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Open Office Plans To Party Like It's Version 3.0
penguin_dance writes "The Register reports that 'OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October' to celebrate eight years, and hopefully announce the release of version 3.0. Some notes: [OpenOffice.org 3.0] will support the OpenDocument Format 1.2 standard, and be able to open files created by MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X." As maj_id10t notes, though the OO.o site does not yet carry an announcement, "Lifehacker has posted an entry stating the final release of OpenOffice 3.0 is available for download via their distribution mirrors."
There is such a huge difference in features and usability that there is no way that OpenOffice would gain any ground over Microsoft, in my opinion.
I'm not a big fan of OpenOffice myself and I can't really say anything about features, but to praise MS Office's usability seems utterly absurd to me.
I am reasonably computer-savy, but if I have to do anything more complicated than typing a really simple letter, Word drives me up the wall. It constantly feels like I have to work against it, instead of having it do work for me.
Same thing in Excel: I'd rather use pencil & paper or write my own scripts instead for every calculation I have to do, than trying to get Excel to do anything that even remotely resembles what I want it to do
Mind you, I'm not saying OO is any better in that respect. I'm just saying it can hardly be any worse
I'm always sceptical when people talk about using OO seriously with "no problems".
It's strange that so many people on Slashdot make claims like this, yet for me and various people I know in real life, basic things like sorting in OO Calc seem to fail on any non-trivial spreadsheet. Heck, I even got the Undo command not to undo simple find-and-replace changes properly the other day.
And have they fixed the font embedding that kills PDF export from Writer yet? It's only been a bug since forever, with more votes than almost anything else in the bug tracker.
As long as this sort of thing is going on, usability isn't even an issue: OO isn't even useful for more than throwaway work, and it actually seems to be getting worse in the 2.x series to the point that it's not even useful for much throwaway work either.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Apple's got some intereting ideas in terms of Office Applications. They don't highly tout iWork, or even promote it that much, despite the fact that it shows quite a bit of promise.
Keynote is hands-down the best presentation app out there.
Numbers is considerably more intuitive than Excel, with its vastly superior UI. A few minor features are missing, though it's really a joy to work with.
Pages is the enigma of the bunch. Apple seems to want to combine the roles of the layout app with the word processor (Publisher vs. Word). They seem to have done a pretty remarkable job at the layout part, though the word-processing bits could still use some work. It's "different" enough that users might have a tough time getting used to it.
More importantly.... none of the apps are trying to mimic Office, OoO, or AppleWorks. If OoO tried to be daring for once, and adopted a completely new set of paradigms, rather than mimicking MS Office, they might actually have a compelling product. For now, though, it's a second-rate knockoff of an already mediocre product.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Do yourself a favor and learn LaTeX. Yes, it has a learning curve and you need lots of documentation and/or an internet connection to know which packages you need but at least it provides consistent results, doesn't reformat half of your text on a whim and isn't nearly as frustratingly annoying as any Word-like program.
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