OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Released

Sean0michael writes "OpenOffice.org has announced their 3.0 Beta is ready for testing. The new version includes some great enhancements, including MS Office 2007 import filters, an improved notes feature, a built-in Solver component, and an Aqua interface for Macs. The site has a complete list of Beta features. Download your beta release from their site."

Comments

Hang in there guys

[Anonymous Coward]

In a few more years OpenOffice.org may be almost as good as Microsoft Office.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

You got that backwards there, son. Even though I know you're either trolling or (more likely) astroturfing, I'm going to bite.

I can open a word document with OO. I cannot open an OO document with Word.
I can open a Word Perfect document with OO. I cannot open a WP document with Word.
OO has the cool cachet of the GPL, while Word is just another boring corporate moneymaker.
OO has fewer bugs and faster bug fixes.
OO costs nothing, while stupid people pay good cash for Word that could otherwise be spent on more important things like beer, games, and more beer.

The only thing Word has going for it is that the Uncyclopedia parodies Bill Gates (and even includes a real criminal justice system mug shot of him) but not Scott McNealy. I mean, if Uncyclopedia doesn't make fun of you your software must really suck, right?

Re:Hang in there guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you do need to give them a few years. After all, being able to match Microsoft's bloatware takes time.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Some poeple consider features to be more important than compatability.

Microsoft Word has many more (and more mature) features than OO.org and your post does not dispute this at all.

+4 "Informative" indeed.

Re:Hang in there guys

[compro01]

i agree with all but the WP one. word opens WP files just fine, usually.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Aliencow]

OO has fewer bugs and you're much less biased than I am.

Re:Hang in there guys

[JohnnyGTO]

Most of them are a jumbled up distraction.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean seriously. Other than being free, what does Open Office have that Office 2007 doesn't?

I get office 2007 for free, and it's absurdly better than the last OOo I tried. I write lab reports and the graphs sync with the data in the excell sheets automatically, and I can merge entire plots with a simple copy paste command. I can copy data from excell and paste it into word to make a table that looks clean, presentable, and more importantly, it auto syncs with excell if the data changes.

OOo has about the same functionality now that Office had 10 years ago.

I'll download OOo 3.0 and see what's changed. But I don't think it'll be compelling enough to make me switch from Office 07.

Re:Hang in there guys

[angrykeyboarder]

Despite my being a huge "fan" and user of Open Source software, I have to respectfully disagree with your opinion.

While OpenOoffice.org has many features that are more than enough for the average user (e.g. Me), Microsoft Office has more and many that many users can't do without.

And Microsoft Office 2007 (once you get used to the "ribbon") is even better than Office 2003, which is better than anything from OpenOffice.org.

Personally, I'm happy with OpenOffice.org in Linux but I'm also open-minded enough to know that it's inferior to Microsoft Office 2003/2007.

It's pretty much a copy of Microsoft Office 2000 (which is 9 years old).

You get what you pay for...

When was the last time you used Microsoft Office and what version was it?

Re:Hang in there guys

[hairyfeet]

And let us not forget the speed. While I have no qualms giving OO.o to my customers when they have me build them a new box, I would never recommend OO.o to a business that was using hardware older than 1 to 2 years. It is just too damned slow.

Compare OO.o,even the older 1.5,to say,Office 2K(best damned Office released IMHO) the speed will blow you away,even with the hidden Office service disabled. I personally think it is because Sun insists on tying OO.o together with the JRE. But not having tried tearing into the guts of OO.o I can't really tell for sure. All I know is on the 1.0-2.2Ghz 512Mb of RAM equiped machines I come across most often when working on SOHO computers OO.o is simply blown away by any version of Office. Of course,since most of them are running Win2k Pro(best damned Windows released IMHO) they can't run the pretty bloat that is Office 2K7. But I have tried OO.o 1.1-2.2 and have yet to find one that can match the speed and stability of Office 2K or 2K3.

That said, I am downloading OO.o 3 Beta as we speak and since I'm typing this on a 1.1Ghz with 512Mb running Win2K Pro(perfect for testing freeware before offering it to my customers) I'll be installing it and putting it through its paces as soon as the download completes. Maybe like Firefox 3 they've managed to trim some of the bloat,who knows. But IMHO OO.o on anything less than a 2.4Ghz with 1Gb of RAM is just too damned painful. But that is my 02c,YMMV.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Try to open a 5 MB specification document and you will actually know the difference.
Even a 2 MB doc, with another 100 Kb doc opened along with it is going to freeze every single time.

So, if we are looking for cheap word clone, yes, open office is the best one (I also use it), but one shouldn't be blind to the obvious negatives that it has.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Meorah]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/odf-converter

Re:Hang in there guys

[Deagol]

You forgot a big one: OO runs *natively* under more platforms than MS Office.

Re:Hang in there guys

[pavon]

I personally think it is because Sun insists on tying OO.o together with the JRE. You can disable the JRE: Tools > Options > Java > disable. Only a few components use it. Doing so does improve the start up time quite a bit, but I haven't seen any difference whatsoever with runtime performance, so I don't think the JRE is to blame there.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Machtyn]

Yes, but can OpenOffice run on ....
Er, can OpenOffice open Microsoft Works files?

Seriously, though. I try to recommend OpenOffice to people who come to me and ask. I then find out that they have 150 Microsoft Works documents that can only be read by two programs: MS Works Word and MS Office Word.

Microsoft should be forced to pay users for that POCrap, or go to jail for it, or put it away and allow system builders to put OOo on their computers alongside their 90-day trial of MS Office 20xx.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

Some poeple consider features to be more important than compatability

Yes, and almost all of them work for Microsoft.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Critical Facilities]

Do you really find that many people with Microsoft Works documents? I'm not saying you don't, it's just surprising, as most corporate environments seem to be totally tethered to MS Office. I couldn't tell you the last time I used Works, to be honest, I didn't realize it was still being developed/supported.

Re:Hang in there guys

[VGPowerlord]

As a regular user of OO that's required to send RTF files to people, I really wish OO's developers would fix RTF saving so it wouldn't omit random formatting close tags. Saving an RTF in OO then reopening it still in OO shouldn't end up with a document with completely different formatting, because it didn't save where the 18pt bold font ended/12pt normal font started.

P.S. Since when can Word not open WordPerfect documents? I don't have Word installed here, but the last version I used (2000) had importers for WP documents.

Re:Hang in there guys

[encoderer]

No, it's just that for most people compatibility no longer an issue.

I can't recall the last time I sent a Word/Excel doc to somebody who couldn't open it.

Nor can I recall having a WP file sent to me in the last decade or so. Besides, Word CAN open up WP docs saved in the WP5 or WP6 formats.

Now.. as a developer, I have done some pretty great things with Office. Not so much using Office as the platform (although everyones done a bit of that at some point), but moreso just automating it in C#/Visual C++ using its COM wrapper.

A good example is an MRP we wrote in C# that uses Excel as a reporting platform.

Many here just can't get past the idea that it's closed-source, a MSFT product, etc. Me? I just want to deliver the best software I can. We're a small company. Top Line growth is important. And I don't have the luxury of indulging personal preferences.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Computershack]

I can open a word document with OO. I cannot open an OO document with Word. I can open a Word Perfect document with OO. I cannot open a WP document with Word. OO has the cool cachet of the GPL, while Word is just another boring corporate moneymaker. OO has fewer bugs and faster bug fixes. OO costs nothing, while stupid people pay good cash for Word that could otherwise be spent on more important things like beer, games, and more beer. All of that is utterly irrelevent. EVERY BUSINESS CAN OPEN A WORD DOCUMENT and that's all that counts. The corporate market is the only one anyone is interested in because that's what makes them rich. That's why OOo has MS Office compatibility because it knows that without it, it's dead.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

OOo has about the same functionality now that Office had 10 years ago.

We have Word (and Word Perfect) at work, and I don't use anything in it I didn't use ten years ago.

At its best, an unused feature is bloat. At its worst it's a security risk.

If OO lacks a feature you need that Word has, you should buy Word. If not and you still buy Word IMO you're either not thinking clearly or you're spending someone else's money.

Re:Hang in there guys

[spasm]

Half my damn students.. I occasionally teach undergrads and every semester I make it clear that I will not accept papers in microsoft works format and every semester without fail a dozen students email me a final paper in works format. It came for free on their computer and by and large we're talking about a level of computer illiteracy where they can't actually tell the difference between works and regular office, let alone acquire a copy of either office or OO and install it..

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

While OpenOoffice.org has many features that are more than enough for the average user (e.g. Me), Microsoft Office has more and many that many users can't do without.

If Word has a feature you need (especially one you ABSOLUTELY need) that OO lacks, then you should get Word; it's a no-brainer.

You get what you pay for...

Not always! Often you pay far mor than for what you get. More expensive is not always better or higher quality. You usually pay for what you get, however.

When was the last time you used Microsoft Office and what version was it?

I had Excel and Access open at work today, probably 2000 or 2003 (not there right now).

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

Yes, you can convert an OO document to Word with an open source tool. But that's Open source's strength; Microsoft didn't write the tool. My point is that out of the box, Word is useless for opening an OO document.

Re:Hang in there guys

[MrHanky]

That runs counter to my own experience. OpenOffice feels sluggish even on fast computers, but not a lot slower on slow computers -- at least not as slow as you'd expect. I used it a lot last summer on a Pentium III 500 MHz with 512 MB RAM, and speed was never an issue. I've also used it on a 266 MHz laptop with 320 MB RAM, running Debian, and even that was acceptable in use (it did load slowly, though).

OpenOffice's sluggishness is mostly an issue of feeling. I don't think I've lost even a minute, in total, from using OpenOffice Writer instead of Word on slow computers. In fact, I might have saved a bit of time, due to OOo's far superior styles implementation.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

I'm sure I forgot way more than one big one.

Re:Hang in there guys

[trdrstv]

And let us not forget the speed. While I have no qualms giving OO.o to my customers when they have me build them a new box, I would never recommend OO.o to a business that was using hardware older than 1 to 2 years. It is just too damned slow.

Compare OO.o,even the older 1.5,to say,Office 2K(best damned Office released IMHO) the speed will blow you away,even with the hidden Office service disabled.

Though I agree that Open Office is damn bloated compared to MS Office in terms of Memory usage (the same spreadhseet takes over 100 megs of ram in OpenOffice, vs 15 megs in Excel isn't uncommon) I've learned to live with it, due to the cost/benefit of simply buying more Memory. RAM is damn cheap and has Far more utility, so I would rather buy 1 gig of (laptop) RAM for $50, than buy MS Office.

Re:Hang in there guys

[TheRaven64]

OOo has about the same functionality now that Office had 10 years ago. Ten years ago was Office 97, which a lot of people in industry I've talked to consider the first version of Office that was 'good enough.' Many of them have upgraded some or all of their machines because you can no longer buy Office 97 and it's no longer supported, but if OpenOffice really is as good as Office 97 (I haven't felt the need for an office suite for some years, so I can't accurately make this comparison) then that's probably something worth advertising. Most people would take something that's free but good enough over something that's better but $400.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Denyer]

I haven't tried it, but apparently this modification of OO.org handles Works:

http://go-oo.org/discover/#ms-works-import

Re:Hang in there guys

[dwiget001]

It has been as good and better than MSFT Office for some time now.

And, it just keeps getting better and better. I bet Bill and Steve just hate that, TOO BAD FOR THEM!

I use it almost constantly to unscrew screwed Office documents at work.

At home, it is my exclusive office suite.

Re:Hang in there guys

[EvanED]

It's pretty much a copy of Microsoft Office 2000 (which is 9 years old).

Not even that. Word 2000 had outline mode, normal mode, and (IIRC) non-sucky change tracking, all of which I use, and none of which OO has.

Re:Hang in there guys

[johannesg]

Wait a minute there, what are you counting for speed exactly?

I will agree that OpenOffice takes comparatively long to *load*. However, that time is spent only once per day; it will typically remain in memory for the rest of the working day (if you are one of those quaint people that actually turn their PC off before going home - otherwise it can remain in memory indefinitely!). So that cost isn't all that important.

Where it counts is what you do with it, and in my experience, editing is as fast as MS Office, and scrolling through a document, or printing it, or turning it into a PDF, is typically far faster than with Word.

Re:Hang in there guys

[PitaBred]

I get office 2007 for free, and it's absurdly better than the last OOo I tried. No, you don't. Somewhere along the line, you pay for it. Your company does, your school (and therefore tuition does), your MSDN subscription does. If it is free, you're in a developing country where Microsoft doesn't have an overly strong presence yet, or you pirated it.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Steve J 83]

I regularly get Word files (usually containing 3 lines of plain text) that won't open on a number of computers I have, where I didn't feel like spending hundreds of bucks for Office.

Re:Hang in there guys

[hairyfeet]

The problem with simply buying more RAM(which I always tell customers to do) is that a great majority of the 1999-2003 boxes I've come acroos simply won't take more than 1Gb of RAM,in fact most pre-2003 machines I've run into won't take more than 512Mb. Which is one of the reasons I picked up the circa 2000 HP Pavilion(knuckle buster from hell) that I'm typing this on when the owner wanted to trade it in at the last shop I worked at. Since it is a 1.1Ghz Celeron topped out at 512Mb of RAM running Win2K Pro it is a perfect test bed for me to try freeware that I'll offer to my customers. I've found that for many SOHO shops a 1.1Ghz running Win2K Pro on 512Mb of RAM is perfect for the email,receipt printing,bookkeeping duties that most of the older machines in a small shop end up doing. I've been running this machine for nearly 8 years and have never wanted bigger for my Internet usage. While I have my 3Ghz 2Gb of RAM gamer multimedia rig for the Internet the old HP just keeps on humming.

And for the above poster running Debian? While I fully agree when it comes to Open Office on Linux that it runs beautifully on older hardware,it just doesn't run as well in Windows. And since most of the SOHO shops I deal with have Office 97 or 2K it isn't costing them anything to stick with what they have. That said,I run Office 2K through Crossover 6 on my Xandros Business Pro 4 laptop and it STILL runs rings around Open Office,even though Office is running native compared to MS Office running on an abstraction layer. I don't know if the code has just gotten too big and bloated or if what I have read over the years on the forums is true and Open Office had fundamental bugs in it when it was originally purchased by Sun.

And while I doubt we'd ever see Sun do this,IMHO if they really want Open Office to be a MS Office "killer" then they need to take each individual component(writer,calc,etc) and one at a time rebuild them from the ground up for performance,stability, and integrative ease of use. If they were to do that I have no doubt with the way MSFT keeps getting more and more bloated with their products that OO.o 4 could run rings around MS Office in every category.

And just for the record when a SOHO has me build them a new machine I install OO.o right along with antivirus and Firefox. For me it has become a standard install. But on older machines it is just way too damned slow even with JRE disabled for me to recommend.But that is my 02c,YMMV.

Re:Hang in there guys

[growse]

Microsoft Word Viewer - it's free.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Just Some Guy]

Many here just can't get past the idea that it's closed-source, a MSFT product, etc. Me? I just want to deliver the best software I can. We're a small company. Top Line growth is important. And I don't have the luxury of indulging personal preferences.

Same here, which is why we avoid Microsoft lock-in like the plague it is. Do you have the luxury of watching your hard work vaporize because the next version of Word drops some of the functions you use, and the current version won't run on Windows 7? Maybe you'll get lucky and neither of those will happen. A lot of us in IT aren't so lucky, though, and have watched the rug get pulled out from under us on key projects.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Spy der Mann]

yes, but what happens when suddenly the Word Viewer stops working for some obscure new Microsoft Word format? Microsoft has been known to simply stop supporting certain formats. Last year it dropped DBF support for Microsoft Excel.

Embrace, Extend, Exterminate.

Re:Hang in there guys

[xtracto]

OO has the cool cachet of the GPL, while Word is just another boring corporate moneymaker.

It is simpler than that.

If I send someone an ODF file and they tell me "I can not read this file, what program do I need?" I just need to send them a link to openoffice.org and they can download and install the software in any platform.

Whereas, if I send someone a document in .docx adn they tell me the same, I have to tell them to buy a US$100.00 software (unless they only need to read it).

Re:Hang in there guys

[xtracto]

I think the problem is not the Java issue, but that when you run OpenOffice it loads a lot of crap that you do not use (that is why Word is separated from PowerPoint and from Excel).

Word open faster than OpenOffice even using Wine. That is quite ridiculous.

The problem (AFAIK) is that OpenOffice code is a horrible deformed beast.

Re:Hang in there guys

[hairyfeet]

Well, as I said I work mainly with SOHO style Mom&Pop shops. And most are running 1.1-2.2Ghz machines with 512Mb of RAM. With those kinds of specs one doesn't leave ANY Office running 24/7(I don't know if Open Office does this,but most know MS Office 97-2K3 can suck up all the RAM and crash if left on too long,so most don't). Maybe if I describe a typical setup it'll make more sense,so I'll use the local appliance repair shop as an example.

The machine used out on the floor is a typical 1.4Ghz Dell with Win2K Pro and 512Mb of RAM. They have one IE6 window open that connects to the credit check app given to them by DirectTV. They have a VB6 app(cooked up by yours truly) that stores names,address,and billing info for record keeping and printing receipts on repair work. And finally they have Firefox setup so the secretary can surf on her break along with a list of parts houses stored in the bookmarks for when a customer brings in some off brand for which they don't have replacement parts for. So in this case(and most of the places I end up working for) Office is launched several times a day when the secretary needs to whip off a letter to be sent to a customer. Since the little VB6 app I wrote them has a slot for birthdays they'll open up a pre-made "thank your for your patronage and happy birthday!" letter and customize it,or they use it for correspondence with other companies,etc. On an older machine like this it just wouldn't be smart to leave it open all day since writing letters isn't really a core part of their business.

That said,I just put Open Office 3 through its paces with a test letter I use for such purposes that has text,graphics,TOC and formatting and I was nicely surprised. While it still took longer to load than Office 2K,it wasn't enough of a difference to be irritating. And while it used more RAM for the same document(78Mb VS 62Mb) it actually used less than MS Office on a blank sheet(46 to 53Mb). So I would say that when Open Office 3 comes out of Beta I will be recommending it to those who have an older computer but no copy of Office. I will also be recommending it to those that want a little more modern office suite without having to learn that stupid ribbon as the new Open Office looks surprisingly like MS Office 2K3, which is what the vast majority of my customers seems to prefer in a layout. I'd say with the better performance along with the more modern UI that Open Office has really turned it up a notch and given us a valuable tool for those of us that don't want to get stuck on the MS Office upgrade treadmill. Bravo and job well done,Sun and Open Office developers!

Re:Hang in there guys

[xSauronx]

if thats the only requirement you have, thats slack. for one of my classes the instructor would ONLY accept docx documents for papers. my database intro class is ENTIRELY access 2007 ditto for word processing and spreadsheets. I got office 2007 as a student for 60 bucks, because its basically required. ive had to use it so much at the end of this semester, in fact, that i barely boot into linux anymore, because i just had to reboot to do my school work :( i get 2 weeks off from school, 2 weeks where i wont have to dual-boot, then i have to start the aforementioned Access class, and intro to programming, which will undoubtedly require me to program something for Windows

Re:Hang in there guys

[xSauronx]

downloading an entire office suite is a god damn hassle when someone just wants to read a document. i tried sending papers to friends so they could proofread it for me and help me out (im a lousy writer), and nobody wanted to be hassled to download an entire office suite, then install something, just to read it. it was *far* easier to save the document as .doc and just be done with it.

dont get me wrong. id prefer openoffice. id prefer if Word, etc could open ODF documents, itd be nice, but right now its a pain in the ass sometimes. as i mentioned in a previous post, i *have* to use office 2007 for school. it bugs the hell out of me, but then again, office is used everywhere :(

OO is good for plenty. my sister got a job writing some copy for a local newspaper, and her word trial was up....OO works for her, as long as she saves to .doc so the editor can read her submissions.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Z34107]

Perfectly good TINSTAAFL point, but another way is developer's conferences.

Microsoft gives out a lot of free stuff - I got my copy of Visual Studio 2005 and Office 2007 from these, along with the first (non-public) Internet Explorer 7 beta.

They really believe that having developers (and therefore software) on your platform is important. Software packages are probably the only thing keeping people from switching to a Ubuntu-style distro in droves.

