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

New Feature

[LMacG]

"notes in the margin"? That must be for all the OO.o users named Fermat.

Re:New Feature

[amias]

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

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.

Re:I'm sure it's just me

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

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.

Re:I'm sure it's just me

[Ciarang]

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.

Re:I'm sure it's just me

[EvanED]

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...)

still need an outlook replacement

[OrochimaruVoldemort]

it just isn't a full office suite without one, not to say that thunderbird isn't bad or anything. hopefully, they will have one when 3 comes out for everyday use. I still would like to see a publisher replacement (for printouts and what not).

Re:still need an outlook replacement

[Yetihehe]

Thunderbird is more like outlook express. You are searching for Evolution I think.

Still no Comment/Uncomment button in Macro editor

[denis-The-menace]

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?

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.

Re:Finally!

[contrapunctus]

I use iWork but I'm worried that one day Apple will decide they don't want to keep making the software and then I have to convert (a lot of) files to another format.
So it's not that I don't like iWork (I love it actually), it's that I want my data in open format and it looks like odf is a good choice(?).

Re:Finally!

[nine-times]

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.

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

[The Mighty Buzzard]

Wait, you're actually advocating putting developers on bling rather than actually making the product better? Thinking like that is the main thing that's gotten Microsoft to lose as many customers to OO as it already has.

Me, I'd much rather they put their heads to making OO run faster with less memory. It's truly pathetic that MS Office 2k3 runs faster under vmware+xp than OO does natively in linux.

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.

Re:Openoffice.org needs a more friendly website

[vtscott]

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.

Hopefully...

[Shawn is an Asshole]

Hopefully that GUI is not the final version.

It'd be nice if they'd copy MS Office 2004 for OS X or Lotus Symphony rather than continue on with a bad copy of MS Office 2003. Notice the side bar? Floating on OS X (I prefer floating, btw), part of the window in Lotus Symphony. For me, at least, that is significantly more helpful than toolbars/menus or that irritating "ribbon".

It's also be awesome if Writer supported tabs and split editor like Eclipse. Those two features are one of the main reason I do everything I possibly can in Eclipse.

For the scientists: ERROR BARS

[TheMeuge]

I am happy that after something like 5 years of suffering, the scientists finally get what they really need - definable range for error bars. Cause really, having to use Gnumeric for analyzing data, because OO 2.X was missing such a vital function was pretty sad.

Kudos to the development team for implementing these changes, and allowing me to further propagate open source software within the academic community.

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.

Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS

[xtracto]

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.

Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS

[proxima]

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.

[...]
But if you can suggest a good data analysis application that runs on Linux, I will listen, and will surely try it.

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.

Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS

[psykocrime]

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.

Re:Database support ?

[AKAImBatman]

Any chance to get database support outside of Windows ?

??? 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?

Re:Aqua?

[caerwyn]

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.

Re:Office 2007 ... still good enough

[stoolpigeon]

Don't switch. If you are happy and have already ponied up for windows and office - have a great time. For those of us running other platforms and unwilling to get on the MS treadmill, this is good news. If for some reason you feel a need to move later, OOo will be there waiting.

Re:Office 2007 ... still good enough

[TheMeuge]

Sure, if you installed a pirated copy of Office 2007, on a pirated copy of Windows, and you're happy with the functionality of both, you won't see any advantage. But for those who do not want to go down that road, the options are to purchase a $100 copy of Windows and fork over another $150-300 for the Office suite (depending on pricing).

But some of us prefer Linux to Windows or MacOS, and many others have problems with Office 07. For us, this is big and exciting news.

I understand that as long as it works for you, you don't give a damn about anyone else, but if that's the case, please choose not to care a little further, and refrain from posting.

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:VBA

[hairyfeet]

Forking to the rescue! Here you go. Oxygenoffice has VBA support,as well as more templates,clip art,etc. Enjoy!

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.

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:Database support ?

[Albanach]

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

Hybrid PDFs: fully editable PDFs with embedded OO

[Chrisq]

The feature that is not yet available Hybrid PDFs: fully editable PDFs with embedded OpenDocument files (issue 65397) is a real killer. What it means is that you can attach a PDF to an email that anyone with normal PDF software can read. If the recipient has open office then they will be able to edit it too.

This will be really useful in that you can avoid having to distribute some files in "exported .doc format" so that it can be read by anyone and edited by other editors, or attaching two separate files.

Re:Stability

[trytoguess]

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?

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?

Writers need AUTOSAVE

[zymano]

autosave saves every word written instead of the current time based systems,which saves every few minutes.

Writers want this. Computers can't be trusted. There are a few times when power supplies fail or computers crash. You don't want to rewrite an important few paragraphs.

This is great feature which writers would warm to and the word would spread. Microsoft doesn't have it.

I don't know who to ask at the OO website.

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.

Re:Crap, is documentation out of date?

[Knuckles]

The real problem is with the people that use it like a robot and don't really know how to use the program at all.

And the people who know it so well that it's all reflexes. I know, I worked as a PowerPoint presentation designer for a few years, and everything I did then had begone to work automatic. How I would approach a complex slide (objects to use, grouping), how I would grab objects, menus, shortcuts, everything. PowerPoint 2007 wants to make me tear my hair out.

Re:Stability

[psykocrime]

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

Re:Stability

[psykocrime]

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.