degree, it is about what benefits the users receive. YMMV, but that's definitely how I see it.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
OO is a slug in performance compared MS Office 2003... and 2007 seems even faster.
http://www.CelloFourteGroupie.net
Disclaimer: I am one of the founders of NeoOffice.
Being based on OOo 1.x, IBM does not need to release the source code for Symphony. OOo was originally dual licensed both under LGPL and the SISSL license. SISSL allows companies to make completely closed source forks, only providing notice of the original vendor and SISSL license. This license was one of the primary motivating factors for why we forked and created NeoOffice, to prevent companies from making a commercial product whose improvements couldn't be shared back with all the volunteers that had worked to create it.
Closed source forking is also our reason for using full GPL since it guarantees everyone's freedom to access the code. Not even LGPL provides that ability since commercial closed source proprietary code can still be incorporated provided it's in a shared library. Only the full GPL provides enough protections to ensure that everyone must cooperate and that no one can make key parts of the project rely on closed source solutions.
ed
Every release -- even a small point release like this one -- I hope that the OOo developers will add an outline mode to Writer. And every release I'm disappointed. I really like OOo, but this one missing feature keeps me from using it for serious work becuase it makes large document planning and writing production in Writer sloooooow.
And before some n00b who's never written a 200-page document jumps all over me: No, the OOo "Navigator" does not provide an outline mode. It provides something akin to a re-organizable TOC in a floating window, but it doesn't provide the productivity enhancements afforded by inline hierarchical control within the editing window. This is one function that MS Word got right. For example, in Word I can start typing and make a list in normal text, click into "outline mode" and either use a key shortcut or a single click-drag to promote/demote some text to headings (while leaving other items as content), or re-order paragraphs of text or headings. To do the same thing in OOo's Navigator, I need to switch to a different window to reorganize headings, but switch back to the editing window to resume editing content. I also need to switch between two windows to split a heading into two sections, switch back to move it, and switch again to resume composing content -- something I can do with a CR and single mouse-drag in Word.
Word: type, type, drag, type, type, [enter], key-combo, type.
OOo: type, type, switch-window, drag, switch-window, type, type, re-style, switch-window, drag, switch-window, type.
Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right! Or do it one-better and improve on the similar inline hierarchical editing from FrameMaker+SGML. Or innovate some collapsible tag interface from something like the old HotMeTaL from SoftQuad. (But don't trash the Navigator; it *is* useful for final proofing, just not composition)
-J
I think not...(*poof*)
... I still can't add a word to the dictionary with just one click. Try it for yourself, you'll see. Make a typo, right-click on the word once the squiggly red underline appears. It gives suggestions, and not an "Add" menu -- but a submenu. So me, the uncaring user, just wants to add this to the dictionary. I pick "Add" submenu, then I am faced with a choice. "soffice.dic", "standard.dic" and "sun.dic". Um... what? Why should I care? What happens if I pick the wrong one? Is there a wrong one? Why do I have to make this decision? Screw this, I'm going back to MS Office! (Okay, slight hyperbole with that last.)
Unfortunately, this is a classic example of why open source software designed for mass use needs more contributors familiar with basic usability concepts. This way, end users could spend less time playing with their dics, and more time accomplishing their goals.
So you're saying that slavishly obeying three-letter file extensions is a good thing when OO does it? You'd be pissing your pants with rage if you opened a .html file in Notepad and it started IE instead.
How about issue 25072, "Cross-References to Headings"? It's number 3 on word processor top-voted list (even when not counting votes on duplicates).
It looks like only 3 years old, however they just marked the issue from 2001 as duplicate (number 2204) for the newer report. So that makes it 6 years old.
I personally feel that this is about as important feature as styling when writing document longer than couple of pages. I believe a couple of persons feel the same too, see all the frustrated comments.
This makes it quite difficult to recommend using OOo to any (university) student as it's troublesome to write anything but short reports with it. And when students can't use with, they won't recommend/use it at work either when they get out of school.
Bibliography is another PIA.