Re:Hang in there guys

[cecil_turtle]

Unless I read incorrectly there was no prior point to dispute... but if you'd like to iterate said features then we could maybe have a discussion about them, as the inverse is true. The GP post wasn't meant to be a complete list of the ways OOo is better than MSO.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Randall311]

This is very true. OOo hangs horribly on very large documents like project specifications that are typically > 5M. I am all for open source, and I am not a Microsoft sympathizer. That being said, Microsoft did at least one good thing in it's 33 year existence, and that is MS Word. MS Word really is hands down the best word processor in existence today. I use many of the features in it that people here would consider "bloat" too. Tracking changes is amazing and works wonders for productivity, and their new equation editor in 2007 is a welcomed improvement. If you haven't tried the new ribbon user interface in 2007 you don't know what you're missing! It takes a few days to get the hang of it, but once you do, it's another big boost for productivity.

This is not a flame post and I'm not bashing on OOo at all. OOo puts up a valiant effort that they should be commended for, but at the end of the day Microsoft actually got it right this time.

Re:Hang in there guys

[MojoStan]

Yes, you can convert an OO document to Word with an open source tool. But that's Open source's strength; Microsoft didn't write the tool. Actually, Microsoft did write the tool. They released the tool as open source and they still sponsor the project.

• Microsoft Expands Document Interoperability
  • "Expanding on its customer-focused commitment to interoperability, Microsoft Corp. today announced the creation of the Open XML Translator project. The project, developed with partners, will create tools to build a technical bridge between the Microsoft® Office Open XML Formats and the OpenDocument Format (ODF)."

From the "Contributors" section of the project's "About" page:

• Microsoft (Funding, Architectural & Technical Guidance and Project co-coordination)

Re:Hang in there guys

[Lord Maud'Dib]

Word open faster than OpenOffice even using Wine. That is quite ridiculous. Why is this ridiculous? Wine executes the binaries directly and just maps the calls to system equivalents.

The problem (AFAIK) is that OpenOffice code is a horrible deformed beast. OpenOffice source code is openly available so why not contribute and clean it up yourself? Oh, that's right, you're safely hidden behind your keyboard where snarky remarks can easily be made and are mostly expected.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sgtrock]

Time to change schools to a place that knows how to teach you to understand computers, not just how to be a button pusher.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sdnoob]

and most of them sit there unused...

the majority of ms office users could easily get by with either openoffice or abiword/gnumeric. basic typed documents and simple spreadsheets are the most common types of documents and many users simply do not do anything more "involved" than that, ever, with ms office.

the only reason we have ms office (or windows, for that matter) in our office is because we support users and companies that buy them, and the most common reason they give us as to why they did is simply "because everybody else has them", NOT because they NEEDED them.

we promote and support open source solutions wherever possible. we live and work in a poor, rural part of the US and not everybody has money to burn on things they don't truly NEED. saving a couple hundred bucks or more by skipping ms office and maybe windows, too, is one way a lot of people can save some cash (so they can afford other things like food, electricity and fuel; which are all steadily rising in cost).

so what if the open source product is missing feature XYZ; how many people actually use feature XYZ and is it really crucial to have in the first place? is it worth spending $$$ just to have it? is there another open source product that'll work better? or can you simply do what you need to do a different way and save the money? the beauty of open source projects is that if people do want and need feature XYZ, it stands a chance of being added.. or if you're so inclined, you can add it yourself. how often do big, greedy corporations actually listen to their consumers instead of the ka-ching their money makes when they blindly hand it over?

Re:Hang in there guys

[turing_m]

There are a few other things you can do as well.

http://www.zolved.com/synapse/view_content/28209/How_to_make_OpenOffice_run_faster_in_Ubuntu

Re:Hang in there guys

[Crayon Kid]

Microsoft Word has many more (and more mature) features than OO.org

I beg to differ:
http://www.linux.com/feature/118986

And since we're on the topic, let's also see Impress vs Powerpoint and Calc vs Excel:
http://www.linux.com/feature/119546
http://www.linux.com/feature/119513

Conclusion: evenly matched.

Re:Hang in there guys

[level_headed_midwest]

I routinely work with documents well in excess of that size (usually slideshows with 30-100 slides and 30-70 MB) and the last several builds of OOo haven't given me nearly as much trouble as MS Office XP/2003 did. OOo 2.1 and earlier did sometimes have a bit of trouble locking up with multiple big documents open, but not anymore. The 64-bit Linux builds run especially nicely and they're pretty snappy as well, even on my 1.06 GHz (C2D ULV) system. I also do work with some pretty big spreadsheets (10k rows X dozens of columns) and OOo 2.2+ has been more stable than MS Office as well, the 64-bit Linux builds particularly.

OOo also starts up instantly if you are willing to part with 30 MB or so of RAM and use the quickstarter, otherwise it's a 2-3 second load the first time you open the app after you power on your machine and then almost instantly after that.

Re:Hang in there guys

[level_headed_midwest]

OOo also has the ability to export to PDF, which is something I use very frequently. A PDF is even better at preserving original formatting than using Office 2007 to send somebody else running Office 2007 a .docx file as they may not have the font you used or have different printer metrics adjusting their margins. Very rarely will somebody have to edit something, so PDFs work very well. If they need to edit the file, I usually tell them to edit the PDF as most people with Office also pay a bunch of money for Adobe Acrobat or then I will send them a .doc file along with the PDF, noting that the PDF is what the original was supposed to look like and any mangling of the .doc is their computer's doing.

Re:Hang in there guys

[JohnFluxx]

Btw you can control openoffice the same way through it's java and c++ interfaces.

Re:Hang in there guys

[cyborch]

But it requires Windows, which isn't free...

Re:Hang in there guys

[DeanOh]

Ditto with my students in 100 introductory computer informations systems class I teach.

I deliver the same message about Works documents ("don't send 'em") and OpenOffice ("don't spend $ on Office until you really need to...and then use the school's academic pricing to get a full suite for less than $100").

Invariably a handful will deliver the .wps format. Even after the joys of .rtf and OpenOffice have been illustrated (along with the evils of OEM bloatware).

Invariably, during the second or third week of class, somebody will announce they've purchased the discounted "student version" at their favorite big box store (Word, Excel and PowerPoint only) for $140; had they paid attention and used the school's license, for $50 less they could have had the full Professional version. Even if they didn't need the Outlook, Access and Publisher apps, they certainly could have used the extra $50 back in their pocket.

I also give them the option to review the OpenOffice user experience and compare its functionality with Office as a term paper equivalent; there are few takers for this...

Re:Hang in there guys

[aussie_a]

Even if Office 2007 is better, are the extra features worth $110 (assuming you don't need ALL of the new features) or $400 if you actually do need all the new features? I know it isn't for me, and I'd love to know just how many people here on slashdot do actually need those extra $400 worth of features.

Re:Hang in there guys

[richlv]

yes, and people place things on page with spaces (or the advanced ones, with tabs).
yes, and people mix outline numbering, paragraph numbering and manual numbering throughout a long document.
yes, and people insert automated table of contents only to edit it manually later, thus rendering it non-updateable ever.
yes, and people set paragraph style to heading, then manually format it into a normal paragraph look-alike.
yes, and people have no idea what non-breaking space is, so they write date together with the month or initial together with the surname to prevent them from appearing on different lines.

for 99% of msoffice users, kword or abiword would be an overkill, not to talk about openoffice.org (or try to talk about what features oo.org has that msword doesn't).
the knowledge general population has about using "basic" office software, the documents that result from this - that's a huge mess.
so touting feature count (which is debatable on itself) at this point just sounds a bit silly :)

sorry about the rant, just 10 minutes ago i had a prolonged conversation with a colleague about this very same topic, so i had just recounted most of the usual abuses :)

Re:Hang in there guys

[gevantry]

I use NeoOffice, which is actually OO.org in a different wrapper, and I've noticed that it seems to have as many features as MS Officeâ"at least, as many of the features as any human is bound to use in a lifetime. What are mature features? You mean they have age lines?

Re:Hang in there guys

[Fred_A]

You got that backwards there, son. Even though I know you're either trolling or (more likely) astroturfing, I'm going to bite. And most importantly...

Runs on my platform :

- Microsoft Word No
- OpenOffice.org Yes

Case closed.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Whitemice]

I've read about this. Supposedly you can also control OOo from .NET (C#). But I've seen a total of one trivial example and nothing else.

Controlling M$-Office is easy and *VERY* well documented. The only thing I've really seen for OOo concerns Java developers and is an enormous tome of API docs (API docs seem to be considered "documentation" in Java land). I'd really like to use OOo in my apps but there just isn't much information readily available.

If there is documentation, articles, and examples I'd seriously like pointers to them (substantive ones - not "Hello World" noise).

Re:Hang in there guys

[the plant doctor]

That I definitely have to agree with since I do a lot of collaborating on manuscripts.

Sadly for me OOo is definitely behind in that area since I prefer Writer to Word for the styles implementation.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, but what happens when suddenly the Word Viewer stops working for some obscure new Microsoft Word format? They'll release a new one. They have for every version of Office so far.

They've even released a 2007-format plugin for 2003 and built a PDF exporter into Word 2007. They make it easy for you to make documents other people can read.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

i tried sending papers to friends so they could proofread it for me and help me out (im a lousy writer), and nobody wanted to be hassled to download an entire office suite, then install something, just to read it.

If it's just proofreading, then why not use plain vanilla ascii text? Why do you need fonts and page setup just for proofreading?

Re:Hang in there guys

[Just Some Guy]

I would never recommend OO.o to a business that was using hardware older than 1 to 2 years. It is just too damned slow.

I'm running Kubuntu 8.04 on a 4 year old Dell Dimension with a gig of RAM. I hadn't opened OO.o since my last reboot (from when I upgraded from 7.10), so none of it was already loaded.

On this older PC, the initial load of OO.o Writer took 5 seconds by my wristwatch. Subsequent loads took about 3 seconds. That should be fast enough for anyone, except maybe for people who compulsively close every application that they haven't used in the last 30 seconds.

Once loaded, it seems to sit and wait for me to type something about as quickly as any other program.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Just Some Guy]

my database intro class is ENTIRELY access 2007

That shouldn't have taken more than a few minutes:

"Access, I'd like you to meet my friend, Database. Database, this is Access. You two have nothing in common, but maybe you'll find something to talk about anyway.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

I stand corrected.

Re:Hang in there guys

[encoderer]

"Same here, which is why we avoid Microsoft lock-in like the plague it is"

Plague? Oh, please. But if it was really "same here" for you -- if sales growth was important -- then you would be happy to embrace a ubiquitous business platform.

We use OSS tools, as well. Not much Java, but plenty of LAMPP.

"Do you have the luxury of watching your hard work vaporize because the next version of Word drops some of the functions you use, and the current version won't run on Windows 7"

Honestly, I've been doing this for an awfully long time and this has NEVER happened to me in any meaningful way.

I mean, were you just pulling the "drops some of the fucntions" line out of thin air? I've been doing VBA scripting and/or COM-based integration since Office 97 (when it was introduced, I think) and we still do maintenance and change requests on apps from that era.

I really doubt you're a dumb guy -- based on your UID alone I'd like to think you know what you're talking about -- but you do realize that backwards compatibility has been sacrosanct in Windows and office?

And that Windows 7 currently is nothing more than rumor, but if it does ship to the specifications talked about today, it will all be source compatible? And that it may, via a VM, be binary compatible?

Further, are you suggesting that Unix, Linux, and OSX will never break binary compatibility? (Especially considering OSX already has).

Honestly, the only platform on which I'd feel backwards compatibility is more assured than on Windows is on Mainframes/X-Series Minis.

And that's an entirely different beast.

Ya know.. I'm a fan of elegance. Elegant code. Elegant solutions. Windows is not elegant. My daughters and wife use macbooks. For non-work computing, I use one as well.

But having dogmatic "principles" in software development is an academic exercise that just has no place in a small company that wants to be successful. And really, it's a joke to me anyway. It makes about as much sense, to me, as arguing Ford versus Chevy. Or Coke versus Pepsi.

There's nothing wrong with specialization. Nothing wrong with a company specializing on fixing Chevy's or building solutions using only OSS software.

But if you reached that decision not based on your assessment of market needs and personal competence, but instead based on some missionary-like notion that you need to save the world from the "plague" that is Microsoft, then honestly, your business deserves to fail.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Just Some Guy]

Let me give you a real-life example involving Microsoft, even if it's one that I've used a few times before. The company I work for built depends heavily on a FoxPro program with a 15 year history. Although it wouldn't have been my first choice, it's served us well over the years.

But now it's dead. There will never be a version based on .NET. There will never be a FoxPro 10. It may or may not run well on Vista (although they have a community-supported side project called "Sedna" that hopes to cobble something together). Now we're scrambling to port our mission-critical application - the one that keeps revenue flowing - to something more future-proof. The current version still runs great, but there's no assurance whatsoever that we'll be able to use it a couple of years from now. VB6 legacy apps are in the same boat, but we're lucky enough to only have to deal with one deprecated technology at a time.

So, yeah, my warning wasn't hypothetical. Redmond giveth and Redmond taketh away, and there's a very real risk that the components of your livelihood will simply disappear. Ours did. Fortunately, we (and from the sounds of it, you) are nimble enough to shift directions and move on with something new. We'll pull through this unscathed. That doesn't mean the transition will be pleasant, though, and there's a lot of other stuff we'd rather be spending our development dollars on.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Frantactical Fruke]

Hmm. For a year or so, I used StarOffice 5.0 on a 60 MHz Pentium with 32 MB main memory and oodles of swap, where most of the program lived (on SuSE Linux, of course). Nothing has felt slow since then. You youngsters just have it too easy.

Re:Hang in there guys

[JohnFluxx]

Well given that Java is from Sun and that .NET is from Microsoft, it's hardly surprising that MS Office is mostly geared for .NET usage and Openoffice.org is mostly geared for Java usage.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Whitemice]

No, you can use M$-Office from Java just as well. I think the issue here is: documentation.

Re:Hang in there guys

[hairyfeet]

Um,you didn't really read my earlier post,did you? I said on anything over 512Mb it runs fine. I also said that the Linux Open Office is a VERY different beast from the Windows version and because of this or Linux having better memory management OO.o runs better there. But you see all of my business customers are running Windows,in fact most have no choice other than Windows due to a proprietary app required for doing their business that will only run on Windows.

That said,if you have a copy of MS Office(I haven't tried with 2K3 but I have with 97,XP and 2K) get the trial version of Crossover,or if you are good at the Wine voodoo,use it. Install MS Office. Then see when one starts quicker and uses less memory and CPU. For me MS Office 2K starts in half of the time of Open Office 2.2 and uses anywhere from 20-50% less memory depending on the function. The fact that Office 2K can function better even though it is going through an extra layer leads me to believe that what I read on the Staroffice forums years ago is true: that there were fundamental bugs in the code when Sun bought it which has never really gone away.

But having used OO.o Beta for a couple of days now I can honestly say it is a BIG step in the right direction. While it is still slower and uses more memory,it isn't nearly as bad as 2.2 is. And the more modern 2K3 layout will please many of my customers who believe that Office 2K3 is the most efficient when it comes to getting work done. So as soon as it comes out of beta I'll be adding it to my "handy dandy tools" cd that I carry with me to every job. But this is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Hang in there guys

[spasm]

Wow, and that's in CS - I teach sociology so at least my lot have some sort of excuse for computer illiteracy.

Re:Hang in there guys

[encoderer]

Just curious -- what's stopping you from running Fox Pro 9 until the bits crumble into sand?

For example, in the early part of this decade my partner and I were able to cut a small niche out for ourselves doing data-level integration w/ the Symantec ACT! program.

The reason I bring it up is that Act! uses a Fox Pro DB. We still get change and support requests and when we do it's a bit like taking a time warp because I just use all the same tools and all the same custom libraries that we wrote 7 years ago.

(VB6, coincidentally enough)

Anyway, every situation is different, I'm just curious why the lack of an upgrade path is a bad thing. It's not as if Microsoft has disabled FoxPro and is requiring a migration over to SQL Server Express or something?

Aqua

[Srsen]

Congratulations to the OOo team on (finally) getting an Aqua interface running on Mac OS X. This is a great leap forward for the project and I predict will grow the project significantly in both user base and contributors.

Re:Aqua

[Sunshinerat]

Anybody spotted the PPC version of this?
Looks like there is only an Intel version, no universal binary.

Re:Aqua

[david@ecsd.com]

Yeah, but how long is it going to take before some douche bag starts whining about how it doesn't "feel like a 'real' Mac application?" Probably in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . .

Re:Aqua

[dgb2n]

It is an accomplishment and I'll download it but I wonder how this compares to Neooffice.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just get the powerpc version of NeoOffice. It's not 3.0, but it works great.

Re:Aqua

[Farmer Tim]

It reminds me of Appleworks. Which is to say it feels like a Mac application, but not a very good one.

(Kidding. A brief fiddle about with it makes me very hopeful.)

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

User base, yes. Contributions, unlikely. The OS X community is renowned for its exclusive commitment to Apple. I can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux, for example.

Re:Aqua

[rubah]

will there be a need for neooffice after this? I thought their primary function was making OO.O mac-like.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because we don't insist on writing everything in horrible languages like C and C++ to hideous APIs like GTK. Makes it hard to port, see.

Re:Aqua

[dotancohen]

Not ported per se, but half of KDE looks like it was lifted from the Mac. Quicksilver has spawned a dozen clones.

Re:Aqua

[pattokun]

Unfortunately the OOo team have made a huge mistake regarding Mac usability. They have taken the default Mac OS X keyboard shortcut for switching between language input methods (Cmd-Space) and assigned to the non-breaking space character. Re-assigning the shortcut in the Keyboard preference pane didn't fix the problem either.

Looks like multilingual Mac users may want to wait for a later version.

Re:Aqua

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yeah, but how long is it going to take before some douche bag starts whining about how it doesn't "feel like a 'real' Mac application?" Probably in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . .

Ooooh! I want to be that douche bag!

Seriously, this is a great step forwards, but like most ports it is still seriously lacking in real functionality, especially when it comes to features that OS X offers, but other OS's do not. These include:

• - spell checking - OO.org claims to support OS X's built in spell checker, but as of the beta still flags words as misspelled that every other application knows are not because I added them. Training two, separate spell checkers to know all the technical terms I use daily are not misspellings is a hassle and is "not native." Hopefully this will be fixed by the time the final version ships.
• - system services - OO.org cannot use any OS X system services including the built in, universal grammar checker, language translation services, or any of the dozen or so services I use in MS Word, Pages, InDesign, TextEdit, mail.app, etc., etc.
• - responsiveness - whether it is because it is a port, or just because it is bloated, OO.org is still a dog for performance. I sometimes see visible lag when tying in word processing documents and it really, really hogs resources. MS Word is slow and a hog, but OO.org is really the only application I use regularly that is worse in that regard.
• - keyboard shortcuts - OO.org does not use the standardized keyboard shortcuts for all functions, but does use them for some. For example, copy and paste uses the standard (cmd-c, and cmd-v) but increasing the font size does not use the same (cmd+) that native apps do. Sticking with one set across all platforms makes sense as a standard. Using the standards on a platform makes sense. Going halfway in between, however, means I have to guess if a given feature will be like a "real Mac application" or like OO.org on Windows or something else entirely.

Please note. These don't mean OO.org sucks or the developers are lazy or anything else. It just means that there is a real usability and functionality concern when comparing a not quite polished port to a native application. One of the drawbacks of cross-platform applications (especially when they are not designed as cross-platform initially, but try to port to new platforms) is they tend to miss things and also tend to become a least common denominator when it comes to features. Windows and Linux don't have a universal grammar checker, so if you use OO.org on OS X (which does) it is ignored, despite being implemented by default in all native applications.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux, for example.

Anything originating on OS X is likely to be written to the Cocoa API, and much of that in Objective C. That combination makes it unlikely that the originator could expend the time and energy to port it. So if those projects haven't been ported to Linux it's only because Linux developers haven't done it.

On the other hand, things originally built using OS X, but not using OS X-specific features, such as Ruby on Rails, are everywhere.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, and a huge portion of OS X was lifted wholesale from FreeBSD, so what? Pointing out clones or copies of applications is not what I was asking.

So I'll ask again: Name a single significant open source application that originated on OS X and now runs on other platforms. You can't, because OS X is designed specifically to prevent cross-platform development, and the Apple development community likes it that way.

Your inability to honestly answer this question proves my point that Mac users will certainly enjoy downloading and using OpenOffice for free, but very very few will contribute anything back: because OS X developers simply don't care about other platforms. This is also proven by the existence of things like Darwin ports, where the contributions are all one way. Again, an absolutely MASSIVE use of open source by the Apple community, with almost nothing given back.

