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."

Comments

Re:Openoffice? no thanks.

[neuromanc3r]

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

Using OpenOffice with no problems?!

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:Using OpenOffice with no problems?!

[markdavis]

I represent over 150 business users that use ONLY OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheet, etc, and I can attest that we do use it seriously with very few problems. Your comment is way-over-the-top wrong.

Are there some missing things that we would like to see? Sure. But that hardly justifies "isn't even useful for more than throwaway work".

Re:Using OpenOffice with no problems?!

[markdavis]

We do everything that a typical business would tend to do with it. Our company newsletter (8 pages, with lots of graphics, columns, frames), wiring diagrams, signs, letters, budgets, expense analysis, small databases, manuals, pdf exports, data parsing, inservice presentations, flowcharts, labels, dealing with lots of Emailed .doc, .xls, and .ppt's, etc.

Are there some bugs? Yes. Although we have not hit any that have prevented normal use or to cause us to not trust OO. But having conversed with MS-Office users- they have bugs also. There are bugs in just about every huge/complex program on any platform.

And I have reported some of those bugs and (as you also said) watched some of those bugs not get corrected over years. However, they don't prevent us from using the software, "seriously", for many years.

Re:Openoffice? no thanks.

[Jesus_666]

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.

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.