OO needs to spend less time on new features and more time fixing the ones they've got, IMO. Especially when it comes to compatibility with MS Office. ODF's great, don't get me wrong, but the only way OO will see anything close to widespread adoption is when people can effectively and easily transition off of MS Office.
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
Have you tried READING THE HELP file??? Calc CAN open a CSV file as a spreadsheet. It works differently than Excel, but why is that a problem; Excel does it WRONG. By definition, a CSV file IS a text file and unless you provide other guidance in the File Open dialog, why would you expect it to do other than what it is programmed to do?
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
Rename file.txt to file.csv.
Understand now?
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
It isn't, but its also not something that makes it "unable to compete with word", it's just an area where it isn't any better.
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That's a pretty good feature - have you actually requested it? As ODF is XML based it seems like it should be easy to implement. I've never really used it in Word but I have fond memories of the tag interface in HoTMetaL, which remains quite a common in good text editors.
Calc does open CSV files as spreadsheets if you tell it to do so in the File Open Dialog. Check the Help Index under 'CSV'. It has been there as long as I have needed it. By definition, a CSV file IS a TEXT file and all Text files are opened with Writer unless you tell it otherwise.
If I am not for myself, then who will be for me? If I am only for myself, what am I? If not now, when?
It was this tar file, sorry:
http://ubuntu.org.ua/getdeb/od/odf-converter_1.0.0.orig.tar.gz
Installed the Bubblemon yet?
Are you kidding me? I've used SO since 5.0 - when it was actually quick and nimble. In a nutshell,
1) It's much slower now - even though they told us they were breaking into components to make it faster - the joke is on you.
2) listening to feedback - yeah - look at their response on basic statistical analysis. Search their bugs for statistics, error bars and regression and you'll see that it's been 5-6 yrs and STILL no ability to put the equation on the chart.
3) They are SO far behind MS it's ridiculous.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not an MS lover by any stretch but I use OO day-to-day and I recently sat down in front of Word 2007 and thought,
1) this will really make it easy for newbies to create nice documents
2) creating nice documents is really easy
3) too bad they won't adopt ODF as they'd clean house with Office '07.
Seriously, I've lost faith/hope in OO. Just look into GO-OO and you'll understand that things move glacially slow with OO development. Maybe IBM's 35 person addition will help but I forsee more pissing contests than actual work getting done.
Vista is a joke but Office '07 is a really nice product because it DOES make it REALLY easy to create nice looking documents. I added a picture to a test.doc that I was working on and was blown away with all the cool things that I could do with the image. In short, really easy to create nice looking documents - Isn't THAT what a good word processor should do???
Anyhow, I've lost faith that Sun will actually listen to the users of their software and, if they do, it'll be after the user has left out of frustration due to waiting.
Do you regularly create and manipulate 200+ page documents in MS Word?
Have you tried changing the file extensions in Microsoft products? It can be downright impossible.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
It really should try importing it when you have "spreadsheets" file type selected, though, instead of only with the more specific "text csv".
.txt in writer, but not when you give it a cue about this being a spreadsheet.
It's reasonable for pure autodetection to open
I'm being very kind to IBM when I say steer clear of Symphony.
Your personal information is fair game for whatever IBM sees fit to do with it.
"Such information will be processed and used in connection with our business relationship, and may be provided to contractors, Business Partners, and assignees of IBM for uses consistent with their collective business activities, including communicating with You"
The software is not Free.
* Read all about the "Proof of Entitlement" in the license.
* You may not redistribute.
* Authorization for Use on Home/Portable Computer: The Program may be stored on the primary machine and another machine, provided that the Program is not in active use on both machines at the same time
There are other terms that I found personally distasteful.
Read it yourself: http://www14.software.ibm.com/cgi-bin/weblap/lap.pl?la_formnum=&li_formnum=L-DBTS-76CJJR&title=IBM+Lotus+Symphony+Beta&l=en
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This is because OOo is integrated together (which many here do see as a bad thing when Microsoft does it but do remain silent when OOo does it. Perhaps they just don't read OOo articles). It means that recently opened documents is the same in all of the OOo products. I like this interoperability as I can directly open Writer documents from the Calc window and is a feature I'll miss when I move to KSpread instead. However it does mean that file extensions are important.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
...and took 2 hours of work with it. I was this close to crying.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
For a 200 pages document, nothing comes near LaTeX.
