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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."
Actually, I recently tried the release candidate for the OS X Aqua version. It's horribly ugly (just like on other platforms), but it does seem to work.
Yup. And since Microsoft has dropped the only compelling feature that set Office for Mac apart from other office suites (VBA macros) and STILL hasn't made Entourage into a first-class Exchange client, OpenOffice 3 is now just as good (though not quite as good looking). Grats, OO.o team; adios, billg.
0 1 - just my two bits
Having made an honest effort for more than a year to switch to something other than MSOffice (removed MSOffice from Vista and installed OpenOffice, also installed NeoOffice on Mac), I have recently gone back to MSOffice.
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.
OpenOffice was an absolute torture. I had originally expected that after moving to OpenOffice, I would be able to convince everyone else in my office to make a move as well (eventually).
I guess that takes care of that.
OO.org works pretty well me but I am not really a big user.
I would love to see a feature list.
Also I would really like to see Base fleshed out. Or at least better documented.
I have tired to play with it but it just makes me nuts.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Doesn't Word have kerning disabled by default? What do you recommend to people now? LaTeX?
It is wonderful that we have a native intel Mac OS X version(I know the neooffice people try, but it has not been stable for me). Thanks to the developers. My question is will there continue to be an X windows build for PPC macs. The PPC macs still have a good year or two years left in them, given that we will not see snow leopard for 12-18 months. It would be nice to have a version of OO.org to run them.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
The PPC version is hidden away with one of the openoffice "Projects" -- click on the projects tab, and then you're on your own, but eventually you get to an ftp site. I've found it to be very stable in light use (I mostly use the Linux version).
I believe they're adding VBA back next version. And if you want something native, Apple has iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I use OO.o daily. 3.0 has some major improvements, and you should check it out.
I largely prefer OO.o Writer to MS Word now that OO.o Writer has better commenting and revision control. I can rely on it for 99% of my work, but I find I still sometimes switch to Word under Wine if I get a manuscript that uses EndNote (rather than Zotero) or very complex embedded equations.
I have grown used to Impress. PowerPoint users might still have grips. I prefer LaTeX Beamer, but sometimes need to make or read PowerPoint presentations & Impress gets the job done.
The new solver in Calc makes it more useful. I think I prefer Gnumeric still & find myself breaking out stronger data analysis or data presentation programs.
Like any other piece of software, there are things you feel like you couldn't live without and things you have to get used to. I remember it felt clunky when I first started using it, but that went away very quickly. Some things are more elegant than in MSOffice, some less. I've been using v3.0 for a while now (beta and fc releases), and I like it quite a bit. One of the big clunkinesses, the graphical depiction of comments/notes, is now very nice. There are still some screen rendering oddities that don't get in my way but do contribute to the impression of clunkiness. On the whole, I imagine it's still clunkier than its commercial counterpart, but the gap is narrowing. However, I rarely edit documents that are more than a few hundred pages long, and I know many of OO's critics say that its shortcomings are especially obvious if you work on long documents. So I can't comment on that.
How has MSOffice come along in the same time? Is pdf writing integrated now? Do files still bloat to ridiculous sizes on repeated editing?
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.
Miscellaneous Features
I cofounded a company last year and we decided to use Office 2007 since we're consulting with clients.
Wow it's been bad. Office 2007 has been a nightmare (endless bugs--crashing when accepting revisions, randomly moving to the top of the document as I'm paging through it, etc.), and interoperability with clients hasn't been as important as we thought.
I can't wait to use 3.0 in the office.
NeoOffice bases itself from Novell's go-oo semi-fork so it inherits the extra features of that version. They are working on NeoOffice 3 which will employ the 3.0 codebase but it is unclear to me whether or not they are still going to use Java to implement the UI. In any case, losing the need for X11 isn't the only reason for NeoOffice. If you want the solver, various import filters that the Sun branch doesn't include, or bugfixes the NeoOffice team have had trouble getting Sun to include then NeoOffice will still be worth a look.
Correct me if I'm wrong,but doesn't Open office have a VBA converter? I remember awhile back when I was using Star Office that they had one and since Star Office is based on Open Office I figured they both had it.
That said I never really got the whole embedding code in a document bit. It seems like if your users got used to having code running in a document that it would be a lot easier to pass them a .doc filled with nasty exploits,and why not just,you know,build a damned app to do the job? We've had VB6 and VB.NET for years and both can whip off an app pretty damned quick. And then you aren't tied to a document reader/writer simply to run your code.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I just download 3.0 out of the stable directory on the CS Utah mirror and it shows as OOO300m9 (same as RC4)build 9358.
I tried the PDF import plugin, but it doesn't give me any options and imports it directly as a slideshow with messed up text.
Look at issue 43029.
Notice that it is classified as a feature request rather than a bug and its target milestone is only 3.2, despite being first created more than three years ago, having over 200 votes, and numerous comments on this issue and its various duplicates showing how it's a complete showstopper for using most professional grade fonts with PDF export.
