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An Early Look at OpenOffice.org 3.0
ahziem writes "With the final release 167 days away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features: view multiple pages in Writer, notes in the margin, Microsoft Office 2007 file format support, Solver in Calc, new visual theme in Calc, native tables in Impress, more columns in Calc, error bars in charts, performance improvements, real native Aqua Mac support, and more."
In less time than it took you to post that you could have gone to http://www.openoffice.org and seen for yourself that the website looks good and has a nice big new user & general info link to a useful page with tons of information.
This is great news. I've been using OOo for ages but lets face it before 2.0 it wasn't really up to scratch and even 2.0 has some pretty rough corners. I'm hoping that the release of 3.0 which sounds like it will have added all the missing features will also indicate the start of the "polishing" of this great product.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
Thunderbird is more like outlook express. You are searching for Evolution I think.
Extreme Programming - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Developers
I thought so too with 2.0 and unleashed it upon my non tech savvy friend. Turns out she does use some crazy word functionality for tracking edits. Different parts of a document are highlighted according to when and by whom they were eddied by. At least open office 2.0 didn't really support that, now she has a negative experience with free software. She'll be a little more skeptical the next time I tell here a free program will do everything she needs it to do. On the other hand my non tech savvy brother is using Open Office in med school exchanging a whole litany of MS office formatted files, with out a hitch. Well the 2007 format was a hitch, but the Novell version of Open office handles them perfectly.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
??? It already exists? OpenOffice Base has a dependency on Java, but otherwise it's available for all platforms. (The core database is HSQLDB.) As I recall, you can use either JDBC or ODBC drivers to connect to a remote database.
The data sources configured in OpenOffice Base can then be used in programs like Calc.
So... I'm not really sure what the issue is?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
You're a little confused.
Aqua is the set of widgets and such that make up the MacOS X user interface. It has evolved over the various versions of the OS, but it's still Aqua.
Quartz is the underlying PDF-based drawing technology that MacOS X uses to draw everything to the screen- including the Aqua UI widgets.
Referring to native Aqua is quite correct.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
There is a simple workaround , go to the Window menu and do 'New Window' then line them up next to each other
un-maximised , this fits nicely on a widescreen monitor . It will happily display the same document in two windows .
Will be good to have that properly integrated though.
Maybe it might be worth putting some logic in OOO to detect widescreen and adjust the layouts accordingly ,
seems a lot of programs are not designed with widescreen in mind.
Toodle-pip
Amias
[site]
ummm... Have you used the test versions? they need to do a lot.. NeoOffice has taken the OOO code base and made a better product... already supporting some things that OOO cant do until 3 is out. Unless OOO does something majorly different soon, I'll be happy to stay with NeoOffice, as its fast, stable, and well supported. And remeber to always up the memory usage by OOO and NeoOffice as well, unless your on a really old peice of junk computer, as it'll run much faster... even on OSX.
I wouldn't call it "crazy word functionality", it's a very commonly used and important facility.
The same thing is supported in Open Office Writer 2.0 as well, see Changes on the Edit menu. I *think* it's even reasonably compatible with the Word implementation, but don't make any more dubious claims to your friends based on my say so.
At least open office 2.0 didn't really support that...
It does, but not nearly as well as Word. For instance, I'm not sure how well it handles tracking edits by multiple people, and I do know that deleted text shows up in the original place, just strike through, which probably throws off the pagination. Word displays deleted text in the margin, like the new notes feature. I was excited when I read that because I expected OO Writer to follow suit, but according to the article, that's not yet. Still, the notes in the margin seems like the fist step there, so hopefully better track changes support is not far behind. Here is another issue with the track changes feature that I had forgotten about.
(This is a feature I use myself a fair amount, and have been disappointed with OO's support for it.)
I also have a couple votes for this improvement, which is to add something like Word's normal mode. Having the margins there I think is really obnoxious. Normal mode in Word will make it so that successive lines aren't a couple inches apart on the screen. Even Word's page view mode lets you collapse the top and bottom margins.
There aren't major issues with OO Writer, but at the same time, there are enough minor annoyances that I'll still take Word in a second.
(Calc vs. Excel is another matter... I go back and forth there. Excel has a bunch of annoyances too...)
Forking to the rescue! Here you go. Oxygenoffice has VBA support,as well as more templates,clip art,etc. Enjoy!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
The only reason I've ever bothered with .docx is when I was doing a research paper (at school, didn't have my Ubuntutop on me), and I discovered '07's References feature. Having Word handle all your citations for you is something a student can't easily pass up* (and naturally, saving to .doc strips the references).
*Yes, I know there's LyX, but I've yet to find a portable version that doesn't crash/burn on startup
"I think an etch-a-sketch with an ethernet port would beat IE7 in web standards compliance."
RTFA and ye shall receive:
http://katana.oooninja.com/w/openoffice.org/performance_improvements
A quick google search
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000252 shows how to implement pivot tables in OO2. http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/wednesday_186.pdf tells us that Pivot Table support will be improved in OO3
You should better go with a real statistical analysis package. Even for those kind of things in the long term it will be easier for you and they are more robust.