> OOo developers will add an outline mode to Writer. And every release I'm
> disappointed. I really like OOo, but this one missing feature keeps me from
> using it for serious work becuase it makes large document planning and writing
> production in Writer sloooooow.
I ranted about a year ago and found that I was not the only one. In spite of a five year old wishlist bug, the recriminations have not fallen on deaf ears, and last February I heard some encouraging noises from the dev team. Outline mode is not coming soon, but some day maybe... I'm keeping the faith but meanwhile I hate to say that for now Ms Word is my outliner of choice.
If you don't think you need outline mode, then it is just that you have no idea what efficiently working with big documents is like.
Yes, it's been requested of the OOo team quite a few times over the past 4-5 years. ODF intuitively matches this concept, but implementing it apparently requires some nontrivial change to the Writer codebase. And a little more enthusiasm by those who could code it (wish I could). If I could direct my OOo donation to this one feature, I'd give $XXX instead of my paltry $XX donation. There's some background available here: http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/category/writing
J
I think not...(*poof*)
I've been messing with 2.3 for a while now and I've noticed that the display of fonts and line work in Writer, and fields in Calc, continue to have odd quirks in Windows that require you to minimize/restore if you want to see them displayed correctly. Most often, this manifests in situations where text or tables seem to disappear and you need to perform the minimize/restore trick to get them to come back. I realize this is a fairly minor complaint, seeing as how easily it's worked around. But this has been a problem from day 1 with OO and if you're using OO in Windows, hoping that it's fixed in this version, you're going to be let down.
In addition, fonts still look like hell on your monitor in the Windows version and that has not changed either.
---don't make me break out my red pen.
You totally misunderstood his original problem, then gave an even worse response.
.txt and OOo opens it as a Text file in Writer.
.txt to .csv, then OOo understands what you want it to do, and opens as a CSV file, letting you specify the Character that you want to separate columns by, and the Line Ending character you want to use.
He was talking about a CSV file HAD to have the CSV extension for OOo to understand it as CSV. The original poster has a file named
If you change the
I have been using this feature since about 1.0. Works pretty well.
Scott Carr
I am a student (MEMS) and so I need to handle formulas and export in PDF.
.pdf file
.svg files! This is a shame.
OOo 2.3 Writer:
+ handles complex mathematical formulas
+ produces a very nice
+ allows for complex text formatting and precise placement of diagrams
+ It has macros!
+ It will open documents written in many formats.
+ It saves your document in many, many formats.
but
- Quite often the display is not refreshed and you have no idea anymore, what the page looks like. It reminds me a bit of the olde versions of Finale, but there you had a special "Refresh display" function. Here you don't. The only option is to restart Writer.
-- Seems prone to crashing. It crashed twice in the week I have been using it.
- Can't include/insert
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Incidentally, OOo also allows for the use of Python and other programming languages as well. However, while it might be my lack of Java-ness, it looks to me like the underlying problem is that the OOo API docs are mindbogglingly poorly organized. Say for instance you have an object of type TextCursor, and want to find out quickly what properties and methods such an object has. So you go into OOo's online API documentation and find the entry for TextCursor -- only to discover that you cannot tell what properties and methods this object provides. The docs show what *interfaces* it has, but while this might be exciting in terms of software architecting and discovering how OOo reuses its own code base, it doesn't offer a lot to anyone simply trying to make use of OOo objects. To actually find the methods and properties for any object, you'd have to click through each and every interface listing, which is hardly convenient or easy to use.
I strongly suspect that a reworking of the API documentation would give OOo a big leg up in terms of third party development.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
A historically popular, proprietary piece of BBS software for the IBM PC offered a (very popular) mailbox facility. There were rumours flying around that a future version of the software would allow the BBS sysop to charge for electronic mail messages. Charging would be by the letter; with spaces, digits and punctuation marks specifically excluded. The "elite" users responded by crafting readable messages entirely out of non-chargeable characters in order to demonstrate the absurdity of such a proposal.
