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."

Comments

I'm sure it's just me

[zappepcs]

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.

Finally!

[Swizec]

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.

Performance?

[Aetuneo]

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?

Good, but the interface is still lagging

[nagashi]

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.

Re:Good, but the interface is still lagging

[TheLink]

"It's truly pathetic that MS Office 2k3 runs faster under vmware+xp than OO does natively in linux."

Yeah, but I've mentioned stuff like that before and I got modded troll for it.

Hopefully 3.0 will be faster, I use OOo on Linux at work and it takes _ages_ to start.

If they get it right, maybe a lot of companies might actually switch from MSO 2K3 to OOo instead of going to MSO 2007 - since switching to MSO 2007 will require massive retraining/relearning, perhaps more than even switching from MSO2K3 to OOo.

why I avoid OOo

[Aurisor]

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.

Re:Stability

[alexgieg]

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.

Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS

[TheMeuge]

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.

Major flaw in the build-process

[mi]

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):

• agg
• bash
• bitstream-vera
• bsh
• bison
• boost
• curl
• db42
• dmake
• expat2
• freetype
• icu
• jpeg
• firefox (or some other Mozilla-based browser)
• libmspack
• libsndfile
• libtextcat
• libwpd
• libxslt
• neon
• nss
• nspr
• python
• sane-backends
• STLport
• unixODBC
• unzip
• vigra
• xmlsec1
• xt
• zip
• zlib

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...

Re:Crap, is documentation out of date?

[MBGMorden]

So if the documentation says "Warning: Once a file is deleted from the recycle bin, it is impossible to recover" that shows that there is a flaw in the software? Actually, I'd call that a flaw in the documentation ;). Too many people believe that your everyday "Delete" on a computer is absolutely permanent, and as such few take the time to "securely delete" sensitive data (ie, by overwriting it several times before removing the file system entry, the latter of which is the only thing done by a regular delete).

Re:Stability

[alexgieg]

Sure, it sounds like a big deal to maintain a gui, but the time spent doing that may be shorter than debugging WM issues. Mozilla maintains their own gui for the same reason.

Except Mozilla obeys and follows the WM's anti-aliasing, kerning etc. commands.

Well, now that's just not going to happen considering it's Sun's project.

Sad, but true. Although I heard some time ago about some guys doing a Java-less fork. Unfortunately I don't remember the name.

While my Wife and I have no issues with tables, maybe it's just not intuitive for you. It happens all the time. Maybe shelling out the dough for an MSOffice license is what you should do rather than complain about something you got for free?

First, let's stop with this nonsense of thinking one cannot complain or request improvements to a piece of free software. Good free software projects accept and welcome suggestions and criticisms all the time. Why do you think Firefox (since we talked about Mozilla) has a "Report site as incompatible..." option under it's Help menu? Simple: because positive, concrete criticism is good, not bad. Had they followed this "go use the proprietary version" philosophy and that menu option would be a link to Microsoft's IE download page. Also, let's not forget that OOo isn't solely a free software package. It's also the core of Sun StarOffice package, from which they earn well deserved profits.

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.