Of course, you all have the right to do this since it is open source, just don't expect the rest of us to give you guys any respect as true members of the community.

Re:Aqua

[MBGMorden]

That kinda kills the whole joy of the conversion to an Aqua interface on OOo though. The whole point of that was so that we could move on to the "official" version and stop using NeoOffice in the first place.

It makes no sense whatsoever for them to not make PPC binaries available. I have both Intel and PPC Macs, and the PPC machines are still perfectly good machines and are nowhere close to deserving of their treatment as outdated relics.

Re:Aqua

[pembo13]

I thought the complaint was that KDE looked like Windows?

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but that is glacial on a good day...

Re:Aqua

[ceoyoyo]

Bull. Developers who develop strictly for OS X perhaps don't port as much as they might. Developers who use Macs to port software to OS X, design software from the beginning to be cross platform, or work on existing cross platform projects contribute just like anybody on any other OS.

Apple themselves have done a lot of work on WebKit. I personally know some OS X developers who have done a LOT of work on VTK and ITK. Even in the closed source arena, XPlane is developed on a Mac but supports both Windows and Linux.

Now what kind of project is OO.org?

Re:Aqua

[vux984]

I thought the complaint was that KDE looked like Windows?

That's not really a conflict, because everyone says Windows gets all ITS inspiration from the Mac too. :)

Re:Aqua

[RobBebop]

Wow... great post. Sometimes I wonder if OSS could use forums like /. that have 100,000+ users as a means to decide on features and fixes...

I really hope that the OO.org guys get a chance to see your post because two of the complaints (spelling/grammar) seem like easy fixes that would benefit the Windows/Linux users too.

Your responsiveness complaint is one that echoes an old concern with OO.org, but I think that is even getting better.

Your last complaint, keyboard shortcuts, are an even more interesting concern. I would personally like to see configurable options with radio button options like (a) OS defaults, (b) OO.org Defaults, and (c) User defaults. Of course, the User defaults would be savable to a file so I can carry my settings with me when I am at a computer that I don't normally use.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

There *are* PPC builds so far:
http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/Dev_BEA300_m2/

Re:Aqua

[2nd Post!]

Um, how about KHTML, which started open source (like Open Office), got adopted by Apple into WebKit and (eventually) saw much use of contributions as well as adoption in terms of Nokia's web browser, QT using WebKit, rollbacks of code into KHTML, etc.

I mean, OpenOffice was a Linux exclusive app that moved to Mac, so you're quest for a OS-X only app that runs on Linux seems pointless.

Re:Aqua

[rbanffy]

Probably no.

Unless there is no OOo for PPC.

Re:Aqua

[kellyb9]

I'm not really sure what the grandparent post is getting at either. KDE is meant to look like a clone of the Windows environment. And IMHO it shouldn't really be considered a "complaint", it's more a practical consideration for new users.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

A web browser.

If you will allow next = mac.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

So you did file that in a bug report, right?

Re:Aqua

[icknay]

I guess it's just part of the geeky mindset that when seeing something complicated, the discussion turns immediately to its flaws.

But for just a second, I'd like to appreciate how *freaking awesome* it is that GPL app like Open Office exists. Sure it has problems, but it's also an incredibly hard space to work in. The Microsoft monopoly is based very much on the office formats, and the dedication of Sun and the Open Office team to build this complex thing is creating all sorts of freedom for the rest of us. Microsoft knows this, and that's why they expended so much effort trying to mess up the formats ... but it's not working, here we have a GPL tool that reads the newest Microsoft format.

It's pretty hard to function on the internet without some ability to deal with office documents. In fact, I suspect Open Office is creating more freedom and competition than Firefox. Writing a browser, strangely, is not *that* hard. I can think of ten or so browser projects, but only a few office suites.

Re:Aqua

[marcosdumay]

That is because you didn't check the "WindowsLookAndFeel" option :)

Re:Aqua

[MMC Monster]

Handbrake is one, but there is no UI frontend to the linux version. So I'm not sure if that really counts.

Re:Aqua

[Winckle]

The handbrake project.

http://handbrake.fr/

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because we don't insist on writing everything in horrible languages like C and C++ to hideous APIs like GTK. Makes it hard to port, see.

No, you insist on writing everything in horrible languages like Objective-C and AppleScript to hideous APIs like Cocoa and Quartz. Makes it hard to port Apple crap to other platforms, you know.

Unfortunately, Apple refuses to support nice languages, like Python, Smalltalk, or C#, or nice APIs, in order to keep the Macintosh platform separate and proprietary.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

User base, yes. Contributions, unlikely. The OS X community is renowned for its exclusive commitment to Apple. I can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux, for example. This makes Apple users sound so... French

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha, silly rabbit! Trix are for KIDS!

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Not ported per se, but half of KDE looks like it was lifted from the Mac.

BFD. Much of the Mac UI, not to mention the rest of OS X, didn't originate with Apple either. And the similarities are only superficial: KDE is skinnable.

Apple rarely comes up with anything original.

Quicksilver has spawned a dozen clones.

Again, BFD. Hotkey command input has been around for a long time, too.

Re:Aqua

[cp.tar]

I can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux, for example.

Um... Transmission?

It's only the best BitTorrent client I've ever used, and now it has become the default client in Ubuntu. Though AFAICT the Mac version is still superior.

Re:Aqua

[cleatsupkeep]

Did Transmission start out just for the Mac or did it start out cross platform? I can't find anything on their web page saying they started out Mac only, but I thought I heard it somewhere.

Re:Aqua

[spasm]

One of the March builds of 3.0.0 included a PPC version - OOo_3.0.0_080314_MacOSXPowerPC_install.dmg - I can't find it on OO's site any more, but it still seems to be available at http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.openoffice.org/extended/ooomisc/MacOSX/
and on some torrent trackers.

I've installed it alongside 2.4 - it's a lot slower than 2.4 (so much so that it's close to unusable on my 1.5 Ghz G4), but it has the lifesaving feature of being able to open .docx files, so it's worth the dual install from my point of view - I open them in 3.0 then save as odt or regular doc before working on them in 2.4. A glorified converter, but hey, it works.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately, Apple refuses to support nice languages, like Python

Damn, all these years and I never realised this was an April Fools joke gone horribly wrong. Shucks.

Re:Aqua

[nileshbansal]

thats the other half..
> I thought the complaint was that KDE looked like Windows?
>> but half of KDE looks like it was lifted from the Mac.

Re:Aqua

[mamer-retrogamer]

The official OpenOffice for Mac port will eventually replace NeoOffice, but not right away.

OOo/Aqua is Intel only, so PPC users have no choice other than NeoOffice.

Also OOo/Aqua is still lacking the "fit and finish" of NeoOffice. There are little things like: the window sizer widget being overlapped by UI elements; dialog backgrounds have Tiger-style pinstripes even in Leopard; floating toolbars have KDE-style window controls. You know, douche bag OS X user niggles. ;)

So while the "official" Mac port of OOo is getting there, NeoOffice is still has its place.

Re:Aqua

[TheRaven64]

If you write applications on OS X using Objective-C and Cocoa you can often port them to other platforms using GNUstep. If you use proprietary Apple technologies (Cocoa is not - it's an implementation of the OpenStep specification) like QuickTime then you will need to rewrite those parts. GNU GCC only got Objective-C++ support a couple of years ago, so applications using this were a problem. In Ãtoilé svn we have a partially-complete reimplementation of CoreGraphics too, if anyone is interested in working on it (in etoile/branches/Opal).

Re:Aqua

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

So you did file that in a bug report, right?

I filed the first two years ago. I haven't filed any in a while because they don't have a bug report feature built into the program and to file bugs requires you to register an account, (including your personal info) with Sun.

Re:Aqua

[TheRaven64]

Are you sure that is the default keyboard shortcut for switching between input methods? On every Mac I've used with 10.4 or higher it's the default shortcut for invoking Spotlight.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

seems as though this link is what you want. not sure if the version is in step with the Intel binary, though... downloading now...

Re:Aqua

[Weedlekin]

"you insist on writing everything in horrible languages like Objective-C and AppleScript to hideous APIs like Cocoa and Quartz. Makes it hard to port Apple crap to other platforms, you know."

It's actually fairly easy to write Cocoa apps that can be ported to Linux and the BSDs via GNUStep (it has a few extensions to Cocoa, but these can be installed on Macs without the rest of GNUStep). It doesn't support AppleScript, but Objective-C is part of GCC (which Apple themselves use), so there isn't any need to install extra compilers on Linux / BSD systems.

"Unfortunately, Apple refuses to support nice languages, like Python, Smalltalk, or C#"

Apple doesn't need to support everything itself. Here's a list of Cocoa bridges for all the languages you list, as well as various others you didn't mention:

http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?CocoaBridges

"or nice APIs, in order to keep the Macintosh platform separate and proprietary"

Apple support POSIX, X-Windows, and OpenGL (to name but three), none of which is proprietary, and as as GNUStep proves, there's nothing preventing third parties from writing Cocoa-compatible systems for other platforms. After all, why should Apple do all the work when Open Source supporters keep telling the rest os to write stuff for ourselves if there isn't a FOSS solution that does what we want?

Re:Aqua

[astrosmash]

Yeah, but how long is it going to take before some douche bag starts whining about how it doesn't "feel like a 'real' Mac application?"

It "feels" like Office '97 running on a Pentium 2/233. Are OS X users the only ones who should be unimpressed by that?

Re:Aqua

[je ne sais quoi]

Nah... NeoOffice still runs a large part of OOo code. Mostly the differences on the front end are in using native widgets instead of the OOo ones (why reinvent the wheel?). The irony here is that the guys doing NeoOffice tried to work with Sun to do this when they started but the people at Sun weren't cooperative. NeoOffice is running what OpenOffice.org should have done a long, long, long time ago and only now have decided this is necessary.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure but didn't Transmission start as OS X-only ?

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure they would appreciate if you reported your problems here:

http://qa.openoffice.org/

Re:Aqua

[dotancohen]

I thought the complaint was that KDE looked like Windows? When people are complaining about KDE, it looks like Windows. When people are complementing KDE, it looks like OS-X.

http://what-is-what.com/what_is/kde.html

Just this week was the first time I sat down to a Mac. They are rediculously expensive in Israel, and very uncommon. I opened the control center to configure Sticky Keys, and I could have sworn that I had opened Kcontrol, the KDE control center. Worse yet, Kcontrol has two interfaces, one that I like and one that I hate. This was the one that I hate.

Re:Aqua

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I filed the first two long ago. Sadly the site you list requires registration including handing your personal info over to Sun. You'd think they'd add a bug report feature to the program, especially for a beta.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

How about HandBrake?

Re:Aqua

[Ant P.]

So I'll ask again: Name a single significant open source application that originated on OS X and now runs on other platforms. Marathon.

Re:Aqua

[bencoder]

There's one that I've come across, the excellent OOLite. It's a 3D space shooting/trading game, a somewhat modernised elite, although very true to the original.

Then again, that's not exactly a significant application, but it is one example.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux, for example. Um, how about KHTML, which started open source (like Open Office), got adopted by Apple into WebKit and (eventually) saw much use of contributions as well as adoption in terms of Nokia's web browser, QT using WebKit, rollbacks of code into KHTML, etc. [Emphasis added to relevant parts of GP and P.]

Of course, KHTML's LGPL license required Apple to provide its changes/contributions to the source code. So in your example, Apple used an existing open source project and gave back its modifications (as required). How is this an informative reply to the GP?

Re:Aqua

[HalAtWork]

Personally I bought a Powerbook to use as a laptop simply for the hardware quality (and GarageBand, liked it after fooling around with it once, though RoseGarden is similar). I find myself using OSX, especially since the Airport Extreme is not supported by Ubuntu out of the box and rather than poking around I decided to try using OSX as an experiment to see how the interface could work for me*. However, I still like my open source applications, and have loaded Gimp, Inkscape, NeoOffice, Adium, Audacity, Firefox, and I really wish I could get K3B on there. Hopefully soon I will be able to with the multiplatform KDE effort. I don't really know anyone else with an Apple computer so I can't really say what everyone else is doing. Who knows, maybe there are others like me.

* One thing is I find myself using keyboard shortcuts a lot more. They aren't intuitive but OSX kinda forces you to memorize them to get out of the hassle of using drop-down menus. I'm used to just invoking the menu and quickly navigating to the option I need using mnemonics, because that's how I remember them from selecting them from a mouse in the first place, and somehow it just seems more natural for me. Keyboard shortcuts at least work the same across applications, and menu layout and mnemonic choices are probably more likely to vary.

Re:Aqua

[dbIII]

Why? They are mostly still stuck in the shareware culture. The NeoOffice home page illustrates this clearly - written by someone that has heard of open software but hasn't quite got the point.

Re:Aqua

[Whiney Mac Fanboy]

GrandParent: I can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux, for example.

You: Um, how about KHTML, which started open source [emph mine]

Do you know what originated means?

Re:Aqua

[that_itch_kid]

That was a beautiful, beautiful game.

Re:Aqua

[Bob The Cowboy]

Aside from the fact that the OP asked for examples of open source projects that started out on OSX and then went to other platforms which is absolutely not the case with KHTML (a KDE project)....

As I recall that KHTML debacle it went more like:

1) KDE produces and maintains KHTML.
2) Apple adopts KHTML for Safari's rendering engine and lags on submitting patches
3) KHTML Dev's get annoyed and make noise about Apple's lack of patches
4) Apple releases a gigantic (6MB) fscking diff with no changelog
5) Public makes noise about this (3 slashdot articles later...)
6) Apple eventually agrees to start playing nice and starts the joint project "WebKit"

Not the best way to contribute to an OSS project...

Bill

Re:Aqua

[WiseWeasel]

Specifically designed to offer an extensive set of frameworks and object-oriented C variant Obj-C language != designed to prevent cross-platform development. Does .Net specifically prevent cross-platform development? Just because you offer developers an advanced set of frameworks that only run on your own platform doesn't mean that you're necessarily trying to prevent interoperability, you could just be trying to attract developers with a productive environment. Mac developers don't HAVE to use Apple's frameworks; they could use Java, or strict C, or some other cross-platform language. It's because they're more productive, and they have access to more advanced features provided by the OS vendor, which helps them make better software more easily. If someone wants to make GNUstep usable and provide a set of compatible frameworks for Linux, no one is going to stop them, but it's going to be an awful lot of work to try to keep up with Apple.

Open source philosophy is not tied to any particular platform or programming language. There are thriving OS X GPL projects, such as Adium, and various other networking apps, and its community members likely don't give a rat's ass that some Linux devs aren't joining in. Other OS X devs are happy to contribute, and to use the code in their own open-source projects, and that community is no less valid than the one you choose to participate in. Obviously, it's not as fundamentally free as building on an open framework, since there is a dependence on closed source, but that's not to say that their work is any less important, or that they can't build a successful community around their work. I'm sure they won't be losing a lot of sleep from your lack of respect.

Think of it this way; even if you can't use ALL the code in GPL OS X projects, there is a relatively large userbase for that platform, and so there can potentially be more resources dedicated to developing for it, and so it's possible that significant code contributions to underlying libraries used by those projects are made possible by targetting the platform. You should be happy that people are leveraging your favorite libraries on other platforms, as that can only help make them more robust. Your comment seems awfully antisocial for someone so concerned with community...

Re:Aqua

[willy_me]

It makes no sense whatsoever for them to not make PPC binaries available.

It's a development version. Wait for the final version before complaining too much.

Re:Aqua

[david_thornley]

For those of you who want this in PPC:

1. I haven't looked, but I suspect the source code is available.

2. IIRC, every Macintosh with OSX has shipped with full development software. It isn't normally installed, but it's there. If you've lost the install disks and never installed Xcode, you can always download it from Apple.

3. So, you can always compile it yourself. There should be accomodation for compiling for Macs, and that should work for PPCs.

4. ???

5. Profit!

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun engineers in Germany claim that since Apple isn't shipping PPC Macs, there is no reason for them to make a PPC build.. It is up to the community to do Sun's dirty work making a PPC build.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

You're assuming code written by windows programmers in Sun is going to be "Mac like?"

Re:Aqua

[Whumpsnatz]

De nada. I'm fortunate in that my spelling is excellent, so I almost never use a spell checker. In fact, if I'm using Word on a new machine, the first thing I do is turn off the annoying spell checker and grammar checker underlining.

Keyboard shortcuts might be useful, but I typically only use them in mainframe emulation.

It may look clunky, but for now NeoOffice does everything I need.

Re:Aqua

[jhol13]

X-Windows Please. Just please.

There are limits to fanboyism and that one is far far far over it.

Jesus fucking christ, this is about OOo ported to Aqua as the X11 version was not good enough for Mac users.

The implication by GP ("can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux") still stands.

Re:Aqua

[level_headed_midwest]

1. OOo is OSS software and the code is available. I've compiled OOo from source before and it's certainly doable. You will need to grab GCC, a bunch of X11 libs, and a few cans of Mountain Dew to do the compile- the first two are to do the compile and the Dew is to drink while you're waiting for it to compile. I'd guess 2-3 hours or so on a dual-CPU dual-core G5, 4-6 hours on a single-CPU dual-core or a dual-CPU single-core G5, overnight on a single-CPU single-core G5 and a day or more on G4s and G3s. It takes my 2.2 GHz Athlon 64 X2 about 4-5 hours to compile OOo 2.x and 12-13 hours for my old 2.2 P4 if it is any help.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you link so frequently to what-is-what. I count 4 in recent posts. Yeah, it is your 'home page', but none of the links add to (common) knowledge of what-is-what to any real extent. Your links to "spam" are not germaine to the articles, e.g.

Re:Aqua

[Zoxed]

> Um, how about KHTML, which started open source (like Open Office) ...

FWIW OpenOffice.org started as the *proprietary* suite Staroffice, which was bought by Sun and open sourced.

Re:Aqua

[Weedlekin]

"There are limits to fanboyism and that one is far far far over it."

What did I write to indicate that I was a "fan boy"? If the best you can do to refute my points is write fuckwitted cliches, then why not try shutting up and saving some Internet bandwidth so your school friends have a little more available for pirating games, music, and superhero movies.

"Jesus fucking christ"

I stand in awe of your originality.

"this is about OOo ported to Aqua as the X11 version was not good enough for Mac users."

Which does not change the fact that _Apple support X11_ one whit or iota.

"The implication by GP"

I wasn't answering the GP, so what the GP said has no relevance whatsoever to my post.

Re:Aqua

[benwiggy]

What about Oolite? Started as Mac, ported to Linux and PC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oolite_(computer_game)

Re:Aqua

[gevantry]

I've been using Macs since 1984. Every time someone says of a Mac app that it doesn't "feel" like a Mac app, I wonder, WTF? What's a Mac app supposed to feel like?

There have been four or five major changes in the Mac OS. Every time the OS changes, the so-called "feel" changes. I've come to the conclusion that the "real feel" of a Mac app is whatever app I'm pointing at when I say "it feels like..."

NeoOffice feels like a Mac app.

Re:Aqua

[Fred_A]

I mean, OpenOffice was a Linux exclusive app that moved to Mac, so you're quest for a OS-X only app that runs on Linux seems pointless. OpenOffice was originally StarOffice, a German office suite that ran on Linux, Solaris (and maybe SunOS) and Windows. It was typically free for personal use and therefore quite popular.
After it got opened and bought by Sun (not necessarily in that order), some people worked on Mac OS ports. A native Mac OS version has been in the works for a while but required a rework of a number of modules.

I thought this kind of thing was well known by now...

Re:Aqua

[ta bu shi da yu]

Yes well, be sure you have enough diskspace. I remember compiling early versions of the software and it gobbled greater than 800MB of the my disk in temp storage.

One wonders why they have so much code in OOo when the Linux kernel takes up only a fraction of the space, and arguably does a whole lot more.

Re:Aqua

[domatic]

I don't quite get your dig on the NeoOffice guys. You can download and use NeoOffice without paying them a dime and nothing about the software is crippled. It IS true that in exchange for a small fee they'll grant access to binaries of their development versions (source for any version is free if you can stand the build process.....) but that is just a way for motivated users to fund development. The NeoOffice devs also do a good job of working with their own contributors.

I've also watched the disrespect those guys have had to endure getting bugfixes back upstream into OpenOffice. No, they "get" Open Source.

I'll agree that in general Mac users tend to be demanding, whiny, disrespectful, and "stuck in a shareware culture" but why the slam on the NeoOffice guys?