Even if the facility was ever incorporated into the software, it was never actually used in real life. It's also worth pointing out that in those days, disassembling and editing binaries was by no means unfeasible.
Meanwhile, a group of immature kids who fancied themselves as "hackers" (at the risk of being called out on a "No True Scotsman" phallacy, a true hacker has more in common with a squatter than a burglar) picked up the wrong end of the stick and displayed their ignorance by continuing to craft messages out of "free" characters. The true elite laugh at them.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Have been trying to migrate to OO for a while now BUT... how can you make a "contains" filter in Calc? No, regular expression don't work...
It's been requested numerous times, and has been on OOo's issue list since at least April 2002 -- see here for reference.
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Actually, they're not. They are, in many cases, complete reimplementaitons of the view objects. Apple did a lot of work with Swing on OS X to get the look and feel right.
It doesn't change the fact that the shortcuts are all wrong, the menus have the wrong layout, and so on though. There is only one way of doing a good cross-platform GUI, and that's to have a clean MVC separation and write a different view for each platform. Unfortunately, good implies expensive.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Nonsense. Most people don't embed anything except perhaps some images in their Word documents. And if they embed something it's an Excel spreadsheet or graph, and OOo allows embedding of OOo spreadsheets and graphs just fine, so they'd still be able to do that. In fact, it works a lot better. In OOo you can have a table with data and formulas in your text document, and then embed a graph in it based on that data (which automatically updates when you change the data). Try that in Word.
If anything is a niche it's people embedding things other than images, Excel spreadsheets or graphs in their Word documents. OOo won't be able so serve them. Well, whoopteedoo...
Back on topic, the grandparent's complaint is something that bugs me too. The StarOffice suite originally ran on commercial UNIX and Windows. It was later ported to Linux, and somehow ends up in the 'Linux' category. Linux and Free Software are different; I use a lot of Free Software, but don't use Linux. Referring to a broad category by the name of a relatively unimportant subset of that category just makes Slashdot seem ignorant.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I don't really understand your complaint. I have worked with long documents in OO.o and MS Word. I actually prefer the stability of the former.
But you seem to complain about having to switch windows. Assuming that the windows are (or can be made into) floating pallets in the app or separate OS windows, a click (for the drag) should initiate the window switch on every single OS that OO.o is supported on. Many of those systems can alternatively be made to have sloppy focus. So, you should not have to have more clicks--just a slightly different interface. Or am I misunderstanding your gripe?
Every set of highway construction plans we send out contains a several hundred page ms word document containing all the specs, a several hundred page ms excel document containing quantities and estimates and cad drawings containing the plans. Being able to reorder and change headings and such in an outline view is essential to our work.
IMO this is the problem with having ubiquitous formats, we are required to send it in word and excel so that they can be edited and changed by the dot as needed.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
That is something that really needed to be fixed.
Well, I guess this might make it two features that MS got right -- OOo's word/char count is appallingly inadequate, and effectively keeps the software from being adopted by many academic and professional writers. Proper and comprehensive word/char counts are absolutely vital in any truly usable word processor, and such functionality is glaringly absent from OOo -- despite users having pointed this out numerous times.
I'm getting quite disappointed with the whole OOo team, not least since IBM's Lotus Symphony, based on OOo, implements proper counting. This is basic, required functionality. Requests have been on the books, and effectively ignored, for half a freaking decade by this point. And folks still wonder why MSO hasn't been dethroned yet... Sheesh.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
look at these two bugs...
46683
and
81839
they couldn't even bother to confirm the latter one because it is mind-numbingly easy to verify.
I would rather trust a bunch of monkeys at a typewriter than to put faith into the programmers behind this project. I used to think SUN might be a decent investment, ROFLMAO now!
I'm replying to you since you were modded up, but your parent and the thread of replies has more to do with this.