When I started my PhD I used Gnumeric for several statistical analysis however, after spending some time I had to learn to use a real statistical package. I went for R, which is very well known an accepted through the research community (mainly because it is the open version of S, and can be scrutinized). After using it for about six months I found it better to make even the most simple statistical analysis on it. Oh, and the charts really look professional. No matter what I did in Gnumeric (tried once in OpenOffice but its graphics capabilites simply suck \BBBbig Time), I could not obtain decent charts to add to a LaTex publication.
I would suggest rKward to use R. it is the best IDE (IMO, after trying several and trying and failing to setup several others).
One of the most important advantages of using a statistical package like R is that you can get it to output to standard output in a console. That way you can use whatever scripting language you know (I used GAWK, sed, and other bash niceties) to prepare your data to be included in whatever word processing/typsetting program you need. It really saves a lot of time.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I'm usually the first to encourage people to move beyond spreadsheets and use better tools for statistical analysis. That said, a spreadsheet is a really quick and easy way of doing simple data analysis, and it's perfectly fine to use it at such.
The problem comes in when people start trying to use spreadsheet applications for more complicated analysis or want to do more complicated graphics than a spreadsheet easily allows. If and when that time comes, it becomes really worthwhile to have at least one other tool in which to work. As the other reply suggested, R is a free (and excellent) implementation of the SPLUS language. The package is explicitly designed with statistical analysis and graphics in mind. In fact, a nice introduction to the language is Data Analysis and Graphics Using R - An Example-Based Approach by
John Maindonald and John Braun . You might be able to find the book at a university library before deciding whether to plunk down the money to buy it.
MATLAB is more of a general purpose language, which can be very useful for some fields and not as useful in others. It's definitely overkill to buy MATLAB to do basic statistical analysis, and it's probably not the best tool for the job unless you already know the language well. Most other commercial statistics packages (SAS, SPSS, Stata) have Linux versions, as this community has tended to be more server/unix-oriented historically.
To bring this back on topic, it's nice that OpenOffice.org is expanding its feature set in the statistical/graphing arena - I've personally found it quite lacking compared to Excel. That said, it's also important to know when you've moved beyond what a spreadsheet is relatively good at and find a package which can do the more complicated analysis. Spreadsheets and stats programs are both complements and substitutes in various ways.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
I don't want to get in any sort of an argument, but I just wanted to say that I think the NeoOffice guys deserve a little respect here. OOo went for years just not giving a damn about Mac users and meanwhile the NeoOffice project produced a very usable piece of software.
Yes, NeoOffice is still a bit slow. Last time I tried the alpha OOo Aqua port, it was pretty slow too. Hell, OpenOffice is a slow on Windows and Linux. MS Office on Mac is slow too, for that matter. It seems like only Apple has put in the work to make an office suite on OSX that performs well. But NeoOffice is quite an achievement for a small collection of developers, and it works well. I use it on a regular basis, and don't have any significant problems aside from a slow initial load.
You might want try a new aqua build http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua.html DEV300_m2, which has some major improvements compared to previous builds.
That works just fine in OpenOffice 2, under Insert->Note. I'm not sure how long it's been there - I don't use notes often - but I'm fairly certain it's been around for at least a few years.
...brand new, all over again.
The operating system's job is to get out of the way and run apps. Your OS should always be less demanding than your applications.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The usual reason, assumptions made when one can't see the person writing, with a dash of slashdot's collective view affecting that assumption. Also, the person did state he had MSOffice already, and just stated why he kept it. You responded by telling him to not complain, and use something else. It sounded strange, and seemed like you were trying to drive home the fact that he shouldn't talk badly about OO. But in any case my bad.
As long as a Java software converted to byte code is nothing more than interpreted code, and the VM an interpreter, it's slower than compiled code. Pretending it isn't makes no sense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
And your point is what? You seem to believe that Java is strictly interpreted when in truth that is almost never the case with a modern VM. And the link you just supplied makes a case which seems counter to your position on Java performance.
Java is often Just-in-time compiled at runtime by the Java Virtual machine. Hence, when Just-in-time compiled, its performance is: [12]
* lower than the performance of compiled languages as C or C++, but not significantly for most tasks,
The average performance of Java programs has increased a lot over time, and Java's speed is now comparable with C or C++. In some cases Java is significantly slower, in others, significantly faster[13]
No, Java isn't perfect, but blanket assertions that "Java is just plain slow" and other that that ilk, are just plain wrong. In a great many contexts, the performance of Java is more than sufficient. If something you see that uses Java is too slow, that just argues that it needs to be optimized, not that it can't be performant because it's Java.
// TODO: Insert Cool Sig
Have you ever looked inside a Pages or Numbers document package. It's almost self documenting. Images in folders accompanied by a gzipped xml file.
You can download the 3.0 (DEV300_m2) Aqua snapshot here: http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/aqua-Intel.html