Re:Aqua

[Sunshinerat]

The problem is not that it can be compiled from the source, I get that...
The problem is that this is a Beta version. How Beta can you be for PPC Macs if you do not offer such a build (you would not receive any bug reports for the PPC macs). So, I get the impression that there will be no Mac PPC version when we go beyond Beta.

Re:Aqua

[2nd Post!]

Except WebKit was the fork from the start; it just wasn't open sourced until 2 years later.

Re:Aqua

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I've been using Macs since 1984. Every time someone says of a Mac app that it doesn't "feel" like a Mac app, I wonder, WTF? What's a Mac app supposed to feel like?

I consider an app to "feel native" if that is how you want to describe it, when it takes advantages of all the OS X features that programs built using the native tools do. That is to say, if I were to go to xcode a write a simple text editor in a few dozen lines, will the application under consideration be able to do all the same things as my bare bones text editor? Will it be able to use system services? Can I drag and drop it or run it from a flash drive without installation? Can it use the grammar checker on all the text fields? Can I use services I've installed without copying it into a native app and back? Does it use the default keyboard shortcuts for standard functions (from saving files to undoing the last action)? Are all the keyboard shortcuts used by the program ones that don't interfere with default OS X shortcuts?

There have been four or five major changes in the Mac OS. Every time the OS changes, the so-called "feel" changes.

Generally I think you can restrict it to the current generation OS at this point. OS 7 apps may have been native at the time, but that time has long since passed. I have a freeware application I installed on OS X 10.0. On OS X 10.5 it still works and still performs like a native application. It can still use the native spellchecker in OS X, whereas OO.org cannot. In fact, it can still do all the things I listed.

NeoOffice feels like a Mac app.

NeoOffice and the beta of OpenOffice both fail on pretty much all the points I listed. That isn't to say they suck, or are not worth using. They just lack functionality I can get from really, really simple applications that are native; functions that are fairly universal for all OS X apps. I can run Pages or TextEdit or Oxygen or BBedit or MS Word or Adobe InDesign or Abiword or CleverRabbit and I know that hitting the same key combination will tell me the number of characters, spaces, characters and spaces, words, and lines in the selection. The same is not true for OO.org and that is a real deficiency. I think of that deficiency as being a non-native application, or more specifically an incomplete port. If you want to call it something else, that is fine. Just so long as you recognize the difference in functionality. This is why software evaluation sites for OS X list native and non-native next to software listings and why people prefer the former.

Re:Aqua

[Risen888]

OpenOffice was a Linux exclusive app that moved to Mac

-1 wrong

From wikipedia:

"StarOffice was originally developed by the German company StarDivision in Lüneburg, founded by Marco Börries in 1984. They developed the first version of StarWriter for the Zilog Z80 home computer system, the Amstrad CPC (marketed by Schneider in Germany) under CP/M, and later for the Commodore 64 under Microsoft BASIC, which was later ported to the 8086-based Amstrad PC-1512, running under MS-DOS 3.2. Later the integration of the other individual programs followed as the development progressed to an Office Suite for DOS and for Microsoft Windows, which was marketed from then on under the name "StarOffice."

The development of the integrated StarOffice started at the end of 1994. Until version 4.2, StarOffice was based on the cross-platform C++ class library StarView."

Re:Aqua

[2nd Post!]

Note I said "OpenOffice" and not StarOffice, StarWriter, etc.

From the same wiki article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Platforms
"Platforms for which OO.o is available include Microsoft Windows, Linux, Solaris, BSD, OpenVMS, OS/2 and IRIX.[10] The current primary development platforms are Microsoft Windows, Linux and Solaris."

My point still stands that it was a Linux app that moved to Mac (it also happened to be a Windows, BSD, Solaris, OpenVMS, IRIX, and OS/2 app). My use of the word "exclusive" was incorrect, and that I admit.

Don't Hate!

[TheRealMindChild]

I will probably get crucified for this, but one of the new features seems to be support for VBA! While this may not appeal to folks creating NEW solutions, at least we got a stepping stone for supporting old solutions on a non-windows/office platform.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

I will probably get crucified for this, but one of the new features seems to be support for VBA! While this may not appeal to folks creating NEW solutions, at least we got a stepping stone for supporting old viruses on a non-windows/office platform. Fixed.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

People won't hate you for your comment, though they will hate you for your nickname, playa.

Re:Don't Hate!

[TofuMatt]

I don't understand why people think that OpenOffice gets better the more it's like MS Office. OpenOffice.org seems to try hard to be an MS Office clone, but it's like the Linux distros that try to be "Windows-like"; Windows is the reason we want something else, so why are you copying it?

Macs, for instance, do looks of things differently than Windows and Linux, and people are attracted to them because they're different, not because it's just a way to do MS-things, the MS-way, with non-MS program. Until OpenOffice, and a lot of other Open Source Software projects, understand this, they aren't much better than what they emulate. The feature bloat in both Office and OpenOffice is gross.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

You are part of the rebel alliance and a traitor! Take him away!

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, people are attracted to macs because they're pretty and they're not windows. Yes, you have a few /. dorks who run it because it's "bsd with a pretty face" (never mind that it's actually Mach) but most people who run macs run it because it's pretty and because "zomg it's expensive that means it's good!!!111onehundredeleven" -or they run it because you can be a drooling mouth-breathing idiot and still operate a mac (it's hard to fuck up wich button to click on a mac, isn't it?).

People who use macs -most people who use macs- don't know jack shit enough about computers to explain what's good or what's bad about the way MS does things.

Re:Don't Hate!

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

I will probably get crucified for this, but one of the new features seems to be support for VBA! I don't understand why people think that OpenOffice gets better the more it's like MS Office.

In this particular instance, this is a real and useful feature, especially for people looking to perform a large migration to OpenOffice and away from MS Office. Simply put, this feature means less work for people trying to perform such a migration and that is better than more work. That seems quite understandable to me.

Re:Don't Hate!

[MightyYar]

I don't understand why people think that OpenOffice gets better the more it's like MS Office. It depends on what the goals of the project are. If they want to go after users of Office, then they will need to import - more or less flawlessly - from Office formats. Since there are 10-15 years worth of VBA macros out there, it is reasonable that you should support that part of the file format.

I know that I personally have a few GB worth of data in Excel and Word formats, and much of the Excel stuff is macro-enabled/enhanced. If OpenOffice did not support the Macros, I'd have to keep a copy of Office... at which point, why download and use OpenOffice?

Now, please note that I am playing somewhat the devil's advocate here. I'm a user of NeoOffice (even paid for the early access thing) and do in fact use both Office and OpenOffice together on the same machine - in part because I don't want to be locked in to a specific package again in the future. I was just trying to convey the vantage point that I think typifies the office market.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Abcd1234]

; Windows is the reason we want something else, so why are you copying it

No, the Windows implementation of these things is why people want something else. The features themselves aren't necessarily a bad idea.

Meanwhile, things like VBA support are *vital* for migration away from Microsoft products. Without them, people will continue to be locked in to MS solutions. So quite complaining. This is a good thing.

Re:Don't Hate!

[idiotwithastick]

There's no reason to be against some feature just because it emulates what MS Office does. MS Office does some things well, and it'd be foolish to not implement those features just because it's like Office. Similarly, it'd be just as foolish for Microsoft to ignore the features that OSX does well just because it's made by Apple. Imitating competitors and improving their features is part of what makes good software.

Re:Don't Hate!

[RiotingPacifist]

The thing is OO isn't really open source, in that its entirely built and controlled by sun, no community project seams to be interested in making an innovative office tho.

Re:Don't Hate!

[AbbyNormal]

Its a matter of perspective really. I manage the IT of a small office who relies heavily on MS Office.

  I don't want something else. I want a clone of MS Office. I want to save money to spend it on training costs.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Kjella]

Most people want better and cheaper, somehow same quality and cheaper isn't as valid an improvement as same price and better? Pardon me if I don't mind if they take the 95% of the market using Office first by being cheaper (and possibly better too) than Microsoft first, I'm sure they'll get around to fighting about the all important 5% that want to "be different" afterwards.

Re:Don't Hate!

[mhall119]

The thing is OO isn't really open source, in that its entirely built and controlled by sun, no community project seams to be interested in making an innovative office tho. Aside from the fact that OO.o is not entirely built by Sun, there is the KOffice suite, and the slightly less cohesive GnomeOffice suite.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Uncle Focker]

The feature bloat in both Office and OpenOffice is gross. Yep, in my day programs had no features and that's the way we liked them!

Re:Don't Hate!

[Colonel Korn]

A mature OS isn't based around the idea of being "different" from Windows. A mature OS is designed to work well. Just because MS does something in Office doesn't mean that OO shouldn't have it too.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Uncle Focker]

But you have to remember that Microsoft does everything wrong. *rolls eyes*

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

We won't hate him, we'll just have a nice friendly crucifiction.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Yvan256]

People who use Windows -most people who use Windows- don't know jack shit enough about computers to explain what's good or what's bad about the way MS does things.

There, fixed it for you.

Re:Don't Hate!

[snl2587]

For the record, VBA is still widely used in the engineering world, and given the stubbornness of some of the people around me in the engineering world that's not likely to change soon. So for the rest of us required to use VBA but not wanting to use Excel, this is a welcome addition and one I have been toying with since they introduced it.

Re:Don't Hate!

[KnightNavro]

The more like MS Office it is, the easier it is for corporations to switch to OO. The more compatible with MS Office it is, the easier it is for people to use OO.

I use MS Office 2007 at work. I don't have a choice in the matter. If we start delivering documents in any other format, our clients will have a conniption fit. If we can't open a Word file because our office suite isn't perfectly compatible with the file, we have a major problem.

Unfortunately, I sometimes have to take my work home with me, where I don't want to pay the MS tax. The more easily I can work with Word and Excel files with OO on my home computer, the happier I am. The more OO screws up my cell formatting and causes things to print incorrectly, the more likely I am to turn to the dark side at home.

Before anybody brings it up, no, it's not an option to explain to our clients that open source and implementing open standards is the way to go. We get files from governments at all levels and work for dozens of different clients. Most of them are a hell of a lot bigger than us and won't care if some engineering consulting company thinks an open program is better. Changing office suites is a big deal to some companies. Just look at the feedback MS got for changing to ribbons in Office 2007. People bitched and moaned that they couldn't find anything and it took a whole click more to do a something they had done in three clicks before.

Re:Don't Hate!

[maxume]

Would you mind filling in some of the details on how you ended up with gigabytes worth of data stored in Excel files? Or is it mostly in word files?

I've done some work lately on a project with about 10 megabytes of data in Excel files, and I already think it is a bad idea to store it and manage it as spreadsheets.

Re:Don't Hate!

[ianare]

I'm getting tired of this blatant lie. OO is released under the LGPL. There, end of story - it's open source.

And while sun does have the copyright, the community plays a role in the development process.
Furthermore, some other projects do use OO code, eg neooffice

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

The GP post pointed out that OOo now is trying to support VBA. You then said you don't understand.

It's simple: there are a lot of documents out there with macros attached. If OOo gets compatible VBA support, suddenly those documents will work with OOo. Right now those documents don't work.

For example, I used to work at Microsoft, and at review time the HR department would send us a Word document with macros attached. Thanks to the macros the document was a little data entry form, and you could click on radio buttons to rate yourself. Now, a web form is a much better solution here, and I'll bet that MS uses web forms for this now. But how many of these macro-enabled documents are out there now, in current use by businesses?

The Word example is pretty trivial. It's more interesting when you consider a spreadsheet with macros. How many half-baked business modeling tools are out there that were hacked together in Excel with macros? And the guy who hacked them together quit long ago, and no one understands the thing, and they still use it?

So, in summary: VBA is important because (if it works right) it will make OOo a viable alternative for the current locked-in installed base of Microsoft Office users.

And it probably isn't just people hoping to steal customers from Microsoft who want VBA. I'll bet there are plenty of people out there who want this for themselves, so they can finally ditch the MS software and just use OOo for everything.

By the way, I'll cast my vote right now for Python as the "native" scripting language of OOo (and all free open source software). It's clean and tidy, which makes it easy to use for anyone.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Arcane_Rhino]

Nope. This is the one thing that has prevented my transition.

I will download it tonight and see how it performs.

Re:Don't Hate!

[amorsen]

I don't understand why people think that OpenOffice gets better the more it's like MS Office. The only reason a "word processor" has to exist is to read and write Microsoft Word documents. Therefore it makes sense to mimic Word as closely as possible.

If the goal is to actually edit documents, there are better solutions which are nothing like Word. Framemaker is one. LaTeX is another.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Amen. I really liked the integrated interface of older versions of OpenOffice- I'd prefer there to be just one executable and not have to differentiate among impress, writer, etc. Yes MS sells all these things separately but why does OpenOffice have to model itself when these components are part of the package. Simplify OO, Simplify.

Re:Don't Hate!

[MightyYar]

Would you mind filling in some of the details on how you ended up with gigabytes worth of data stored in Excel files? We have an automated collection system that dumps out all the raw data plus some summary pages into Excel workbooks. Frankly, I don't need to retail all of the raw data, just the results... and even those can probably just be pasted into Word or Powerpoint (and probably already have been as review meetings took place and test reports were written).

I don't have the time to go back through all of this data, but I wouldn't dare delete it because of its value if there were ever a lawsuit (this has happened before). Plus, every once in a while someone will ask me to email them a copy of the test results from when we tried this or that.

Each Excel file isn't all that big, but I did the same basic job (or had people reporting to me that did) for almost 10 years... so it adds up!

You don't have to tell me that Excel is no good for big volumes of data... I've long been a huge fan of moving such applications over to databases, and have done so on a few occasions. I'm actually running into the same old arguments now with a Wiki, where I think a database is more appropriate.

Re:Don't Hate!

[RiotingPacifist]

Its released under LGPL with a disclaimer that it can be used in propiatory products. But my point wasn't that licensing, its just not a community centric open source project, SUN control it. As a result there is little/no inovation in SUN because its developed in much the same way MS office is just your allowed to see the source.

Re:Don't Hate!

[RiotingPacifist]

While Ive tried Koffice and i quite like gnumeric, there's nothing much interesting in either. There is no 'tabbed browsing' or 'multiple desktops' there's none of the 'new' stuff that causes people to be fans of Firefox or Compiz or enlightenment there's just a pretty standard office suite.

Re:Don't Hate!

[jedidiah]

You don't NEED to know anything about technology to know that it has failed you.

Re:Don't Hate!

[maxume]

So has the version of the Excel files that the system outputs changed in 10 years?

I figured it had to be something like that, but it is always amazing how far people will push things to avoid learning something new(in your case, either the vendor didn't want to support better output or it wasn't worth changing, I'm not trying to pick it apart here).

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

Correct. You also have to deal with a fundamental concept in engineering that I'm seeing more and more. We did it this way before and it was approved and built and fulfills its purpose. So when we have to do something similar, use the same general idea. Having to start over and get a different process approved before you can even start something is the motivating factor.

Re:Don't Hate!

[ianare]

From the about page :

The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which is the primary contributor of code to the Project. Our other major corporate contributors include Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, and Google. Additonally over 450,000 people from nearly every curve of the globe have joined this Project
Now, I have never contributed to OOo, so I can't speak for how they actually handle individual contributors. Many open source projects are not always very inviting to individual contributors, especially when their opinions differ from the core devs (see GNOME). But they certainly do accept code from others.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Uncle Focker]

But my point wasn't that licensing, its just not a community centric open source project, SUN control it. No, you said it wasn't really an open source project. Last time I checked, community involved, or lack thereof, had nothing to do with the definition of whether something is open source.

Re:Don't Hate!

[AvitarX]

Look at kword2

It may not be earth shattering, but they do, IMHO, a great job with their interface.

With things fluidly moving from place to place, and a great sidebar that captures what I think is the best of ribbons. You can turn them all into toolbars, a tabbed sidebar, or floating tool windows. All by dragging, no obscure menus.

And it uses a frames style page editing, which though not innovative, and kind of annoying for small documents is quite useful in longer more complex ones.

For simple type documents I really like Abiword. It is like that 5% of Word that people who don't need real wordproccessors think is all there is to one.

Re:Don't Hate!

[MightyYar]

It wasn't a vendor, it was me during my co-op :)

Yeah, it just wasn't worth changing. The PC is a non-networked (em, it might be "networked" now... there were issues when the data would grow beyond floppy size, though zip gets you pretty far on an Excel file) P90 with Windows 95 running Office 95. Every once in a while it dies and they dig up another old crappy PC and load the hard drive image over (which is so small that no one cares it's on the network). The equipment that it is attached to is obsolete (not even Y2k compliant) and a new piece of equipment is slowly taking over. New co-ops have developed new software to handle that data, though I think they still use Excel.

I hope they are doing backups! :)

Re:Don't Hate!

[PitaBred]

Take that with a grain of salt. One of the Computer Science professors at my school (not going to name names) was a brilliant algorithmist. His Windows95 machine had more viruses and shit on it than any other machine I had seen up until then, or have seen since. And I've fixed a LOT of bad infections. Just because you're a computer scientist doesn't mean you have good computer sense. It just means you know how to write software in some form or another from a theoretical basis rather than hacking.

Re:Don't Hate!

[PitaBred]

If they want you to use Office, have them buy it for you.

The more like Office it is the easier it may be to switch to, but that means you're perpetually playing catch-up. Which isn't a good position to be in.

Re:Don't Hate!

[belmolis]

Hear! Hear! I understand that one market is people used to MS Windows, but too much adherence to Microsoft's way of doing things interferes with usability for people like me who know and prefer a Unix environment. The most irritating thing about OO for me is the way file selection works. A file selection dialog should default to the directory in which I started the program. I just hate it when I go to the directory where I keep the files for a certain purpose, start up OOWriter, and get a listing of my home directory, from which I have to laboriously dig back down to the right directory. And then if I'm not careful it may want to save files in my home directory too.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Eskarel]

There's a simple reason for this. Microsoft often fails to deliver what they set out to, and they're proprietary, and often due to the realities of being a for profit software company based in the US they have to add things they'd probably rather not like DRM, but they've spent millions researching the UI's they use.

Add to that the fact that Open Office is trying to get people to switch to it and you'll see that having the lowest learning curve possible can be a big benefit.

Now that that's out of the way this whole "it has to be different" mantra that you see in some open source folks is a horrible trait and an indication of stupidity.

Software development should always be about making the best software possible, and sometimes that means that when you're creating a new version that something that the other guy did was actually the right thing to do.

This is particularly often the case in User Interfaces because while the proprietary world isn't always perfect, I've never seen a completed open source product with a UI that was both original and non crap. Enlightenment comes close, but E17 has been in development for as long as I can remember and even that's mostly stolen from Apple.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Macrat]

Actually, the reason NeoOffice exists is because of how Sun rejects community code. The same goes for the code that comes from the second largest OOo code contributor, Novell.

Re:Don't Hate!

[mhall119]

While Ive tried Koffice and i quite like gnumeric, there's nothing much interesting in either. Office suites aren't exactly interesting or exciting pieces of software. They're the work-horse of software. That said, OO.o's extension framework may provide some of those exciting features from third-party developers.

I've never used KOffice much, but it was Krita that first prompted me to install it. Krita is a pretty good raster image editor, especially for those who don't like Gimp's layout and menus.

Re:Don't Hate!

[symbolic]

Simple...it's a chapter from Microsoft's own playbook: embrace and extinguish.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Anonymous Coward]

If they want you to use Office, have them buy it for you. are you really that dense? the option is not get them to buy it for you, it is your engineering company doesn't get the contract. No one will care as there are 30 others happy to use what the customer requested. why the hell would a organisation 100 times your size give a damn about 1 supplier that is not happy with their choice of office suites.

Re:Don't Hate!

[TheoMurpse]

You know what? Fuck you.

I own a Windows and a Mac laptop. The Mac laptop is better. There isn't one particular feature I can point to as to why it's better, but as I use both, I prefer the Mac. There's just a ton of little reasons that make up for the fact that I can't run Windows prog--oh wait, yes I can do that, too.

I was a Windows zealot; I defended Microsoft during the antitrust trials; I've faithfully used Microsoft products (including MS-DOS) since I was in kindergarten (that's 20 friggin years). I've used Tandy, IBM, Dell, and Sony systems (desktops and laptops). I wish the desktop I'm using now were a Mac!