I use Excel at work for almost one thing only: looking at tab delimited files containing lots of numbers. It's frequently easier to look at numbers in Excel before opening them up in Matlab or some other software.
Being to lazy to install it on my home computer for the odd days when I bring home work, and my girlfriend installed OpenOffice on my computer, I attempted to use it for the same thing. I clicked on the "Open as tab delimited" option, and it opened the file for me in Writer instead of Calc. I tried some other options and basically whined at my girlfriend the same complaint. I'm not about to rename them as I have other software expecting them to end in '.dat', and I'm not sure what the standard tab delimited has for a standard extension.
It's enough of a bug that it impeded me from getting stuff done for half an hour.
...and for most people that's true too - they don't come near LaTeX either!
/.'ers, but not everyone wants to learn a programming language to be able to create a document.
It might be bizarre to many
That one bugs be too, especially since the correct answer is none of them. It shouldn't be saving user-added works in the main dictionary, it should be saving them in a separate dictionary. That way they can add words to the main dictionary, without it conflicting with my changes when I upgrade.
Who on earth modded you up? Not only do you have no reading comprehension skills, but as a result of said lack of skill, you go into an anti-M$-worthy rant?
Yes, quite insightful.
Put Cut-Copy-Paste at the top of the right-click menu, so I don't have to move the mouse down half-a-screen to use these common options.
It's these kind of usability tweaks that Microsoft is so much better at, I'm afraid, and it's the kind of thing they need to put a lot of work into if they really want to take on Office.
Personally, I hold out more hope for KOffice, which is built on KParts. If KOffice 2.0 is as good as the developers say it will be, I will be switching.
And make that KDE4/Windows as well... cygwin is a pain, it'd be a lot better if I can use KOffice on all the platforms I use. That goes for KDE apps in general - I doubt many people will make a "clean cut", they'll use Firefox, GIMP, OOo etc. only to finally figure out "hmm all my apps are there, I can just run Linux underneath" and end up with Gnome, not Konqueror, Krita, KOffice and KDE. Which is rather sad, particularly since most claim KDE is trying to copy Windows more than Gnome is.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Why does it have to be so damn hard to insert page numbers to documents in OpenOffice.org Writer?
When I click the drop down menu "Help" -> "OpenOffice.org Help F1" and type "page numbers" as the search term and then "footers," I get this advice:
So far so good, I follow the instructions and my document gets page numbers. By default, the page numbers are aligned to the left side of the page, so next I need to click the "Styles and Formatting" button and in the box that opens next, I need to right-click "Footer" and choose "Modify..." Then a new box opens and there I need to click the "Alignment" tab and then choose "Center" and then click the "OK" button.
Well, now I've got page numbers on the bottom of my document pages, aligned to the center -- just the way I like them. But adding the page numbers has changed my document's layout, decreasing the hight of pages. So now I need to adjust the top margins of my document. So it's time for "Styles and Formatting" again, and there I need to click "Page Styles" and then right-click "Default" and choose "Modify..." Then I need to click the "Page" tab and change Top Margin from 2,00cm to 1,00cm and then hit the "OK" button.
After all these actions, I've got page numbers in my document and the document layout is just like it was before adding the page numbers. But it just seems an awful lot of trouble for doing such a simple operation. And I have to repeat the same routine again with every new document where I want to add page numbers. In Microsoft Word and Abiword you can add page numbers with just a couple of simple clicks, without altering the document's layout.
I haven't tried OpenOffice.org 2.3 yet but I don't really expect they've made adding page numbers any easier in this new version. :-(
It's in Office since PowerPoint 2002. I used it years ago for giving usage presentations to students. 100% sure
Let's get this right: when someone opens a text file called something.txt and OOo decides to open that with the text editing component, that's slavish obedience?
If the numeric values happen to correspond to RGB colors, should it guess that the text file called something.txt ought to be opened with Draw instead?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I had OpenOffice 2.1 installed and then tried to install 2.3. Didnt work. The installer complains it cant find the openoffice 2.1.msi or something. I'm still waiting a month later for a working OpenOffice 2.3 installer. Love to try it if I could install it.
