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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."
I just recently invested in The OpenOffice.org 2 Guidebook , which cost quite a bit. Is 3 going to have massive new UI changes that mean I have to learn how to use the program all over again?
and there will be plenty of folk who can be pessimistic about this, but I'm having trouble with doing that. It's free, being improved, and already works as good or better than MS office for more than 99.9% of the needs of myself and my family as well as most people I know. Those are not empirical numbers (just a good guess) but I remain impressed. What are the downsides to this? I'm not trolling, just wanting to know what they are.
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Am I the only one who thinks the Macro editor should have a button to comment or uncomment a selection of lines?
The things has a full fledged debugger with breakpoints and everything but they expect you to comment out code manually one line at a time?
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Finally us mac weirdos will be able to move away from NeoOffice and get to the sweet sweet sensation that is OOO. It was just way way too slow on Mac before because the support was fake.
Features are nice, of course, but how does it perform? How much memory does it take to run? Will it work well on relatively slow hardware, or do I need the latest and greatest to run it? Is it significantly slower than the last version, significantly faster, or about the same?
Everything is subjective.
I guess I'm one of the few that really really likes the office 2007 interface and really wish OO would adopt something similar. That's not enough to get me to switch (not an option anyway, running linux fulltime now). It's a little frustrating to see MS continually evolving their product in very visible ways, while OO has looked pretty much the same for 3 years now. If we want people to switch to OSS, we need to be visually superior to MS. All the back end superiorities of OO are not immediately obvious to many (free file format, multiplatform, powerful editable style system, etc), aside from the cost.
Whether your like or hate the office 2007 interface, at least MS is out there rethinking how people use applications, which tasks they need to access the quickest, etc. OO is sticking to the same old massive row of buttons. Koffice is doing more thinking along these lines, but personally I don't really like where they're going. But at least they're rethinking things.
agreed. but being able to display multiple pages side by side is a feature i've been waiting for (after i had to find out via multiple google-queries that it isn't possible yet). it'll be really nice to utilize that good ol' 21"-CRT when writing my papers!
Thanks, OOo! I left Microsoft Office in 2005 and never looked back.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
Personally, I'd love to be able to have a notes feature. I was just recently collaborating remotely on a business letter and we had to type our justification for changes directly into the document. Screwed up the formatting, to say the least, and wasn't that great for readability, either.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life
I had tons of stability issues. This has been solved so far as I can tell by completely removing the version of 2.3 available in the repositories and installing the one available directly from OOo. It's sad, I know. In the OOo forums people said that Ubuntu (and perhaps other distributions?) don't like to integrate bug updates into the version Ubuntu uses until they are tested as stable in Ubuntu. In the meantime, Ubuntu is then left with a very unstable release of 2.3. I installed directly from Openoffice and have had none of the problems I had previously.
Perhaps there is a reposity out there that pulls directly from OOo so I don't have to update the program manually? Anyone know?
If you're happy with your current system, then you are right, there are no compelling reasons for you to switch.
For the rest of us, linux users, mac or windows users who don't want to pay for MS Office, and for anyone who prefers their documents be stored in a truly open format that won't forcibly be obsoleted by the vendor in 12 months when they need another stock price bump,
we are glad that OO continues to improve and remain a viable set of office tools.
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I run linux on my desktop, and I spend a decent amount of time making charts, editing documents, and so forth. Unless it's an enormous hassle, I'd always rather boot into Windows to get my office work done, honestly because of three major issues:
:) )
1) Charts - 99% of the time when I'm using a spreadsheet, it's just to make a quick graph of some data. The MS office charting features are really simple to adjust after the fact, while the OOo one is like pulling teeth.
2) Performance - OOo feels less responsive than I'd like, and it takes a long-ass time to load. (Blame java?
3) Aesthetics - OOo still looks like it's stuck in the mid 90's. MS Office has nicer fonts by default.
Anyways, I'm not trying to flame or criticize. I'm just honestly presenting the reasons why I don't like OOo in the hopes of fostering some good discussion.
I was just over at the OpenOffice site browsing through some of their marketing materials to see if there was anything interesting. I came across a presentation that was given on September 19th at the OpenOffice 2007 Conference. The presentation was called "OpenOffice.org 3.0 and Beyond," and it walked through some of the most notable features that are expected to be released in the next big OpenOffice milestone. The presentation was actually pretty interesting to flip through, but the one thing that really caught my attention was their reference to including a Personal Information Manager (PIM). More specifically the presentation mentions bundling Thunderbird with their Office Suite, and refers to it as an "Outlook replacement." This is all assuming that Thunderbird recently losing two of it's main developers doesn't affect the decision, because I'm sure OpenOffice wants to ensure that Thunderbird will continue to progress before including it. A post that I made earlier this year regarding Thunderbird as an Outlook replacement really sparked some heated debates in the comments. People were saying that it will never happen, yet this is the direct goal of the new OpenOffice. They plan on including the Lightning add-on for Thunderbird so that in addition to email support, users will also be able to manage their schedule and appointments. http://cybernetnews.com/2007/10/13/openoffice-30-wants-to-compete-with-outlook/
I use OOo in Ubuntu, and I really, REALLY hope this new version to stop handling menu and dialog font spacing and anti-aliasing (or the lack thereof, as I prefer) by itself, and instead let Gnome or KDE handle this, as all other applications do. It's just ugly to have the fonts in everything looking perfectly in a certain way, except for OOo.
My 2nd hope is for OOo 3 to stop using Java for the wizards. Or for anything really. There's no point in having Java handle things behind the scenes on an otherwise compiled application. It just make things slow to load and slow to run.