And as for my credentials? Programming since I was 4, formerly employed as a web developer (I've heard from former coworkers that my boss has talked about me to new hires and how he'd hire me back in a second if I applied--I left because of school), experienced in software design and abstract math. I'm not a moron.

So believe me when I say: I have become a Mac fan in spite of my former Microsoft fanboyism, and it's not because I wanted something more geared towards idiotism.

The fact that you've been modded up +2 Insightful means there are two idiots or blind MS fanboys trolling Slashdot right now.

Re:Don't Hate!

[mgblst]

Wow, how about for the obvious bloody reason. Do you people (not like Windows/Office) just right comments and never read them again. It sure seems that this has been responded to many times before.

Re:Don't Hate!

[Risen888]

Well then, what sort of innovative, radical features are you looking for in your office suite? This is not a rhetorical or sarcastic question; let's hear it! What are you after, what do you lack?

Finally!

[Penguin Follower]

Aqua interface for Macs.... not that NeoOffice is bad or anything.

OpenOffice Aqua Finally

[Foofoobar]

Finally I don't have to launch X11 to open Open Office on Mac anymore. I look forward to the final release so that I can finally get everyone I know on Macs off Microsoft Office once and for all.

Re:OpenOffice Aqua Finally

[Zoidbergo]

I look forward to the final release so that I can finally get everyone I know on Macs off Microsoft Office once and for all. Of course the problem you then run into is having to compare this suite to Pages/Numbers/Keynote. Let's face it. Those 3 are good enough for most non-power-users, which is really the same market OpenOffice can hope for in the short term.

Any serious word processor users (like technical writers, etc) that I've met that don't like Word, say so because they prefer WordPerfect, not because they prefer OpenOffice. OpenOffice Writer isn't even a twinkle in their eye.

And is there even a real alternative for Excel yet? Keynote is superior to Powerpoint. So where does OpenOffice really have a leg to stand on?

Sure it's a free Office suite. I think more people are clamoring for an alternative to MS Office, whether they have to pay or not. Less of a priority to them is the price tag. It's a definite BONUS, but not a critical priority.

While I'm a supporter of ODF, and open formats (and even OSS in general) I just don't see OOo as a viable alternative for most users, or as compelling an alternative as other OSS projects (languages, servers, frameworks) are.

If they're Mac users, I'd recommend iWork. If they're Windows users, I'd recommend Wordperfect or AbiWord.

Re:OpenOffice Aqua Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you never heard of Neooffice?

Re:OpenOffice Aqua Finally

[Foofoobar]

Yep. Problematic. Has alot of issues. Openoffice is at least stable even if I have to open X11.

Re:OpenOffice Aqua Finally

[TheRaven64]

Any serious word processor users (like technical writers, etc) that I've met

I would be absolutely shocked at anyone calling themselves a technical writer who used a word processor. Word processors are for secretaries and managers, not for people who have to deal with serious amounts of text for a living. I can't imagine having to use one for any non-trivial document. Writing my book in Word would have been a nightmare - as a friend of mine who tried to write her PhD thesis with it discovered.

There is a reason why tools like Framemaker and LaTeX still exist is that word processors don't cater to the professional market at all.

Taking too long!

[bogaboga]

I am kind of tired of this OpenOffice.org beta stuff. In my opinion, this beta business is taking too long. Am I alone?

Re:Taking too long!

[Tenebrousedge]

No, no, no. You have it all wrong. In Unix, everything's a file. In open source, everything's a beta! It seems to be creeping into some proprietary software as well. Actually, I have this theory that the entire universe is just a beta project; it would explain a whole lot about these people around me...

Re:Taking too long!

[ColdWetDog]

I am kind of tired of this OpenOffice.org beta stuff. In my opinion, this beta business is taking too long. Am I alone?

You should Google for "beta" software. Might give you a new perspective on things.

Re:Taking too long!

[mapleneckblues]

I have this theory that the entire universe is just a beta project; it would explain a whole lot about these people around me... And the answer is 42.

Missing change items

[GeekDork]

I'm missing the "complete rewrite of rendering API and functionality", as well as proper SVG handling (or EPS, or PDF, hell native support for any proper vector graphics format!), and other things that would keep Impress presentations from looking like ass. What about uniform lines, circles that look at least remotely like circles, etc.? What about proper inline (and display) math typesetting? Instead of trying to remain bug-compatible with MS Office at all cost, they should perhaps think about, well, not sucking as bad.

Re:Missing change items

[Anonymous Coward]

OO is too busy following M$ around to come up with anything innovative.

If you want good rendering use Latex. If you need help using Latex use Lyx.

If you want just a copy of M$ Office Use Open Office.

Re:Missing change items

[Zadaz]

Looks like you've got a lot of work to do.

Re:Missing change items

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter, ran out of posts for the day? So according to you, if someone can't use a text editor in a command driven interface they are too stupid to even exist let alone use a computer? Great idea twitter. Now go and earn yourself a darwin award.

Re:Missing change items

[evanbd]

Alternately, I could work on the code I know, you can work on the code you know, and the OpenOffice developers can work on the code they know. We all pay attention to user requests, and then we don't have to all go learn a new codebase every time we find a program that's missing a feature. Much more efficient that way, don't you think?

Re:Missing change items

[Anonymous Coward]

Twitter, ran out of posts for the day?

M-M-M-MEGA FAIL!

No idea what you losers have against twitter that leads you to do nothing but spend your day accusing random people of being twitter, but let's take an objective look at the post:
1) Does not put down microsoft
2) Puts down a non-microsoft product

Maybe you should have your mommie check your diaper, since you obviously made an oopsie.

Re:Missing change items

[blind biker]

What is "math typesetting"? If it refers to formulas, I must admit I have never had any problems with them in OO.o, and I do a great amount of use of formulas in my docs.

Re:Missing change items

[The Master Control P]

If you want really good math typesetting, write LaTex with TexMaker. I promise, it's frighteningly easy. Although I don't know what formulas you're writing out, unless you do serious math and physics \frac, ^, and _ probably cover most of it. And if they don't, that's what TexMaker's pages of other symbols are for.

Honestly, the only thing that I somewhat dislike in LaTeX is having to set up my pages manually - I'd like having a screen with a bunch of radio buttons for common presets that displays a sample page in this format, and then has an interactive editor where selecting a page parameter highlights that feature on the page.

Re:Missing change items

[GeekDork]

Try e.g. setting the equivalent of a simple LaTeX inline $\frac{1+\alpha}{2}$ in OO.o or pretty much every other word processor or presentation tool that's not based on TeX. It will have font issues, ugly inside spacing, will break line spacing, and be generally a pain in the ass to create in the first place. Even simple stuff like $1^2$ will break things significantly. In TeX, you'd have to do pretty nasty stuff like typeset chain fractions before line spacing breaks even inline. Even if you fiddle around with it, it'll look strange because sub/superscripts are in the wrong places of the font size is off. I had the "joy" of porting a paper from LaTeX to Word, and I'm seriously planning to never do that again, unless I get published in a very good journal.

Re:Missing change items

[GeekDork]

I've been looking around. The OO.o people know exactly that their drawing framework stinks out loud, and they announced far-reaching changes for 2.0. What they came up with is XCanvas. OO.o and Inkscape were officially started around the same time. Both had a base to work from. In that time, Inkscape has evolved into a quite powerful vector graphics tool with a rendering engine (libcairo) that is extremely capable, and with an interface that's actually fun to work on. OO.o on the other hand has done... what exactly? From my point of view, and judging by the set of functionality I regularly use, they've done exactly dick except changing the icon set every now and then and calling that a release. All issues that I found had already been discussed ad nauseam, but never resolved. Issues I found in Inkscape were actually fixed by the next release (which looked pretty much the same but was much better to use).

If the word processing tool hadn't worked from the start, OO.o would be dead and gone by now, since it has no other working features. I'm not wasting my time on that. (Plus I'm no good with praphics.)

Re:Missing change items

[Tweenk]

Inkscape uses libnr, its own rendering engine (which is actually responsible for 95% of rendering-related issues and awful performance in some edge cases), but they plan on moving to Cairo sometime soon.
The good thing with Inkscape is that by some miracle it works well most of the time. The bad thing is that the code is mostly shit. There are at least 3 layers of cruft in some parts of the codebase, and although the language is C++, some 60% of the code is still plain C. There is a lot of duplicated code that performs differently but does essentially the same, like import and paste. However, they're improving quite fast on that front - 0.47 is meant to be centered on refactoring.

(BTW I dug a bit into Inkscape code to fix the clipboard, so I know what I'm talking)

Re:Missing change items

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want just a copy of M$ Office Use Open Office. Wrong fucktard, it was putting down OpenOffice for being a copy of a Microsoft product "or M$ as twitter the troll eloquently put it, only twitter the troll and his sock puppets use M$ today" so why don't you go find a razor, run a hot bath, and slit your fucking wrists fucktard.

Re:Missing change items

[blind biker]

Formulas in OO.o are still better than in Word, even when inserted inline as in your example (even and especially fractions). And the OP was complaining about the lack of features of a FREE product (OO.o), while not thinking that a for-money product like Word makes a worse job at some of those features he requests. As someone answered him: boy you got a lot of work to do!

Re:Missing change items

[GeekDork]

I am the OP. And I also replied to the "lot of work" comment, thank you very much.

My point is not so much that OO.o sucks, but that OO.o continues to suck in aspects that are well-known to be far, far sub-par, and that were announced to receive attention a long time ago, but then were blissfully ignored in favor of just polishing the interface some more. To get to your point, IMO saying that OO.o is somehow "better" at math is an overstatement. It is different, but at least as far from being "good" as the competition. In that light, building a first-number release on adding 768 columns to the spreadsheet is hypocritical at best.

Oh, one more thing: OO.o desperately begs to be compared to MS Ori^H^Hffice, so I don't see an issue with actually doing so. The LaTeX toolchain(s) have no issues with properly handling vector graphics and other niceties that would make a common office suite hide under a rock, and guess what: they're "FREE" too. And they don't run around crying for attention.

Re:Missing change items

[blind biker]

You can compare OO.o with Office as much as you like - and in fact, compared to it, OO.o shines, at least for my purposes. Because, as I said, formulas are much better implemented in OO.o Write than in Word (for one thing).

Re:Missing change items

[ais523]

To get to your point, IMO saying that OO.o is somehow "better" at math is an overstatement.

But it can multiply 850 by 77.1 correctly. I'd call that better at math.

Still no Reveal codes feature?

[Viduliya]

> I was hoping to see something more than just another MS Office clone at least with version 3.0. How hard can it be to implement such a useful feature anyway? I can't believe they do not get enough requests for it.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[swimin]

Maybe a bunch of users should get together and form a bounty on it. I'd gladly throw in $10 to have reveal codes.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[MightyYar]

I would LOVE reveal codes. Unfortunately, I don't think that their object model is like WordPerfect, where everything is stuck inside one big layer. I wouldn't expect "reveal codes" to happen in Word or OpenOffice... it would certainly not be trivial to implement.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[story645]

Why not just code it yourself and submit it as an extension?

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[Viduliya]

I have not looked at any code, so I do not know this for sure. If you can convert the document on the fly to an XML like format then reveal codes should be trivial to implement. Heck, I would accept the XML in a another window/pane as reveal codes.

Sadly, I believe that the OpenOffice developers are thinking the same way, Microsoft has thought of MS Office. The must be thinking, all users are dumb enough to never want anything more abstract than WISIWYG editing with some useless hidden formatting characters shown.

I think Openoffice Writer is a nice product, it is too bad they do not aim to improve it beyond MS Word.

Nothing worse than having garbge/redundent/misplaced formatting staying hidden just to bite me on the next change on a large document. This is still my prime reason to not use OpenOffice (or MS Word) to create any serious document of a substantial size.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[Inda]

I'll do it!

You'll need to tell me what you mean by 'code' and 'extension' first though.

pffft

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ohh god me too!!!!!! Reveal codes is the single best trouble shooting tool ever to enter word processors.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[MightyYar]

WordPerfect reveal codes is more than just showing the codes, though. It lets you edit the codes and this is immediately reflected in the document. Plus, the cursor position in the document follows the cursor position in the reveal codes section.

I don't think an exported-XML pseudo reveal codes feature would be nearly as useful, but that's just MHO :) Even if you could export back to the document, it would still be slow and feel more like working with LaTeX, I would think.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[swimin]

Because I'm not that committed to it. $10 is less of an investment than actually writing it (assuming I value my time).

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[blind biker]

Hells yeah. My $10 would be there in a heartbeat.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[TeknoHog]

If you like reveal codes, you'll probably love LaTeX.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[tepples]

Maybe a bunch of users should get together and form a bounty on it. I'd gladly throw in $10 to have reveal codes. Have you tried opening a .odt file in a zip program?

Looks like my favorite new feature isn't there yet

[Anonymous Coward]

The ability to edit PDFs.

Clones needed, references checked

[moderatorrater]

Windows is the reason we want something else, so why are you copying it? Speak for yourself there, cowboy. The pricing is the biggest reason that I use open source instead of proprietary, everything else is just icing on the cake. The biggest problem with open source that most people have with it is user friendliness, something that their proprietary competitors either nail or create (since they're the de facto user friendly program). In the case of OOO, at the very least they need to be able to replicate the functionality of the Office version to replace usage for complex documents.

I'm DMing a D&D game right now, and most people are trying to use HeroForge spreadsheets to build their characters and show them to me. Without MS Office, I can't read them. If there's a problem with character sheets for D&D, I can only imagine how many businesses and other groups have problems with OOO not recognizing MS scripts.

Until OpenOffice, and a lot of other Open Source Software projects, understand this [that they need to be different], they aren't much better than what they emulate. In the areas that matter, they're very much inferior. Apple has been able to create UIs that are much superior to anything anyone else offers. Open source has failed to do so for 90% of their attempts. Unless the project is in that 10%, they could do better by moving towards the MS version rather than continuing what they're doing.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[sm62704]

The biggest problem with open source that most people have with it is user friendliness, something that their proprietary competitors either nail or create

Maybe that's why I love Linux and hate Windows. I don't need "user friendly". I need user obedient. I don't care if it sneers at me and insults me so long as it does what I want it to do the way I want it to.

Microsoft programs do what they allow you to have them do, the way they want or no way at all.

As an added bonus with Linux, it doesn't unsult me, while my intelligence is often insulted with Microsoft's "user friendliness".

I don't need my hammer to be user friendly, either. I just want to drive a nail and no backtalk from the damned hammer. Like Linux, it is user-obediant.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[edschurr]

I'm DMing a D&D game right now, and most people are trying to use HeroForge spreadsheets to build their characters and show them to me. Without MS Office, I can't read them. If you're using Windows, have you tried Excel Viewer? Or alternately try Excel Viewer 2003 and the MS Office 2007 Compatibility Pack.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[jedidiah]

I just want a basic word processor and spreadsheet and don't want to pay
and arm and leg for it. Free isn't even necessary but the nature of the
market here has destroyed the middle ground.

Open formats should make ALL of the msoffice/OO class apps unecessary.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[Anonymous Coward]

- make me a sandwich!
- what? make one yourself...
- sudo make me a sandwich
- oh, ok...

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[prockcore]

So use google docs, like I do.

No need to run bloatware when a damn web application is better than OpenOffice.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[Koiu Lpoi]

I'd give you a 10/10 for your post, except that Linux doesn't always behave in ways that are unsurprising. I mean this in the way that the creator of Ruby meant it - an application should always be consistent with itself and its own rules, and those rules should make sense. Hit a nail with a hammer, it goes in or it breaks. Use Linux, and occasionally it's like the nail flies up out of the hole. You ask someone why this happens, and 10% of the time you get told to make a new hammer. Windows has its own surprising quirks, too, but because of its marketshare, people are used to them, and this sadly makes them less of a problem.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[turing_m]

I don't need my hammer to be user friendly, either. I just want to drive a nail and no backtalk from the damned hammer. Like Linux, it is user-obediant.

The great thing about Linux these days is the community. It only takes one "genius" (i.e. anyone who can read a man page) to figure out how to do something via CLI and post the howto on ubuntuforums. He ups his "thanked x times in y posts" count, and the rest of the proles have an easy recipe they can search for.

This is oftentimes superior to the closed source model of the developer trying to brainstorm all the possible uses that users can come up with and coding it all into a GUI. The community gives the CLI both power AND ease of use.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[syousef]

The biggest problem with open source that most people have with it is user friendliness

Perhaps. However personally, I have no interest in how user friendly it is, just in how difficult and time consuming it is to get something done. I'm willing to learn so for me, missing, buggy or undocumented features are the bane of my existence with F/OSS. Roughly in that order. Granted I'd be described as a power user, developer, and hobbyist. Granted people aren't all as willing to learn the name and function of dozens of command line utilities. However zero dollar price is a big enough incentive to get past all that. That said what do you suggest an end user do when a feature is missing, or there's a bug no one is willing to fix?

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[Anonymous Coward]

That's fine. There are plenty of Gentoo and emacs options out there for you.

For everyone else, we want Ubuntu's and OOo options that do what MS products do, as well or better, and with the absolute minimum in learning curve.

Don't take our kind of software your direction. Use the insanely capable software that already exists for people like you. Leave the stuff with a sliver of a chance in the office to us.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[scott_karana]

Your hammer analogy sucks, here.
If your hammer were Linux, there would be such community contention that you have to choose between steel or "beta" titanium heads, choose whether you wanted a wooden or artificial handle, choose what wood or plastic/metal you wanted for said handle, choose not only the generalized grip shape but the specific dimensions of it, et cetera. Oh, and don't forget that if you decided to change any one part, you'd have to change to the other rival set of (nigh identical) parts.

Choice is great, but something that a majority of Linux developers don't realize is that LACK OF CHOICE is in itself a choice.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I find Apple's UIs obnoxious and clunky. Speak for yourself.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[sm62704]

That's the best thing - you don't have to give anything up with Linux. You don't have to do things the way somebody else wants you to do it. With Micorosoft it's their way and their way only.

I prefer KDE to Gnome, for example. I can choose. I prefer 98 to XP, but I'm stuck with XP. It won't be long before you need Vista to run a Windows program.

I have to disagree about the learning curve. When I update the Mandriva side of my PC there is no learning curve at all. Some things are better and there are new things, but it works the same way as before. When I update the Windows side they've changed everything; what was once under "file" is now under "tools", etc. Every time I "upgrade" a Microsoft product it's completely different than the last version and my learning curve is as steep as if I'd never used the program before.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[sm62704]

Your hammer analogy sucks, here.

I thought you nailed it pretty good. If you don't like choice, then the US is not the place to be. One of the Muslim nations might be more to your liking.

Choice is IMO always good. Ther's no difference between having no choice at all or having lots of choices and picking one at random.

I can't understand why so many people these days are against freedom.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[sm62704]

There are things about Linux that do annoy me. The way mousing out of a text box takes focus off the txt in KDE for example (I have an older version so this may have been fixed, it's just a random example).

The difference is, if I'm more annoyed and less lazy I can change it at will.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't care if it sneers at me and insults me [...]

As an added bonus with Linux, it doesn't unsult me So, which one is it?

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[scott_karana]

Alright, maybe you'll understand it like this:
Imagine a set of n specific choices. Developers should provide n+1 choices, where the added "choice" is merely a lowest common denominator for users who don't care.

Additionally, I find your US/Muslim analogy amusing. I'm not in the States anymore because they don't provide ENOUGH choices and freedom.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm DMing a D&D game right now, and most people are trying to use HeroForge spreadsheets to build their characters and show them to me. Without MS Office, I can't read them. If there's a problem with character sheets for D&D, I can only imagine how many businesses and other groups have problems with OOO not recognizing MS scripts. Business-smizness, if you mistake my dark elf warrior for a racially inferior half-elf warrior, you may meet the end of my vorpal sword +5.

And I warn you, I roll twenties.

*STILL* no outline mode.

[xeno]

Ugh. I sound like a broken record: Every OOo update, 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. 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

And to quote myself (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=322381&cid=20912291): "...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)

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[Anonymous Coward]

You should take a look at this bug:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3959

And if you really want an outline mode, please go vote for it! Really, popularity is considered when features are added to OOo.

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[BigJim.fr]

Lack of outline mode is bug nÂ3959 and if you had as much as skimmed its content you would know why it is taking longer to develop than you think it should.

Everyone agrees it is important, everyone is impatient, the developers know all about it, but it is not a trivial hack, so it will take resources and therefore time.

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ditto, I've been waiting for -years-. Please, please do a proper outline mode.

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll add my vote for an outline mode...it's the main reason I'm still using Word.