I am probably going to lose some karma here but anyway ...
I have a laptop that runs both Ubuntu and Windows and until recently it was a %100 linux system when I majored in management information systems. I changed my major to Business administration due to risk of being outsourced or not finding a job after I graduate.
Anyway all my assignments are ms office based so I decided to use it since 2 of my instructions are picky with proper formating and fonts with their templates. I must say I hate Windows and I am not a big fan of MS Word but it loads in 1 second on my el cheapo laptop with an outdated pentium M. The fonts look beatufil and Excel is excellent.
I installed the latest Ubuntu beta for 7.10 and openoffice took 40 seconds to load and the fonts were just terrible. I am partially colorblind and the excel graphs I imported had the same symbols and I could not make out what each line was like I could in MS Office.
I read one post here in which he used some free utilities from sysinternals (makers of NT magazine) to profile it and found the performance can be improved 20x with proper threading.
Even if the fonts were great it would be nice if it used Gnomes fonts. It can not integrate with either gnome or kde or windows for that matter. Its terrible and at least tollerable if you own an old CRT monitor where the font issue is not as noticible.
If Linux wants to reach out to desktop users OpenOffice has to fork with real improvements or maybe KOffice might be the answer? For now I will stick with Windows as much as I despise it because for accounting and word processing its the only os with a decent office suite besides macosx. Sigh
http://saveie6.com/
I think Open Office is a wonderful gift to computing, but that one element makes my eyes bug out. I cannot stand having the page react with tectonic adjustment whenever I scroll down beyond a certain point. Maybe some people don't mind this, but it drives me bonkers. I spent a long time looking through an older version of OO, but was unable to find a toggle switch to turn off this feature. --Does the new version of OO allow one to type like a civilized human being who doesn't like his marbles rattled half a dozen times every page?
-FL
He meant _writing_ a 200 page doc
Where I'm studying mathematics, we write our postgrad reports, essays, assignments in LaTeX.
;-)
:D (though I somehow slipped in).
Word is inefficient for what I need to do. I reckon more university students should learnify it. Bibliographies, indices, TOCs... what more does one need?
I admit it hasn't got the easiest learning curve, but if you're at a postgraduate level, I assume you've got some brains
Couldn't stand the weather
The two biggest problems I have with OO is the poor spell checking (relative to say Word) and the clumsy envelope printing (definitely relative to Word which makes printing one off envelopes trivially easy). I am constantly hit by both of these... adding features won't help if the basic functionality is still lacking.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Besides, there's always LyX. Most of the power of LaTeX, much nicer learning curve.
There is a fundamental problem with OOo and making "an outline". In the same way that Java decided that the base of all objects is the "Object" object, OOo decided that the base of every document was "The Outline".
That is, the outline-ness of the _whole_ document essentially prevents "putting one or more outlines into a document". It is, to use a lose analogy, like trying to put a car into a car. In the old WordPerfect, which did this perfectly, the outline-ness was not part of the document and you could put one or more outlines into the document. This would be like putting one or more cars into a truck.
With the open document standard this has been largely codified into the entire family of the product.
Yea, it sucks.
Oddly enough you have largely the same problem with Word, but they "fake it" by putting the numbering contexts of the outline-ness several levels into the whole hierarchy. That is, they make "lists" instead of "outlines" and then they put a mode around it. It is a sucky approach we have grown used to with all its foibles.
You can fake it by hand in OOo by working out style sets and then saving a template document. But the whole tab-causes-change-of-style thing isn't a happiness.
So I agree. But the comparison should be OOo to WordPerfect when you talk about outlines.
Innocent people shouldn't be forced to pay for inferior software development.
--"Code Complete" Microsoft Press
I crashed Calc a few times trying to load large data sets from laboratory work. The parent poster was not making a joke. It's a really annoying failure in OOo Calc.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
Has anyone else noticed that Sun is now pushing it (if agreed) with the new update of the Java SDK for Windows?