And my 3rd hope is for OOo 3 to finally make tables creation and editing in Write as easy, free form and trouble free as it is in MS Word. Click a button, start "drawing" your table any way you like, without giving any consideration whatsoever to the number of rows and columns, dividing cells anywhere you want, merging cells in any way, moving cell boundaries left and right and up and down without any invisible wall preventing you (not even the table's boundaries): that's how it should be, and how it actually is in MS Word.
Do these 3 things and I'll never look back to MS Office.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
I am interested in the Standard Deviation, SEM, and a one- or two-tailed T-test. As a molecular immunologist, that's about all I need for 99% of my data analysis.. and I usually use a spreadsheet for it. Perhaps in other fields, more advanced applications are required, and perhaps for analyzing large sets of data from high-throughput screens I would need something far more sophisticated, but for now what I got suffices.
But if you can suggest a good data analysis application that runs on Linux, I will listen, and will surely try it.
I know it's too late to get it into OO.o 3.0, or Firefox 3.0, but what I'd really love to have on my desktop is for any app that shows a document of any datatype/mix (and most of them do), to be able to show two of those docs side by side (or above/below) in the same window. Without window widgets interfering between them. So I can really look at both side by side.
Comparing them, editing one against the other, using one as instructions to modify the other. In fact, if every window panel could slide open (side/side, or up/down) into two, each displaying a different doc (of the same type, or even of different types), that would really increase my productivity. Using one doc as a guide to another is an extremely common use case for most people. All the extra window dragging/resizing/aligning, every time a pair of docs are used, is a hassle of prohibitive annoyance.
What would really be great would be "generic windows" into which I could assign panels from arbitrary different external apps. So I could open a configured document that would spring up with a Firefox window already showing in the 2/3 left side of the main window, and an editable OO.o Writer document in the right 1/3. I could, for example, save "configmarks" setting some page (eg. instructions) as the default in the browser panel, and some template (eg. my letterhead/footer) in the Writer panel. I could have compound docs with different configmarks in each. And let the other GUI widgets for the parent apps get called when I use the compound doc's menus/toolbars, combined together.
I'd love to have quick access to arrangements of windows in stacks of tabs, each with a compound doc with Firefox, Evolution and Writer (or Calc, or any other GNOME app) panes in their usable panels, pointing to each of the actual docs I'm using right now.
GNOME (and KDE, too, with its own apps) could have the windowing-level messaging and composition features to do this. I'd love to stop "using Evolution while using Firefox" and instead just send messages while browsing/searching the Web. It also seems to me that such compound docs would be a lot easier to swing over to my mobile devices, which have such a small screen and clumsy manual controls. Is there a way to do this without rewriting all the apps to use "external panels"?
At the very least I'd like to keep a config that I open, which in turn opens several different independent apps, and just arranges their windows for that specific use. Including which doc gets opened in each, their arrangement on the screen. Is even that simple organization possible in the GNOME window manager? If not, then in KDE?
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make install -not war
This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):
If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots quickly...
Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.
Download a source tarball and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...
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With two products supporting Office 2007 files it should be easier for standards bodies to countenance adopting it.
Where I work, we are in the process of going to 2003. I am Betatesting right now. No, I am not kidding you. It does the job of what we need. (2000 is becoming a bit slow)
Also for our 100 sites (or so) we are testing OOo as an alternative to Office. The main tool we use is websites.n
I seriously have no idea why they do not use Linux. On 95% of our PC's it could be implemented right away with almost no user impact. The only one would be using FF instead of IE.
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Perhaps at one point. However at this point, in the company I am IT admin for, we use thunderbird quite widely as a Outlook(not express) replacement. If you take Thunderbird, and add in the lightning extension, provider extension, and use it in conjunction with Google Calendars, then it makes a very easy replacement for Outlook. We are split about even between outlook and thunderbird/lightning, which is mainly because some still prefer Outlook. Without exchange server and the such, the people using Thunderbird are sharing calendars and such alot easier then the ones using Outlook.
Outlook can sync up with google calendar as well now, but with the provider extension for Thunderbird you can specify which calendar to sync with Google. However in Outlook it syncs the entire default calendar, which has tended to accidently share private events with multiple people. I have no experience in regards to exchange server, so I'm not 100% sure how that compares to the Thunderbird + GCalendar experience.
"Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?"
On the flip side perhaps you should accept the line as the suggestion it is, and not get all offended someone offered a personal usability issue?
That said, no, it has nothing to do with it not being "intuitive to me". OOo's tables, or at least the user interface around them, simply have less features than MS Office ones. For people who just need a "n x m" table now and then that's surely not a problem, but the moment you're required to make a very complex table layouts to accommodate within millimeter of precision fields that will be printed on non-blank, pre-printed paper form, you have a really hard time doing so in OOo. The funny thing, though, is that you can import a document with a complex table from MS Office to OOo, and it works well. That's why I think the problem is in OOo's user interface, not on its internal table support.
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
While I agree that being able to define a range for error bars is nice, does anyone within the scientific community seriously use a spreadsheet for data analysis? In my experience the capabilities of Excel and the like are woefully inadequate for this purpose.
Yes, but one of the really awesome projects that is underway is R integration with Calc. It's very preliminary right now, but the goal is to be able to use R functions from inside Calc. Should be pretty sweet when it's ready.
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Insert -> Note only gives you a note marker; mouse-hovering is needed to read the content of the note. Marginal notes that are visible all the time would be most welcome -- one of the few features I have occasionally missed (though not often) from another popular office suite that I once used.
(Also welcome would be a fixing of the bug that requires me to press Alt twice before I can get keyboard-shortcut-access to the menus in Impress. Yes, I reported the bug ..... several years ago. Oh, and also the bug that prevents images from being inserted in a presentation if you insert it by keyboard shortcuts; that only works if I use the mouse.)