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I used outline mode a lot in Word when I still used it, and I think that navigator is really superior to outline mode - what you need to do, though, is dock both the navigator and the floating styles palette on one side of the program window, one above the other - that way you don't have to switch windows, even if you still need the mouse.

Since version 2.4 there are also keyboard shortcuts for heading levels 1 to 3: ^1 to ^3.

I do a lot of outlining, it works very well for me, and I prefer it to the word outliner - others may prefer the word way of doing it.

On the whole, I think that writer is a much better WP than word - and I used everything from Word 4 for DOS to Word 97 at home and at work, and I still use Word 2003 at work sometimes - we have Openoffice installed as well. I also tried Office 2007 - came with my son's laptop, but didn't like it, and neither does he. He needs MS office for some school projects, but usually writes everything in writer, exports to .doc and then opens and saves in Word once, to check for formatting problems.

The one thing writer needs, in my opinion, is better spell checking, and maybe also grammar checking.

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[xeno]

That's rather patronizing; I've more than skimmed the content, I've culled through the bug db for years. I know it's hard to fix this; it's a serious feature request, not a trivial bug.

HOWEVER, at the top of the OOo 3 beta, there are new features, including note-taking, multi-page editing, and workbook sharing and several others that are low-value high-effort feature additions. No matter how many people click on the "request" button on the "outline mode" bug report, this one seems to keep getting de-prioritized. Every time another request/bug report for outlining gets merged, the votes for the merged one get zeroed out as if it's an edge case or rarely-used feature.

Oh well, OOo spreadsheet and presentation editing is stellar, but for text documents, Word and FrameMaker still work acceptably under Wine...

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[zenpickle]

Bigjim is talking through his hat on this one. This issue was opened in 2002. Complaining after 6 years is not exactly being impatient. It is hard to imagine that this is so hard that it could not have been addressed in 6 years. It is obvious that there is NOT agreement and that in fact the core developers have never made this a priority. They may very well be be justified in this position. I have no idea what percentage of users need this. I need it but I suspect that I am in the minority. The advocates are certainly vocal but that doesn't prove anything number wise. However pretending that this is now and has ever been high priority for the core team is disingenuous. The key problem is that outlining is a structural function that really needed better support in the document structure itself. True outlining should be represented in the data structure. Outlining is not a markup attribute. Outlining means hierarchical (tree structured) data. It is being glued on top by using style tags that are not inherently hierarchical in nature. (Word does it that way but they obviously have tighter control over style tags in their code and even so their implementation is far from perfect.) Even when the document looks right it is easy for successive edits to break a structure when it is only implicit. This means that it really requires a change in the core functionality of the editor and the developers are justifiably unwilling to make changes there without careful thought. However 6 years should have given enough time to plan and implement this if the core team had cared enough. Instead various people have been assigned to make "patches" without having the authority to address the core problems blocking implementation. Outlining will not be solved until it gets promoted to a core team issue which means that it will probably never happen. Seeing no progress in 3.0 was certainly discouraging.

How does 3.0 beta compare with go-oo?

[Dwedit]

So how exactly does the 3.0 beta release compare with Go-Openoffice.org 2.4?

track changes!

[story645]

The improvement in the collaboration/review/track changes is what I'm most thrilled about-previous versions have been so lousy as to be unusable (doing in text comments was faster/easier/clearer to the reader) so this new change looks so promising. I don't care if it's MS cloning-this was my main reason for considering buying MS.

Re:track changes!

[AndGodSed]

MS cloning is not necessarily a bad thing. If one can offer for free a better product than what MS is offering as a paid for product you are bound to have people adopt your product.

The key being "a better broduct." For most companies that shell out for MS framework cost is a secondary consideration.

Re:track changes!

[story645]

The key being "a better broduct." For most companies that shell out for MS framework cost is a secondary consideration. Definitely-my lab tries to do as much as possible with opensource and coding it ourselves as possible, but we're buying office 'cause there are some things no open source alternative does.
Honestly, I've got no problem what-so-ever with cloning-just wish the cloners paid half as much attention to UI as they do to the features.

It doesn't matter

[MicrosoftElitist]

OpenOffice is slow and bloated. It will never measure up to Micosoft Office, which is by far a superior product. When you need to run a business get MS Office. If you want to operate like a mom and pop shop get OpenOffice. It's as simple as that.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

M$ Office is slow and bloated. It will never measure up to OpenOffice, which is by far a superior product. When you need to run a business get OpenOffice. If you want to operate like an amateur with no sense of direction while working on ridding your system of malware, get M$ Office. It's as simple as that.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

There, fixed it for you in the above comment. :P

Re:It doesn't matter

[westlake]

M$ Office is slow and bloated. It will never measure up to OpenOffice, which is by far a superior product.

Decisions in the workplace aren't being made by those who spell Microsoft with a dollar sign.

Re:It doesn't matter

[Anonymous Coward]

Decisions in the workplace aren't being made by those who spell Microsoft with a dollar sign.

Posting anonymously for obvious reasons...

Indeed the decisions aren't made by those who spell MS with a dollar sign. For big enough workplaces, the decisions are made by a few members of committees who receive bits of paper with currency signs on them from Microsoft (or equivalent incentives).

Due to silly email address assumptions from an ex MS VP turned lobbyist, I was cc'd in emails addressed to selected people involved in the decision process for a government body that could influence other government bodies. A few of those emails were at the limit of corruption attempts: invitation to weekend events in exotic places with all expenses paid to discuss business opportunities, how "open" OOXML was, the "economic collapse" that the Open Source movement will cause or the importance of "software choice" (read buying form BSA affiliates). Funnily enough, quite often those invitations landed in my mailbox at most two weeks before the end of the process on the topic the lobbyist wanted to discuss.

I saw the same kind of behaviour from most IT suppliers in my previous private sector employers, so I can only guess it is the standard behaviour with "large" customers.

is the remain hidden on save statusbar bug fixed?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have the status bar set to hide, it re appears on save ... and if you want to hide it again, you will have to go through menubar->view->hide status bar ..

This is the most annoying bug to me and it seems to live on unnoticed ..i fist saw it with 2.3.1 when i started using OO ..i quickly moved to 2.4 when it came out hopping that it would be fixed there ..it wasn't...and i went on to use these beta builds and ..guess what, its still there!!! ..

there already exists a bug report for this but, it would be nice if it would be fixed before the final version ..

its kinda sad to have such a GUI bug and its really annoying to always click "Shift+S" to save a document and to follow it with "Alt->V->B" to hide again the status bar

PDF Import Extension

[Futurepower(R)]

Yes, is says:

" Available Soon... PDF Import Extension
The PDF Import Extension allows modifying existing PDF files for which the original source files do not exist anymore. "

However, that was August 2007.

Re:PDF Import Extension

[dbcad7]

I've always thought not being able to edit was a good feature of PDF's... for example, if you sent someone a CAD drawing to quote you a price on manufacturing it, they have the information needed to do the quote, but can't screw up or change any specifications.. and they can't (easily) steal your work.

To edit your own PDF's I can understand.. to edit others I disagree with... If you need an editable document then why not just send a .doc or .odt or dxf or jpg .. etc.. ??

Re:PDF Import Extension

[Laur]

I've always thought not being able to edit was a good feature of PDF's...

It's not so much an intentional feature as a side effect, the format is designed to accurately preserve formatting, but easy editability was not a design concern. As far as I know Adobe did not specifically set out to make the format difficult to edit. I understand that Adobe Acrobat (the full version, not the Reader) has been able to open and edit PDFs for a log tame, maybe since the first version. The point is that you should never rely on PDFs being immutable, the format itself is not a form of DRM (although PDFs can contain DRM), and relying solely on the format to protect your secrets is just security through obscurity.

for example, if you sent someone a CAD drawing to quote you a price on manufacturing it, they have the information needed to do the quote, but can't screw up or change any specifications.. and they can't (easily) steal your work.

Digital signing solves the problem of other people changing your work or screwing up the specifications and trying to pass it off as the original. The difficulty in editing PDFs really doesn't do anything to help prevent people from stealing your work, they can always just recreate it. Sure, it may not be as quick as if you sent them a dxf, but it's hardly a significant barrier to industrial espionage.

To edit your own PDF's I can understand.. to edit others I disagree with...

There can be valid reasons for this, the format doesn't dictate any ethical issues. For example, sometimes I am sent PDF reports containing embedded images. Sometimes I'd like to just forward on or reference a specific image without the entire report, so I will extract it (using pdfimages from xpdf). Very useful.

If you need an editable document then why not just send a .doc or .odt or dxf or jpg .. etc.. ??

Of course that is better, but having alternatives is nice. BTW, I disagree that jpg is an "editable" document, while you can edit it since it uses lossy compression it should really be considered a final output format. Too many edits and re-compressions will quickly degrade quality.

Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

From what I've seen, this release still has the absurd 65535 row limit on Calc—the only reason such a limit was acceptable in previous versions was because MS Office didn't yet support more, but now that Office 2007 supports up to 4 million-some-odd rows, there is absolutely no excuse for putting that many or more into OpenOffice.

More than 65K rows is the killer feature that has gotten parts of my company to upgrade to 2007. Until and unless OOo supports it, there's no way we'll be able to use it as a full replacement for MS Office, as much as we'd like to.

Dan Aris

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[f8l_0e]

I once read a quote that more than 65k rows was overkill and that if you needed that many rows, you should be using a database instead. If you're not under some kind of NDA, what does your company do that they need that many rows on a spreadsheet? Can anyone else chime in on legitimate reasons to need that many rows in a spreadsheet?

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[chromatic]

Can anyone else chime in on legitimate reasons to need that many rows in a spreadsheet?

I am the human. The software works for me. I do not work for the software.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

...what does your company do that they need that many rows on a spreadsheet?

We're querying data out of a database and trying to do simple processing on it (the type that Excel does very well) in the simplest ways we can, and present it to the bosses. Yes, I could write a Java program to subtotal all our payments by type and spit it out in some kind of elegant format, or we could spring for a dozen more Crystal Reports licenses, but the fact is that Excel does this just fine, and now we don't even have to use 6 worksheets within a workbook to hold it all.

I hate Microsoft, but I just have no way of recommending replacing Office with OpenOffice while this is an issue.

Oh, and by the way (not directed at you, but at the stuck-up git who wrote that quote, which I read, too): when someone says they have a reason to use more than X of something in your product, and all it would cost you to give it to them is (I think) changing the types of a bunch of variables, and maybe adding a couple of extra converter methods, you don't tell them, "No one should ever need that many! Only an idiot would even ask for that!" You either say, "Well, we don't currently have enough demand for that feature to be worth the trouble," or you just darn well do it!

Dan Aris

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[mspohr]

Use a database. I guess it's just ignorance when people use a spreadsheet for database functions. If you need 65K rows, you really need a database. Any spreadsheet is a disaster waiting to happen with that many rows.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't consider MS having a limit as an acceptable reason for the limit to exist, and thus would argue that there is NO acceptable reason for having a 64K row limit. This is one of my peeves with OO as well, and would like to see this problem fixed.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Can anyone else chime in on legitimate reasons to need that many rows in a spreadsheet? There are none.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right about that being a big issues for certain businesses. One little feature that bugs me is when cutting out rows and then pasting them in the middle of rows above, you have to use a 'paste special'. Where as in Office you can do a paste insert and it will take care of it automatically.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[ianare]

... and your company never thought about using a proper database?

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[syphax]

I agree that if you have 65k+ records or rows of data, a spreadsheet probably isn't the best tool.

However, there are several reasons why handling such data in Excel/OO is not unreasonable. These include:

• Many people are much more proficient in Excel than in any other software, due to familiarity. The cost of moving the data over to other software and then figuring out how to do what you want to do is often not worth the time required.
  
• Spreadsheets are inherently more flexible than a database. This is both a strength and weakness, but there are plenty of times when you need to do some sort of funky calculation to the data that is much, much easier to implement in a spreadsheet than via SQL (calculating a moving average of X records comes to mind).
  
• I would argue that a DB is often not the best choice, given the difficulty of implementing certain calculations in SQL (yes, I know about Codd and relational theory, but just because something can be done in an RDBMS does not mean it can be done easily). Often, something like S+/R, Matlab/Octave, SPSS, Tableau, etc., is the better choice- they generally allow you to perform manipulations as flexibly as in Excel, with better performance and less likelihood of errors, but more easily than doing everything in SQL. But many people aren't familiar with these. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be, but they aren't.
  

So, the short answer is that if you have only think you have a hammer (Excel), everything starts looking like nails.

I tend to go to R or Tableau (which is basically a nice interface that sits on top of a database, Excel file or flat file) when I have many thousands of records, but the former has a learning curve, and the latter isn't cheap.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[mhall119]

We're querying data out of a database and trying to do simple processing on it (the type that Excel does very well) in the simplest ways we can, and present it to the bosses. What kind of processing are you having to do that can't be done on the database itself?

when someone says they have a reason to use more than X of something in your product, and all it would cost you to give it to them is (I think) changing the types of a bunch of variables, and maybe adding a couple of extra converter methods, you don't tell them, "No one should ever need that many! Only an idiot would even ask for that!" You either say, "Well, we don't currently have enough demand for that feature to be worth the trouble," or you just darn well do it! I'm sure there will be more to change than just that, and probably some unintended consequences of such a change as well.

  And not to defend someone who is acting like a stuck up git (I haven't read the quote), chances are that he's right, it sounds like you're using a speadsheet to do the job of a database. When someone tells you you're using a hammer to cut wood, you can't just tell them that it costs them little to put serrated edges on the hammer's head and that they should just darn well do it.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[f8l_0e]

That's not a legitimate answer. Please read what Dan wrote in response. My original question was not a troll, it was a technical question. Sun's 65k row limit is most likely to reduce how much memory is allocated when creating or opening a spreadsheet.

      I was curious to see how many people are in Dan's situation that actually need that many rows. (Dan if you're reading this, how many rows do your reports average out to?)

    If there are that many people that use more than 65k rows then that would justify Sun reworking their code, perhaps even a preferences option that allow toggling on and off large spreadsheets. This would allow for the average user to not experience the unneeded overhead.

    Don't get me wrong, I don't like being hindered by my apps either, but if the demand for a memory taxing feature isn't that great, why waste the time implementing it.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

What kind of processing are you having to do that can't be done on the database itself?

First: bear in mind we're using a proprietary application on an AS/400, which, though it uses a perfectly ordinary DB2 database, and we're OK with certain modifications to said database, we can't exactly say to have complete control over.

Second: please clarify "on the database itself." We're not about to alter live data just so we can pull out a summary report.

Third: for the most part (see fourth, below), it's not about complex processing; we just want to do simple stuff like subtotalling, and sometimes switching around some values because the aforementioned proprietary application likes to use negative signs in silly ways sometimes. It's about presentation, since management likes things in a "sensible" format, and looking nice, not in tab-delimited or fixed-width text.

Fourth: the exception to that is when we see problems and need to troubleshoot our database—sometimes to send bug reports to our vendor, sometimes to figure out what I need to fix in my own code. We sometimes need to run quick searches and processing on an entire table, and yes, I know databases can do that, but I don't know of any tool that can browse quickly through a remote DB2 table, colour-code, stick in fudge factors, and run quick lookups vs other related tables the way we can with Excel. Emphasis on the "quick" here: I can *do* a lot of this through straight table queries, but it's so much faster to query it all out once, and then let Excel do the work.

I'm sure there will be more to change than just that, and probably some unintended consequences of such a change as well.

Oh, I'm sure there's more to it, too, and I'm fully aware of the law of unintended consequences; however, I can't imagine that it would be a tremendous undertaking.

When someone tells you you're using a hammer to cut wood, you can't just tell them that it costs them little to put serrated edges on the hammer's head and that they should just darn well do it.

Possibly, but when you complain that the competitor's hammer has a claw on the back for removing nails more easily, and theirs just has a smooth back, and they tell you that no hammer should ever need a claw for removing nails and you're an idiot for asking, it just leaves you scratching your head saying, "Who's the idiot?"

Dan Aris

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[f8l_0e]

I followed the link you posted for tableau. That is one hot looking piece of software, but you weren't kidding about the price. This is definitely a program that I like to see an OSS implementation of.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

(Dan if you're reading this, how many rows do your reports average out to?)

Let's see...I think we've got a couple of tables around the 100k-row mark, and another somewhere between 200k and 300k. So we don't need a lot more rowspace (though I know of people elsewhere who do, more like a million rows...), but we do need some more...

Dan Aris

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Richard_at_work]

Spreadsheets are a throwaway item - you can dump the data to them, do the analysis you want, and bin the intermediate steps in a matter of a few minutes leaving you with the condensed overview you were always looking for. It takes significantly longer to setup an Access database to do the same thing.

And yes, I speak from experience. My company is currently moving away from a 20 year old UNIX based legacy system where most of the reporting is done via CSV dumps (routinely greater than 65,000 rows) and Excel - Excel is easy to use, easy to pick up and most of our userbase already has a grounding in it which means there needs to be zero IT interaction with these people when they need data analysis. They know what they want, and they know how to get it - the spreadsheets are in existence for half a day maximum. We can't say the same about Access.

Its all very well and good to say 'use a database', but theres a whole load of shit that comes with that statement that takes time, money and ability to do. There is a significant portion of the market that is stuck using legacy systems that date back to the ark, systems that can write out ascii text files and thats about it - thats when it starts paying to get creative, and spreadsheets are a fantastic way to be creative with very little outlay.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[jedidiah]

Java Schmava. If you are pulling it out of the database then you can
transform it with the same language that you are pulling it out of
the database with (SQL).

Crystal reports is for hand holding.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

Java just happens to be my language of choice, there was no particular merit being attached to it there; for the rest, until you can come up with a way—within the confines of AS/400 DB2 SQL—to do things like, "How does this field compare to the matching field in the record before it?" and quickly finding the most recently dated records with certain keys, it just won't be able to cut it.

If there is such a way, I would be overjoyed if you would tell me, because I have yet to find one that actually works...

Dan Aris

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Kjella]

Because the world works the opposite of the unix philsophy - to have many tools that each do one job well. Users want one tool that does many jobs well. Excel is what people know to use and they use it for everything from grocery lists to complex macros to data massaging. If it's got >65000 rows, it probably came from a database like in ths case. I've had the exact same thing with users that want transaction entries exported to Excel. Try not to understand this as the "lazy user" speech, it means we've got staff already trained in Excel that would be expensive to teach how to use another tool, particularly when it comes to all the various functions "so... how do I do [excel operation] on this database? what's this 'sequel' you're talking about?" I'd say that if your 65000+ row excel sheet is a data source, you're doing something very very wrong. Processing a raw data list into a usable presentation format in Excel instead of the database side? I'd say that' perfectly fine if the tool can handle it and the person doing it knows how. Adding a layer of complexity where someone already skilled in Excel needs to go to someone with SQL skills every time they want to change something is not the way to go.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[mikelieman]

until you can come up with a way--within the confines of AS/400 DB2 SQL--to do things like, "How does this field compare to the matching field in the record before it?" and quickly finding the most recently dated records with certain keys, it just won't be able to cut it. A-CSI-430 -- Database Management Systems

Learn the Joys of SQL in this 4 credit course offered by your local university.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sometimes database mapping can be done exceptionally quickly in Excel.

I've recently had to convert a terribly designed Access database into a properly normalized SQL database. The data in the Access database was so bad that the only way to map the data into the new formats was to put all the data into excel and map it to the new format using lookups and the like. Unfortunately for us there were almost 100,000 records in the largest table, which required 2 imports to get all the data into the new database.

Yes, there are other (and probably better) ways of doing this, but given the speed that the data needed converting, this was simply the easiest way, and could have been even faster had Excel 2003 been able to handle more than 65K rows in a sheet.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[xtracto]

You [people] should not need to give any reason for that requirement. Microsoft did not ask you why did you need more than 65k rows.

The truth is that it is just a synthetic limit which seems to still be present due to the typical behaviour seen in several open source projects of "if I think it is not useful I won't to it" (see Pidgin text resize debate, or Firefox long text tooltips bug). Even though a hell of a lot of people is asking for the feature *and* all the other similar programs can achieve the same functionality.

This is when it seems that such Open Source programs are being developed by 12 year olds.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[dbIII]

More than 65K rows is the killer feature that has gotten parts of my company to upgrade to 2007

The horror! It appears that people in your company that set such things up need to be told that databases exist.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

The horror! It appears you need to read the rest of my posts on this thread, you dimwit.