Just saw this at work today when a little JDK update notice popped up in my computer's systray.
I actually think this was an interesting idea.
-- SouNerd.com
In OO Calc, type into any cell =10.1 - 10 - 0.1
Do you think you would get zero? No, you get -0.00000000000000036082.
Also, =850*77.1 should give you 1000000 like in Excel 2007, but it gives you 65535.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
I have got to wonder how people are able to learn the jargon relevant to their job. Mostly that is all these 'programming languages' are; jargon relevant to the job. That said, I'm about to teach my self LaTeX. (yes, you can now sit back and watch me crash and burn...)
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
Count the number of languages pulled in to build openoffice... I see C++, java, mono, python, and lua. No wonder it takes so much memory; I could have 4 VMs or interpreters running.
foo@bar:~$ sudo apt-get build-dep openoffice.org-writer
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting libicu36-dev instead of libicu-dev
The following NEW packages will be installed: ant antlr autoconf bison cli-common-dev comerr-dev cpp-4.2 dmake ecj ecj-gcj fastjar fdupes fftw3 fftw3-dev firefox-dev flex gappletviewer-4.2 gcc-4.2 gcj-4.2 gettext-kde gjdoc gperf hspell imagemagick java-gcj-compat java-gcj-compat-dev kdelibs-data kdelibs4-dev kdelibs4c2a kdesdk-scripts libacl1-dev libarchive-zip-perl libart-2.0-dev libarts1-dev libarts1c2a libaspell-dev libatk1.0-dev libattr1-dev libavahi-client-dev libavahi-common-dev libavahi-glib-dev libavahi-qt3-1 libavahi-qt3-dev libbcel-java libboost-dev libcairo2-dev libcupsys2-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev libdb4.5-dev libdbus-1-dev libdbus-glib-1-dev libecj-java libecj-java-gcj libflac-dev libfontconfig1-dev libgcj8-1-awt libgcj8-dev libgcj8-jar libgconf2-dev libgcrypt11-dev libgdiplus libglitz-glx1 libglitz-glx1-dev libglitz1 libglitz1-dev libgnomevfs2-dev libgnutls-dev libgnutlsxx13 libgomp1 libgpg-error-dev libgsf-1-dev libgstreamer-plugins-base0.10-dev libgstreamer0.10-dev libgtk2.0-dev libhsqldb-java libhunspell-dev libicu36-dev libidl-dev libidn11-dev libieee1284-3-dev libkadm55 libkrb5-dev libldap2-dev liblog4j1.2-java liblua50 liblua50-dev liblualib50 liblualib50-dev liblzo2-dev libmng-dev libmono-accessibility2.0-cil libmono-data-tds1.0-cil libmono-dev libmono-microsoft-build2.0-cil libmono-peapi1.0-cil libmono-peapi2.0-cil libmono-relaxng1.0-cil libmono-security1.0-cil libmono-sharpzip0.84-cil libmono-system-data1.0-cil libmono-system-runtime1.0-cil libmono-system-web1.0-cil libmono-winforms2.0-cil libmono1.0-cil libmx4j-java libneon26-dev libnetpbm10 libnspr4-dev libnss3-dev libodbcinstq1c2 libogg-dev libopencdk8-dev libopenexr-dev libopenexr2c2a liborbit2-dev libpam0g-dev libpango1.0-dev libpcre3-dev libpopt-dev libpq-dev libqt3-headers libqt3-mt libqt3-mt-dev libregexp-java libsane-dev libsasl2-dev libselinux1-dev libsepol1-dev libservlet2.4-java libsndfile1-dev libssl-dev libstartup-notification0-dev libsvg-dev libtasn1-3-dev libungif4g libusb-dev libvigraimpex-dev libvigraimpex2 libvorbis-dev libwpd-stream8c2a libwpd8-dev libwpg-dev libwps-dev libxaw-headers libxaw7-dev libxcomposite-dev libxcursor-dev libxdamage-dev libxfixes-dev libxft-dev libxi-dev libxinerama-dev libxkbfile-dev libxml-dom-perl libxml-perl libxml-regexp-perl libxmu-dev libxmu-headers libxpm-dev libxrandr-dev libxrender-dev libxslt1-dev libxt-java lua50 m4 mono-gmcs mono-mcs mono-utils netpbm portaudio19-dev python-dev python2.5-dev qt3-dev-tools translate-toolkit unixodbc-dev x11proto-composite-dev x11proto-damage-dev x11proto-fixes-dev x11proto-randr-dev x11proto-render-dev x11proto-xinerama-dev
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
The earlier poster who was commenting on the relative levels of polish/thinking through user needs between OOo and M$ was spot on.
2.3 *should* be the coolest thing since ice. Especially with a new chart tool and some cool extensions, this *should* be the version that goes mano-a-mano with Office 2007 and at least stays in the ring the full twelve rounds. As a long-time Open Source promoter running a business moving SMEs to open standards, I was really hoping to have some heavy artillery here.
All of the UI gripes are real. The complete lack of support for statistics in the charting tool is painful. The remaining clunkiness of the charting tool in comparison to what Microsoft ships is *very* painful. On both Linux and Windows, performance and responsiveness have taken definite hits since 1.1. Maybe the Debian and Ubuntu repository folks have the right idea, sticking with 2.2 and not "refreshing" to 2.3 in the repositories (as of 10/10).
Businesses like the idea of "free" as much as home users do - but if the amount of work that actually gets done per unit time takes a hit, that soon outweighs the cost of a more usable non-free package - even at Microsoft's robber-baron pricing. People will choose the devil they know over the saint they don't at least unless and until that "saint" can appeal to them on practical as well as philosophical grounds. OOo has been moving asymptotically close to that -- but they won't, or can't, close the usability/features/polish/perceived value gap. Until it does - or some other open/free alternative rises to present a better challenge to the Microsoft megalith (a much improved KOffice, perhaps?), Li ux and free software in general will continue to stop at the server-room door, not crossing over to the Promised Land of widespread desktop (office and home) use. The second- and third-order ramifications of that are just too depressing to think about this early in the morning.
I'm not going to defend the behavior, but quite frankly I think naming a file with the "txt" extension is clearly an indication that it is a ASCII non-formatted text file. The "csv" extension is explicitely for column-organized text data. Sometimes I think making things "easier" is in fact a way of making people lazier. I agree that Calc should have the smarts to figure it out, but by the same token there is a solution which fits with what essentially amounts to a standard. I have no idea why Microsoft would be saving spread-sheet or database table data in a file with a "txt" extension, unless it's the same sort of "feature" as top-posting in Usenet messages, put there to make interoperability with non-Microsoft software more difficult so people throw up their hands and just use Microsoft's software.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
All my reports are readable by Windows machines (you may have heard of PDF files).
.doc: bad idea. Professionally, anyway. I've worked in a few places that don't allow documents to be sent as Windows .doc files because of the possibility clients can turn tracking on and see previous changes including possibly sensitive data that has been "deleted". It's a good practice that students should follow too.
As for
Couldn't stand the weather
As for
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
Actually I don't think that was the really telling part of the original comment. The thing that bit me was that I had tab delimited text files that I wanted to open in Calc. To do this you have to import them as CSV files (doesn't the C stand for something???). There is no TSV option and the .txt option just opens the file in writer. I'd call this pretty unintuitive (it took me a while to figure it out!)
It can't be that hard to take account of which program was used to open a text file when deciding what to do with it. Heck, just give me an option dialog which says "Which OO.org program do you want to use to open this file" and I'd be happy.
I'm not denying it's a bug. OO.org ought to be bright enough to figure it out. I guess my only problem is this is exactly what the open source world so often has to do to interoperate with Microsoft's products; and that is to duplicate their buggy, quirky and standards and conventions-defying behavior.
CSVs also, so far as I can tell, do include tab and space-delimited files as well. The idea of the CSV is that it alerts the user (and the operating system/program) that the file is plain-text with columnar data.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I think you meant "Micro$oft". What is this, the 90s?