Dan Aris

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, I could write a Java program to subtotal all our payments by type and spit it out in some kind of elegant format, or we could spring for a dozen more Crystal Reports licenses

Or you could have the database engine handle that for you, rather than just having it dump all the data :-) OK, maybe you're doing something more than summing but you didn't say that ;-)

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Third: for the most part (see fourth, below), it's not about complex processing; we just want to do simple stuff like subtotalling, and sometimes switching around some values because the aforementioned proprietary application likes to use negative signs in silly ways sometimes. It's about presentation, since management likes things in a "sensible" format, and looking nice, not in tab-delimited or fixed-width text. The place to do that simple stuff is in SQL. It will be quicker, less prone to error and you won't get flamed for using an exorbitant amount of spreadsheet rows.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[dbIII]

What you have is MS Excel used as a user interface to data which is not paticularly well suited to the role but is a hack that works. I've seen spreadsheets mistreated this way many times and I've seen people suprised when some excel monster gets replaced in a week with something a lot easier to use, is an order of magnitude faster and does not have a problem with two different version every week due to people getting around file locking issues when they shouldn't.

The reason we get into these situations in the first place is one small project hacked together with spreadsheet macros grows without the benefit of any sort of planning.

Just because I disagree that your situation is necessary (it's a textbook case of the wrong tool for the job wasting a lot of everyone's time IMHO) does not mean that I didn't read the posts or am unintelligent.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

What part of "management requires reports in that format" did you not understand? Or did you expect us to just show them the raw database views?

Dan Aris

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[mhall119]

#1: DB2 is a quite capable database, you should have no trouble doing what you want within DB2 itself.

#2: By "on the database itself" I mean in the SQL query itself, or in temporary tables if necessary. You won't need to change the data stored in the database.

#3: SQL was made to do pretty much exactly this. You can sum up fields, grouped by another field, and programatically replace one value with another, depending on the content of yet a third.

#4: Not only are databases "capable" of running searches across multiple tables, this is exactly what any modern RDBMS is designed and optimized to do. There is no scenario I can think of where running such a search on Excel, which has no ability to index data or optimize queries, would be faster to run or easier to configure than a database.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[dbIII]

If necessary management needs to know there are other options once it becomes a time sink instead of a quick timesaving hack to misuse a spreadsheet this way - but most likely from somebody else.

There is usually somebody in an organization that informs management of the best ways to use computer resources - and unfortunately for you it appears they may have dropped the ball. If I suggested sending managers reports that were raw spreadsheets with more than sixty five thousand rows I would be laughed at. There is a lot of decent reporting software out there.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Corporate Troll]

Regarding point #2. He could use views, which are ideal datasources for reports.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[mgblst]

For something that is quick and simple, the use of a database is overkill. If you only need to make some quick changes to some data with >65k rows, then you will just be waising time and space using a database. Also, people have macros already setup to do some quite complex things, often procedures that have been forgotten since people have left. Changing this would be a real hassle.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[sabaco]

We would need to know more about your database schema, but there is almost certainly a way. Things like:

SELECT SUM(saletotal), store_id FROM allsales WHERE date >= 'Jan 1 2000' AND date = 'Jan 1 2000' AND allsales.date = 'Jan 1 2000' AND allsales.date each year in each region.

SELECT COUNT(allsales.saletotal), region.name, YEAR(allsales.date) FROM (allsales LEFT OUTER JOIN storeinfo ON allsales.store_id = storeinfo.id) LEFT OUTER JOIN region ON storeinfo.region_id = region.id WHERE allsales.model = 'Volt' GROUP BY region.name, YEAR(allsales.date) ORDER BY region.name;

If you can't do aggregate in DB2 with a YEAR function (I certainly didn't test it... and I know that at least in PostgreSQL it would actually be EXTRACT(YEAR FROM date) instead, or maybe TRUNCATE('month', date) depending on if you wanted year/month or just year) you could potentially use a temporary table to store all the years you are querying first, and then do a join with that instead. Something like SELECT tempyears.year ... LEFT OUTER JOIN tempyears ON tempyears.year = YEAR(allsales.date) or whatever.

I didn't test those queries or anything, but those are the sort of things you can do with SQL that would probably make your life easier, and SQL is very good at this sort of data processing. Your DBA ought to be able to tell you what actual syntax to use.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

Oh, it's worse than that...our application vendor didn't even use SQL DATE fields. They used 6-digit packed decimal fields, which were evidently hastily expanded to cope with Y2K (dates after 1999 are of the form 1yyMMdd).

And I don't think that what I'm trying to do is especially amenable to your suggestion even with DATE fields. Here's an example:

We have a table of classification codes and associated values, which are keyed by state, code, and effective date. For any given combination of state and code, there are likely to be at least a half-dozen to a dozen records with different dates, so if I want to figure out some of the values associated with a particular code, I need to find the record whose state = myState, code = myCode, and date is the greatest less than myDate (and myDate may very well be some time in the past).

I'll freely admit I'm no SQL guru; I've had exactly one database course and learned the rest on the job as required. But I've been trying off and on to come up with a way to do this on the DB side for at least 2 years now with no success...

Dan Aris

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[Mes]

A 1 mhz adc will take how long to fill up your spreadsheet with data? How about something more modern, 100mhz, 1ghz? The problem is these narrow minded programmers think people only want to use a spreadsheet to reconcile their checkbooks.

Who has a computer with less than 2gb these days? 64k rows.. what a joke.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[sabaco]

While that's an irritating way to do dates, it doesn't really make it that much harder. I'm actually an experienced DBA (among other things) so that probably helps a lot, but I can definitely see how you could construct such a query. It also might depend on what version of DB2 you are using, but I'd think something like this (I'm maybe not using db2 syntax, because I'm more familiar with MySQL and PostgreSQL, but it would be similar) :

SELECT somerecord.* FROM somerecord, states, codes WHERE somerecord.state_id = states.id AND states.name = 'mystate' AND somerecord.code_id = code.id AND code.type = 'mycode' AND date IN (SELECT MAX(date) FROM somerecord where somerecord.state_id = states.id AND somerecord.code_id = code.id AND date 'mydate');

It may also be that some "group by" statement would also help. Looking at that, I've thought of another way to do the same query:

SELECT somerecord.* FROM somerecord, states, codes WHERE somerecord.state_id = states.id AND states.name = 'mystate' AND somerecord.code_id = code.id AND code.type = 'mycode' AND date 'mydate' ORDER BY date DESC FETCH FIRST 1 ROWS ONLY;

In that case, we get the max date because were in descending order and selecting only 1 row.

Again, I don't know your schema, so I don't know how close or far that might be, but db2 supports subselects and row limits (in pgsql and mysql you'd say "limit 10" but in db2 it is "fetch first 10 rows only") so that means you can ask it for just about anything. It might require the joins to be written out (mysql and postgresql do implicit inner joins, I don't know if db2 wants them to be explicit) but either way you can still get the data.

If you wanted to get the most recent entry for each state/code combination (and get NULLs if there aren't any records), that isn't much harder (and I think this is correct db2 syntax here) :

SELECT states.name, codes.type, somerecord.* FROM (somerecord RIGHT OUTER JOIN states ON somerecord.state_id = states.id) RIGHT OUTER JOIN codes ON somerecord.code_id = code.id GROUP BY states.name, codes.type HAVING date = (SELECT MAX(date) FROM somerecord where somerecord.state_id = states.id AND somerecord.code_id = code.id AND date 'mydate') ;

The above should rerun the subselect once for each state/code to find the max dated entry. Depending on the schema, you also might end up using subselects with record ids, or using nested queries, or whatever, but SQL should be flexible enough to do almost anything you can imagine.

In the worst case, maybe you should think about hiring an experienced DBA you know as a consultant to help you with this. I'd at least need access to the schema, some sample data, and the expected output to match the sample data. ;)

Is it still designed for 1990's hardware?

[Mes]

Or can I finally open a spreadsheet with more than 256 columns or more than 65535 rows?

640k is enough for anyone right?

Re:Is it still designed for 1990's hardware?

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

...can I finally open a spreadsheet with more than 256 columns or more than 65535 rows?

Yes, you can. It has been expanded to 1024 columns.

From the beta list info

[Colin Smith]

This sounds more like a version 2.4 or 2.5 than a 3.0 release.

Still not going to accept OOXML Docs

[pembo13]

(Except for work where they provide Office) I am still happily going to return to sender any OOXM docs.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Is it any faster ???

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it any faster ???

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

What about OpenType font support?

[lorand]

I can't believe they got to 3.0 and there is still no OpenType font support...

ISO standard ODF support

[dpilot]

From TFBF (Beta Features):
> ODF 1.2 Support
>
> OpenOffice.org 3.0 already supports the features of the upcoming version 1.2 of
> the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF). ODF 1.2 includes a powerful formula
> language as well as a sophisticated metadata model based on the W3C standards
> RDF and OWL. ODF is being mandated and adopted in a growing number of countries.
> In addition; ODF is being implemented by many vendors for many different
> applications.

When criticism is leveled against MS Office 2007 for not complying with ISO OOXML, even in the newest code level, there is the rightful counter that OOffice is no better at compliance with ISO ODF.

This appears to correct that problem.

Re:ISO standard ODF support

[jhol13]

Actually no.

The ODF 1.2 is not ISO standard. Yet.

Were I extremely pedantic I could claim OOo3 no longer supports ISO standard ODF ... but that would be silly.

Akte & Abiword

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, who cares. When does the next version of Abiword come out?!

Where's the 64 bit support?

[CajunArson]

First the bad, I recently wiped out my Kubuntu install and went to the 64 bit version of 8.04 since I recently upgraded to a Core 2 machine. It's great, but the only 64 bit packages for openoffice are stuck at 2.4 (from Ubuntu). For an open-source project OO really needs to get on the ball with 64 bit package support!

I was using the development milestones before the firs official Beta came out and have been generally happy with the new version. However, the much advertised PDF import does not work yet and that would be a nice feature. I also have a wide screen monitor and the ability to look at two pages at once is a nice (and massively overdue) feature.

Re:Where's the 64 bit support?

[Arathon]

Yeah, I was hoping to install the beta (I have to deal with MS Office 2007 documents from time to time), but the .debs are for i386. I wonder if I can compile it for my system? Still...seems a little annoying.

OOBase ?

[jolyonr]

Does this still (for the lack of a better phrase) still suck donkey balls?

I have tried to use it on several occasions. I have one DB in it at the moment, but the OO V2 version is horrible in countless ways. Just searching a 2000 row database is painfully slow - yes, I know filters work better. But still, search should NOT be that slow, I struggle to think how on earth they've managed to write an application that can take 10 seconds to search for a text phrase in ONE FIELD of a database with only 2000 records. If you have a function that people are going to use, please make it work properly.

I used to hate Access too. I knew people who used Access databases on busy live web sites, so I have experienced ways in which Access can suck beyond the reaches of many mortals. But Open Office Base makes me want to go back to Access.

Oh, and yes, I know I'm mixing up DB engines (HSQLDB, JET) with the applications that use them, but the application is what the user (me) sees, so it inevitably takes the flak.

Jolyon

Key bindings (shortcut keys)

[crath]

Two points:

I agree that on each platform OO should support that platform's accepted/native key bindings. This must at least be a configurable option; should the OO team want to make some other set of bindings the default.

One of OO's previous lackings was the ability to use basic Emacs key bindings. Reconfiguring the product to do this was a pain in the butt, and no one in the extended user community had taken the time to create something. I'm not an Emacs-bigot, but with tens of thousands of Emacs users out there, why wouldn't you want to address that market segment?

Hopefull both of these issues are eventually addressed.

Re:Key bindings (shortcut keys)

[niiler]

Emacs key bindings??? Feh! Everyone knows that vi is better... Ducks to avoid the return fire...

Re:Key bindings (shortcut keys)

[ta bu shi da yu]

I don't think you need to duck from return fire... more skulk away as you serious asked for vi keybindings. Do you know what you are asking?!?

Here we go again

[bledri]

People who use macs -most people who use macs- don't know jack shit enough about computers to explain what's good or what's bad about the way MS does things.

Ad hominem attacks on an entire class of humans because they have different priorities and preferences. And this makes you smart, right? Brilliant.

Most people that use computers don't know jack shit about computers. And that's they way it should be. Just like most people that use cars, toasters, airplanes, microwaves, televisions and indoor plumbing don't know jack shit about those things.

BTW, Mac's support Ctrl-Click and Cmd-Click at all times and anyone that can't figure that out is a real freakin' genius. And the mighty mouse (the mouse Apple ships) has three buttons, a scroll ball and reacts to squeezing as well.

Please Arrange Some Usability Testing

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing that constantly annoys me about Open Office is the obvious lack of usability testing in the user interface. There are many many actions that simply require unnecessary and redundant, or millimeter accurate mouse movements and clicks. Extremely frustrating.

In this regard the product that Open Office is trying so hard to imitate does a much, much better job.

Qt4

[appelza]

Now if only they'd lose GTK and go with QT4. ;)

AppleWorks Filter?

[WindBourne]

I have an old neighbor that runs an emac that I help him with. He has moved on to OO, but still has loads of docs in Appleworks. I wonder if at least an input filter will be written?

Has the bloat been reduced?

[QuietLagoon]

The new version includes some great enhancements,

Open Office needs to go on a diet in a mjor way.

Re:Has the bloat been reduced?

[colourmyeyes]

Spot-on. I tried using OpenOffice on Linux and Windows for a year. It's too bloated and slow. Period.

Most users can live without all the whiz-bang features of MS Office; I could have for the year I tried using OO - but I could not stand the sloooooow load times and hanging when opening big files. As soon as I got Office 2003 running under Wine, I switched to that.

I desperately want to use something besides MS Office because I use Linux much more than Windows. If OOo is as fast as MS office I'll switch the second v3 hits the servers.

Re:Has the bloat been reduced?

[Beat The Odds]

Open Office needs to go on a diet in a mjor way.

Yah, maybe they can start by removing some vowels!

Re:Has the bloat been reduced?

[QuietLagoon]

Most users can live without all the whiz-bang features of MS Office; I could have for the year I tried using OO - but I could not stand the sloooooow load times and hanging when opening big files. As soon as I got Office 2003 running under Wine, I switched to that.

OpenOffice needs to stop trying to be a competitor of MS Office, and start being a useful piece of software that people not only want to use, but can use.

It's about being for the users, not against Microsoft Office.

Re. the git et al :-)

[cheros]

I'm with you that he went personal rather that try to retain a decent style of debate, but I do have some agreement with his argument that it's all a bit big. The main issue I see is that you may sit on top of a heap of horticultural fertilizer (to put it politely), and have little way of finding out.

The challenge is that you ARE sitting on top of a large program - the assorted calculations and decisions made in such a huge spreadsheet. Although it's not a "language", it does act as a large processing engine, and thus suffers the same problems of potential bugs hiding somewhere (and even before switching to OO I knew just how easy it is to accidentally allow Excel to "adjust" a formula (when you mess with row and column deletes/inserts). The difference with a "proper" language is that spreadsheets have near zero change control capability.

You're not alone in having this problem, BTW, it's a common risk factor in businesses that decisions are taken on data that is processed in basically an unaudited fashion - spreadsheets in critical business processes draw attention from any auditor worth his/her money..

You've switched to Office 2007 for a simple business reason: cool. However, from a risk management perspective you may want to start looking at a potentially more controllable way of handling so much data anyway. And when it's structurally and process wise sound (which I reckon to involve some query remodelling) you may find you no longer need a gazillion line spreadsheet.

Caveat: this assertion is naturally based on a total absence of knowledge of what you actually get up to with such a heap of data, it is after all Slashdot :-).

UI argument

[cheros]

I've got no problem what-so-ever with cloning-just wish the cloners paid half as much attention to UI as they do to the features.

That's funny, I've had a company switch to OOo precisely because of the UI. Their sound argument was that Open Source products in general do not change UI so quickly and dramatically, allowing staff to grow with the changes.

The reason for that is simple: FOSS doesn't need an argument other than improvement for a new version. It doesn't need UI drama to give a bunch of sales people an argument to sell a new version, so once staff has been retrained (as they would have been anyway for a new version of Windows -Vista- and Office -2007-) it was equally possible to switch to a Linux build with OO.

The showstopper was in the backoffice to adjust available skills in dev and support in time, so they went half way and switched to OOo only as test. I suspect they'll take the Linux step as well once they've seen how OOo worked for them, but that's at least half a year away.

Re:UI argument

[EvanED]

The reason for that is simple: FOSS doesn't need an argument other than improvement for a new version. It doesn't need UI drama to give a bunch of sales people an argument to sell a new version, so once staff has been retrained (as they would have been anyway for a new version of Windows -Vista- and Office -2007-) it was equally possible to switch to a Linux build with OO.

At the same time, how many FOSS programs do ANY formal usability studies, let alone put a few million dollars into them?

I think he means SQL

[Kupfernigk]

I'm not arguing about the validity or otherwise of the row limit, just making an observation because you haven't mentioned SQL as such. You say "I can do a lot of this through straight table queries", but it is quite possible that you can do the whole thing really quite elegantly with a little structured SQL and your ODBC link. The tool for the job is Access in the Microsoft world and OOo Base in the OOo world, but they both act as a translation layer between database and spreadsheet. I have been involved in database translation and linking now on and off for 20 years, and the simple fact is that Access does a better job than farting around with Excel. Once you output your spreadsheet you can do whatever you like with it. You also only need one copy of Access.

Even better than either is Filemaker. The latest version is truly the Swiss Army Knife of database conversion, extraction and analysis. Again you can treat it as pure middleware and pump the result out as Excel if that's what you want. The nice thing about Filemaker is that you can make your middle tier very robust and lock it down so you know no-one has messed with your data between the database and the presentation layer.

Personally, and this is just my prejudice and the way I work, I would never consider any solution that had a spreadsheet involved of more than a few thousand rows. It is just too fragile, too hard to audit and manage.

The fact is that at some point you run out of steam. In the past I have had to extract data from log files with over 1 million rows. I wouldn't use Excel. What is the cutoff point at which a spreadsheet becomes silly? There surely is one.

Can anyone tell me...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

... if adding a single word to the dictionary is still a three-click process?

Re:Can anyone tell me...

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

Answer: yes, yes it is.

Sigh, all this focus on features. Not speed &

[oxfletch]

So great. They've released some fancy new version with blah, blah and blah, none of which most people are terribly interested in.

Meanwhile, the thing is still a slow, bloated pig. Do we have to make efficiency some sort of feature, or provide fake goals and a shiny racetrack before people address the fundamentals?

Makes me sick to see open source apps follow the same fated trails as other bloatware

Reveal codes feature: Vote for it!

[denis-The-menace]

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3395

BTW: work has started on it.

Re:Reveal codes feature: Vote for it!

[MightyYar]

That's great news, but I won't get my hopes up since that bug was started in 2002! :)

Re:Reveal codes feature: Vote for it!

[denis-The-menace]

And is still active.
Last entry was May 3rd, 2008!

If the bug had 500+ votes maybe they would pay more attention to it.

Still no support for shared files

[baggins2001]

Looking at the release notes I still don't see support for Shared files. Until that is available most of my clients can't use it. On top of the fact that linux,XP,2000 with OO runs like 2007 on Vista.

drawing primitives

[ecbpro]

I read some long time ago that they were working really hard on the drawing primitives to improve graphics output for instance in impress. Does someone know if this will still be implemented in OOo3? I tested the beta but at the moment it is still not there :-(
This really keeps me from using Impress for presentations at work.

Summary so far:

[Anonymous Coward]

So lets see, we have a couple of extremely minor utilities (Transmission and Handbrake-without-GUI), a bunch of zealots claiming it is because Linux/C++/anythingnotmadebyapple suxx0rs, and some people debating whether look and feel counts (it doesnt, dumbasses).

Point proven, time to move on.

Use a mirror instead of /.ed official server

[Anonymous Coward]

Quick tip:

Use a mirror, the official server is rather slashdotted and only gives ~20kb/s while a nearby mirror easily can give you speeds like 1mb/s

Re:Hang in there guys - Stern Chase

[Maxo-Texas]

OOo will frequently lack features in word... it's in a stern chase after all.

However, OOo is FREE and will only get better.

Most new Microsoft Word features are pretty obscure on the other hand and some of the recent changes make it harder to use.

M$ Word is a GREAT product.. that
* Costs a lot of money for most (tho I can get it legally for $20)
* Has planned obsolescence
* Can't read older word documents that OOo can.
* Crashes reading corrupted word documents which OOo *easily* reads and fixes.

---

Now...
The kicker is this...
I recently finally made the change over to OOo as of 2.4. Already, there are some things which are so much cleaner and so much more logical that I miss those features when I bring up word. Word just does some things nonsensically due to its history.

And already, there are some features in OOo which I miss in M$ Word (the cropping is SOOOOOO much easier and clearer in OOo than word-- working feels cleaner too).

---

So Ooo is like 9/9/9/10/9/10 while word is 10/10/9/9/10/10. Both are very good-- Both are better in some areas.
When you consider price, drm, and obsolescence tho OOo 10, M$ 1.

OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[zooblethorpe]

I'll ditto encoderer here:

...it's just that for most people compatibility no longer an issue.

Plus, there's one feature that really belongs more in the "Basic Functionality" category, and that's accurate word and character counting. As documented on the OOo bug list for some years now, any combination of double-byte Asian text + regular single-byte alphanumeric text results in "word" counts that are worse than useless. A number of Asian languages do not count by "word" so much as by character (and for that matter there still isn't much agreement as to what exactly is a "word" in Japanese). OOo gives a total "word" count for either the document or selection, but does not break out any included Asian text -- which MS Word does, and has done for longer than I can clearly remember (starting maybe with MSO 97?). This makes OOo a non-starter for anyone working with such Asian languages in any situation that requires counts -- which includes just about all academic and professional use.

There's a sample .odt file included in the bug report (direct linky) that clearly spells out the differences in how the two apps count from a UI perspective (can't speak to the internals). I'd love to pitch in with the coding, but I sadly cannot afford the time and energy required to dig through OOo's extraordinarily convoluted API documentation to figure out how to update the source code myself; I started the process, but gave up in disgust at how the docs are organized. I've still got MSO, so until such time as the OOo team can get around to fixing this long-standing bug, and / or produce more sensible API docs, I'll keep using Word.

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[cecil_turtle]

there still isn't much agreement as to what exactly is a "word" in Japanese If this is the case then how can you be sure that MS Word does it accurately? How does this not contradict your own statement?

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[Niggle]

Plus, there's one feature that really belongs more in the "Basic Functionality" category, and that's accurate word and character counting.

Unfortunately, you're actually getting into a very grey area here. The generally accepted rule is that 80% of your users will only ever use 20% of the functionality. The problem is that while 15 of that 20% is the same for everybody, the last 5% is different.

So you might consider word counts to be a basic feature. I, on the other hand, have been using various flavours of word processors for something like 20 years and have never used a word count. Nor do I anticipate ever having to use one. If they said that feature was being removed from 00o (or Word) to reduce bloat, I wouldn't miss it.

Word counts are a feature that is often mentioned in reviews if it's not perfect because it is a feature that is important to the sort of person who writes reviews for magazines. It's important to them because they often have a word limit for an article. For most home, academic or business use, a word count is a completely useless feature because there are no word limits.

As another example, I don't know how people cope without something like OOo's navigator. But 90% of the program's users have probably looked at it once (to see what the button did) then ignored it.

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[WWWWolf]

I'd love to pitch in with the coding, but I sadly cannot afford the time and energy required to dig through OOo's extraordinarily convoluted API documentation to figure out how to update the source code myself; I started the process, but gave up in disgust at how the docs are organized.

Wow, you actually found documentation? I tried writing an OO.o macro once. I have almost gotten back my sanity now. =)

But anyway, there's one part where OO.o differs from Word: Documents are not coupled to the application. You don't have to use OO.o to process OpenDocument.

Theoretically, it'd not be that difficult to whip up an external application that does various word count methods - after all, there's several word count methods for English too! (Some divide character count by six, some pick a page from the middle of the manuscript, multiply lines by average line length, then multiply by number of pages in manuscript, etc, etc...)

I've written a word count tool for my own use for LaTeX text myself in 15 minutes... and there's a bunch of libraries for parsing OO.o. How hard can it be? =)

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[sm62704]

Most people in the Americas, Europe, Australia, Middle East and Africa have no use for Asian characters, so this bug doesn't affect us. If yo uneed accurate word counts using Asian characters then you should indeed buy, pirate, or shoplift a copy of Word.

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[zooblethorpe]

Unfortunately, you're actually getting into a very grey area here. The generally accepted rule is that 80% of your users will only ever use 20% of the functionality. The problem is that while 15 of that 20% is the same for everybody, the last 5% is different.

So you might consider word counts to be a basic feature. I, on the other hand, have been using various flavours of word processors for something like 20 years and have never used a word count. Nor do I anticipate ever having to use one.

Judging from your comment here, you are very likely not engaged in any professional or academic field related to writing. Academically speaking, to stretch my memory a bit, my college profs required that papers be so long in terms of word counts rather than page counts, as page counts can be more easily munged by futzing with font sizes and line widths. My Japanese academic work required that papers / translations be within or at least so many characters. Professionally speaking, my own field of J-E translation requires that I bill based on either the source Japanese character count, or the target English word count (depends on the client). Many other professional types of writing either bill or have other constraints on documentation based on word / character counts. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that these areas constitute more than just 20% of any potential word processor userbase. One might also make the point that, since these areas are by definition more specific to getting serious work done (i.e. not just casual use), they might be worth a heavier weighting when prioritizing the development of word processor functionality.

If they said that feature was being removed from 00o (or Word) to reduce bloat, I wouldn't miss it.

It beggars the imagination how something as simple as word / character counting could possibly constitute "bloat", given how uncomplicated the code should be. :) In my mind, bloat would be something more like Clippy, or the research "helper" functions in Word, or "smart" tags -- complicated functionality of rather limited utility that attempts to second-guess the user's intent. Second-guessing by its very nature is code-intensive, as you basically have to try to come up with all kinds of possible user scenarios and code them in. Counting is dumb-monkey straightforward by comparison.

Cheers,

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[zooblethorpe]

Most people in the Americas, Europe, Australia, Middle East and Africa have no use for Asian characters, so this bug doesn't affect us.

Fair enough. But if OOo really wants to eat MSO's lunch, it needs to cover at least the same bases. And don't forget, the number of people worldwide using these Asian languages comes to somewhere around 20% of the global population. That's a rather large chunk of the potential userbase to ignore. OOo already seems to have some sort of language detection built in; extending the counting functionality to break down Western vs Asian counts similarly to MS Word would theoretically be relatively trivial -- count up the double-byte chars in the document and exclude spaces. Issue 17964 itself has been on the books for almost five years now, and the CJK-specific comments have been part of the public record for over three years. No dev has even deigned to comment on when this relatively simple enhancement might be added, aside from marking the issue with the extremely vague "later" category. Plus, IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is apparently based to a significant extent on OOo code, appropriately breaks down counts to show Western vs Asian stats (and accurately does not include whitespace in the Asian character count). This makes me think the problem is not in the OOo codebase itself, so much as in some other aspect of how the OOo project is put together -- perhaps the poorly organized API docs, internal dev organization, prioritization, or politics, or some other factors.

I can definitely understand the decision to ignore certain areas of functionality when a project is young and still getting its foundation put in place. But OOo itself has been around for almost eight years, and the preceding StarOffice app was begun back in 1994, with the still-older ancestor StarWriter stretching all the way back to well before even the IBM PC. I'd say it's bloody well time OOo moved beyond core functionality. If the core is such a mess that this is still impossible so many years later, that speaks very poorly of the project...

Cheers,

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[zooblethorpe]

Wow, you actually found documentation? I tried writing an OO.o macro once. I have almost gotten back my sanity now. =)

Start at the API project homepage, and dig down from there. But it's still rather hideously organized, all apparently put together not to be useful for coders, but rather from a software architect perspective, with modules, services, and interfaces all separately documented so that it's nearly impossible to figure out what you can do once you have an object of type X -- basic questions are left unanswered, such as what are its properties or methods. I find it a rather glaring shortcoming that after so many years, the best tool for figuring out the OOo API is still a third-party macro (the X-Ray tool by Bernard Marcelly).

But anyway, there's one part where OO.o differs from Word: Documents are not coupled to the application. You don't have to use OO.o to process OpenDocument.

< ... snip ... />

I've written a word count tool for my own use for LaTeX text myself in 15 minutes... and there's a bunch of libraries for parsing OO.o. How hard can it be? =)

I may look into that, thanks. I'm a sole-prop and thus have precious little free time, but I am *very* interested in getting myself completely free of the MS tax. The lack of any sane counting functionality in OOo has been one major stumbling block, so it'd be quite nice indeed to remove that particular obstacle. :)

Cheers,

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[Niggle]

Judging from your comment here, you are very likely not engaged in any professional or academic field related to writing.

Correct. When I was back in academia, I was usually page count limited because my work tended to include lots of diagrams and tables (astronomy). Most publications had standard templates for font size, layout etc, so you couldn't fudge the page count that way. These days, the stuff I write for work tends to be program documentation, feasibility reports etc. which are as long as they need to be. All of which means that a word count was (and is), for me, a pointless feature.

Professionally speaking, my own field of J-E translation requires that I bill based on either the source Japanese character count, or the target English word count (depends on the client). Many other professional types of writing either bill or have other constraints on documentation based on word / character counts. I could well be wrong, but I strongly suspect that these areas constitute more than just 20% of any potential word processor userbase.

Word counts are probably a commonly used feature where the writing itself is the product. Most business use is probably closer to my use because the writing is merely a by-product of the business.

I guess the only way to know for sure how many people use a given feature would be for the package to maintain use counts of the various features and report them back at regular intervals. Then everybody here on /. could all have a good moan about how evil {insert package name here} is because it phones home and reports stuff about you once a week. :)

Without that sort of feedback, the developers are really just guessing which features are priorities. So the decision gets made on other criteria such as: their usage, their PHB's usage or the number of votes the bug has got on the OOo website.

It beggars the imagination how something as simple as word / character counting could possibly constitute "bloat", given how uncomplicated the code should be. :)

I wasn't seriously suggesting it was. Just that I wouldn't miss it. The 20% of the program features that I use don't include it. Equally, I'm sure I could find features that I consider utterly essential that you have never used.

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[sm62704]

But if OOo really wants to eat MSO's lunch, it needs to cover at least the same bases

That's true, but as OO is Sun's baby they can worry about stealing candy from Steve Ballmer. I'm a user, I'd like to see some true interoperability between Microsoft and the rest of the computing world.

You do make valid points when it comes to "market".

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[zooblethorpe]

Word counts are probably a commonly used feature where the writing itself is the product. Most business use is probably closer to my use because the writing is merely a by-product of the business.

Good point, and succinctly put.

I guess the only way to know for sure how many people use a given feature would be for the package to maintain use counts of the various features and report them back at regular intervals.

I wonder if anyone has seriously done any such implementation? MSO and Firefox both have their "phone home after a crash" optional functionality, but I've never delved too deeply into these. Do either of them include data on program usage, in addition to a simple dump at crash time?

Then everybody here on /. could all have a good moan about how evil {insert package name here} is because it phones home and reports stuff about you once a week. :)

But then that would probably depend on who made the app, and how easy it is to opt out of phoning home. :)

Cheers,

OOo Writer 3.0 beta: the same old problems

[temcat]

Just downloaded the beta to check what has changed since I last tried OOo. Not much as far as I can see.

1) Bullet/numbered lists.
- Still cannot quickly (one mouse drag) change spacing between the text and its bullet/number. Something I can do in Abiword.
- "Clear formatting" does not clear the bullet/number.

2) Still no Normal mode.

3) Keyboard Shortcuts
- Still limited shortcut selection.
- Still assign a shortcut to a special character without recording a macro.

4) The new notes implementation is actually a step back.
- Word compatibility hasn't improved here. You cannot collaborate with people using Word when they use notes. Even if you don't change their notes, not all content is preserved.
- Now I can only see a note on a special page margin, instead of having it as a special markup in text with an option to read it on demand. Moreover, this margin increases with text zoom in Web Layout mode (WTF?)!
- Still cannot assign a note to a range of text.

5) Still cannot search and replace text with a specific named style.

And all of this is only after a cursory look, there is probably much more.

Open Office is swell but...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why people here get so cranked up about Open Office Writer features. I hate word processors. I've always hated word processors. I will likely always hate word processors. LaTeX has been out for forever and a day. Once you go that route, word processors become downright annoying and cludgy.

I like spreadsheets for some things. In the past, I've bumped into Calc's row limit, which used to be higher on Excel. Excel is, in my opinion, the best thing Microsoft has *ever* done. They can keep the rest of their garbage and shove it up their ass! Oh and give me all my money back for selling me operating system licenses I never used because I couldn't buy a laptop all those years without their shit on it.

Impress is good, wish it had more clip art and shit. What am I saying? I don't give presentations unless it from my IDE with an application demo.

Anyway. Great job to the Open Office team and a sincere thanks for their hard work. It's much appreciated by many people.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Aqua - LaunchD, etc...

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple:

LaunchD
Bonjour (Dynamic DNS Stuff (mDNS))
iCal Server

Thats just a few

Good point - many eyeballs?

[cheros]

I think it depends a bit on how formal a formal study is. Given the "effectiveness" of those usability studies I'm not too unhappy with the state of OO. It tends to amuse me to read the claims that new software UI will save "minutes per day" where the efficiency drain in having to retrain people is totally ignored in that calculation, so maybe I've gone a bit cynical after 25 years of computing.

In the days of IBM AT (286) I had to code for people that were actually *scared* of computers. I can tell you that that teaches you about usability, wel before that became a sales argument :-).

The nice thing about open source based development is that it's partially merit driven. If a UI is stupid you can either throw a verbal brick at the developers or suggest an alternative. The latter approach might even be listened to if it's sensible. Does that replace a proper study? Don't know, but as said before, it seems to work for me and a number of people I convinced to give it a try.

So IMHO the jury's still out on that one. I find Vista and Office 2007 prove that throwing buckets of money at it isn't working either. Vist has the worst UI for an OS I've ever had my hands on. The tragic bit is that some FOSS people still think they have to copy it, even when it's bad. The new KDE menu is IMHO thus also a step in the wrong direction.

Re:Good point - many eyeballs?

[story645]

The nice thing about open source based development is that it's partially merit driven. But it's still audience based, which is gonna skew the feedback. My major problem with the openoffice UI is that there's no learning curve-most of it's functionality is right there; it sounds like a good thing, but actually creates problems by a)making it almost as difficult to do basic tasks as it is to do complicated ones b)cluttering up the front screens. Basically, I want a UI that thinks I'm dumber than I really am, and I just can't see some of the opensource crowd going for that.

What, no ribbon?

[gravis777]

How the heck am I supposed to get used to these Text menus? I need a ribbon!

Re:Sigh, all this focus on features. Not speed &am

[barzok]

Perofrmance is one of the reasons I gave up on OOo/NeoOffice and took advantage of the Home Use program my employer offers as part of our MS licensing deal. $20 for MacOffice 2008 is a better value to me than OOo/NeoOffice right now. I can't reliably open Word documents for my wife using NeoOffice, and the whole suite is just a pig. Plus the graphing in the spreadsheet is more trouble than it needs to be as compared to Excel.

New Good Stuff?

[bigal123]

Nice to see this out. However I am disappointed that PDF import even when it is ready will only be added as an extension. It should be part of the core. I was also hoping for a few more big features. Even the improved Crop feature in Draw/Impress was a feature that a developer did as a side job in is free time http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/improved_picture_cropping_for_draw Will 3.0 include some of the features that were forked off with Go-OO http://go-oo.org/ ? ie: -SVG support - So we can import Inkscape documents ... remember SVG is a standard also. -MS-Works import - This would be nice as many home users use this as it cost less then MS Office -Improved EMF rendering - I have not done this in a while but EMF quality was poor -WordPerfect Graphics import -GStreamer integration -Rich fields support - some of the features OOo people said they would not support. -Other Go-oo features I am not trying to start a turf war, but there are some nice features. I would think that there might be time to integrate some of existing code i.e. Works support etc into OOo before 3.0 is final. AS the other features have been sitting in Go-oo they might be considered stable enough to port back to OOo at this beta stage.

Re:Looks like my favorite new feature isn't there

[Tweenk]

Use Inkscape 0.46.

Time to move out of your parents' basement

[Safety Cap]

I don't understand why people think that OpenOffice gets better the more it's like MS Office.
-- TofuMatt (1105351)

It is because it is ANNOYING to have to learn how to do the same thing two different ways. As most folks expressed, MS Office is the standard in the corporate world.

Phanboiz don't get that just because it is MS, it doesn't mean that the interface is done the "wrong" way—and vice-versa. In fact, doing the interface the MS way IS the right way to do it, because THAT IS THE CONVENTION.

MS: Everyone drive on the right side of the road.
OO: your teh sux!!!!11 the left syd is bettr!!!
MS: Every commercially-made vehicle is configured at the factory to drive on the right side of the road, and everyone learns how to drive this way.
OO: i dont kare? you dont doo it right cause if your right handed then it is easier to drive on the left so thats better okay!
MS: Look, everyone has been driving on the right for 20 years. We've done usability studies and double-blind testing to verify this is more efficient.
OO: your teh sux!!! mie cars will drive on the left only and youll be eaten mai dust!!! because mai cars are freefreefree as in beer lololol wtf?
MS: Good luck with that.
OO: mai car is v. 3.0 now so youll see every1 will want some and youll crycrycry
MS: What are you, 12?
OO: shutup!!!!!!!1 your gonnna be sory!

HTML

[belmolis]

I wish that the OO folks would improve the HTML that it exports. It is way too verbose, hard to read and modify, and because it uses so much low-level presentation markup, stylesheets have little effect on it. It also doesn't correspond as well as it should to the document as rendered by Writer or to what the PDF output looks like.

Mac Whiners

[superslacker87]

You know, you are getting more than Microsoft ever offered to you to pay for. What comes with the Mac version of OOo? Everything, including Base. What comes with the Mac version of Office 2008? I certainly don't see Access anywhere in the list. FileMaker Pro costs a pretty penny to get database support.

MS Office 2008 for Mac: $314.99
FileMaker Pro: $274.99
OpenOffice.org: $0.00

We have a winner folks. If I owned a Mac, I'd be more than happy to pay $0 versus $589.98. But if you still want to go the latter route, at least Amazon will ship it to you for free.

Where are Olap Cubes, COM, Interop?

[grusin]

What about olap cubes? I can't access them in OO, but I can in excel, when will that change? :) As for me, that's the most important thing - everything I need is working now. There is one more thing, what about compatible-excel-like com interoperability, so that it could just use OO Calc instead of excel in my applications?

Re:Hang in there guys - Stern Chase

[Anonymous Coward]

* Costs a lot of money for most (tho I can get it legally for $20) Military? If it weren't for the same reason above plus being able to get XP for free through my university, I wouldn't have anything but Ubuntu installed. Alas, my university requires Microsoft Bloatware.

Visual rendering of Word docs remains rubbish

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition to the 65k row limit in Calc. Another absurdity is why OO can't quite manage to render a doc in the same way Word does.

I'll use Word over Writer, simply because I'm sick of reformatting every .doc I come across.

Still no x error bars

[Phyrexicaid]

So now you can apparently select a range of error bars, but only y error bars. You *still* cannot set up x error bars! I love OO, but it's really annoying to have to use another graphing program when this one would do what I need it to with a bit of tweaking.

CJK texts counted by character instead of "word"

[zooblethorpe]

Chinese, Japanese, and Korean texts are pretty much never counted by word -- they are counted by character (or syllable in the case of Korean), not including whitespace. This is standard in both academic and professional settings. MS Word appropriately separates Asian and Western counts, and the Asian count does not include whitespace. OOo's character count does include whitespace, rendering it stupidly error-prone even for Asian-only text samples.

If you're at all interested in how the two counts work out, even just in terms of idle curiosity, please look at the .odt file included in the bug report (links: Issue 17964 bug report, Asian Count Sample.odt)

Re:Hang in there guys - Stern Chase

[Maxo-Texas]

Major corporation.

Corp spends a few million a year on M$ so we all get the top 8-10 M$ products for physical production costs for use at home. Actually, i think we get it below physical production costs.

Supporting 1.2 doesn't mean not supporting pre-1.2

[DragonWriter]

Were I extremely pedantic I could claim OOo3 no longer supports ISO standard ODF ... but that would be silly.

That would not seem to be extremely pedantic so much as extremely wrong. While OOo3 does support ODF 1.2 which is not yet an ISO standard, it does not do so exclusively. There is a drop down in the Options UI to select the ODF version to use.