This bug has become the standard counter-example in on-line discussions to all the OSS advocacy that claims many eyes make all bugs shallow, products will naturally develop according to users' needs because people can contribute their own patches, etc.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Then, as a pretty sharp Unix programmer, why don't you make a better looking interface? I think his point still holds water.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Know what I enjoy when I'm using a piece of productivity software like OpenOffice? Getting my work done so I can go do something else.
The computer is a tool. Especially when using something like office productivity software. I don't sit around pondering the color scheme of my screw drivers, or whether or not my wrenches "go with" my hammer. Likewise, I don't spend time contemplating the visual attractiveness of OpenOffice. It lets me get my work done, that's good enough as far as I'm concerned.
Maybe not
And if you want something native, Apple has iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
Meh. I use Keynote as my main presentation software, but I am thinking of switching back to PPT. It is very easy to use, and looks great, but when you're going to a conference, you end up exporting to PPT anyway, and then you have to edit that PPT in Powerpoint to fix all the things that didn't make the jump. It's wonderful if you're sure that your laptop is going to work perfectly.
BUT
Pages is useless. No, I don't really mean that... It has a lot of nice features. I love the layout of the way it handles comments and changes for collaborative document creation. I like its styles sidebar (unlike the tiny little shitty "Inspector" in Word). It has a very nice, non-obtrusive-but-powerful UI (as one would expect, from Apple). But it just plain can't do tables for shit. This, actually, is also why I didn't use OO.o on Windows, and why I couldn't switch to Linux when I got off Windows. Nothing does tables with the power and flexibility of Word.
And Numbers? Seriously, now. It's a toy. And, worse still, it follows that evil design philosophy that says spreadsheets are a way to make pretty tables. They aren't. They're calculating and information manipulation machines. When I'm in Excel, there's no mistaking the fact that I'm working with information. I only engage the formatting tools to keep information straight. They should never be fronted.
Finally, however, what prevents iWork from being a viable alternative to MS Office is the same thing that stymies OO.o: It isn't MS Office. It just plain makes no sense to use these products in any context where someone else might need to work on them. Unless you ran a company and could set the standard, neither are a real option. I get away with using Keynote, but that's it.
Both iWork and OO.o have some really compelling features that I miss in MS Office, but ultimately, MS Office runs the world. And I, at least, am forced to live in the world.
YMMV.
You might want to try out KOffice2 which is going to be released in a few months.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
OK, so I give it a try for the first time since I switched back to non-free OS world (many, many years ago).
The good: it is about 1 million times faster and more polished than 1.x iterations.
The yummy: the perspective of writing macros in Python instead of craptacular VBA
The puzzling... and maybe the ugly: I have yet to find a way to set OOo locale to "system locale".
Microsoft did a pretty good job with the regional settings, allowing for a lot of customization. Very useful for people who juggle with around 4-5 languages on a daily basis (with accents, chinese characters, and other oddities) and like to have a very customized "common ground" locale. I like to be able to write my dates ANSI style, separate my 3 digit groups with spaces, count in meters, use $ as a currency symbol, and then some.
It is just natural that an office suite should inherit all those settings from the OS (or at least provide a setting to do so).
And so far, it appears that OOo does not have this basic functionality? The "default" option actually sets the application locale to the same used for localizing menus (i.e. if the application menus are in en_US, then the standard en_US locale - including units, date, number formats) will be used...
Looks like I am stuck with Excel for quite a while then.
It should be noted that OO.o is not especially OSS-ish in terms of its history and evolution. OpenOffice is Sun's FOSS release of code(starting in 2000) from Staroffice, which Sun acquired with its purchase of StarDivision in 1999. In StarDivision's hands, the StarOffice line goes as far back as a word processor running on a Z80 with CP/M.
.doc and friends is quite nice to have; but my hopes are greater for the OpenDocument format that OpenOffice helped bring about than for OpenOffice itself. Unlike the case of FF vs. IE, were IE sucked horribly and encouraged nonstandard web development, OO.o vs. Word is important because .doc is a proprietary mass of lockin, and standards are needed; but Word is a much more competent product than IE ever was.
I am very grateful that Sun released OpenOffice, having a FOSS way to interact with
You must be a project manager.
.
When you live within an office suite for nine hours out of twenty-four, six days out of seven, the UI matters.
Version 3 has the ability to edit pdf - that could be a killer feature.
Why? PDFs are useful for distributing material in a reliable way. They have never been designed to be an easily editable format, other than for forms and the like perhaps, and it would be crazy to start treating them as such.
Also, in case you didn't realise, PDF export from Word is available as a freebie plug-in from MS in Word 2007, and it doesn't have all the font bugs OO Writer has! (See my earlier posts in this discussion for details.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
[PDFs] have never been designed to be an easily editable format, other than for forms and the like perhaps, and it would be crazy to start treating them as such.
Forms are exactly what I had in mind. In the last week I've used Openoffice to fill in a pdf criminal records check form and an thirteen (!!) page professional license application form.
When you live within an office suite for nine hours out of twenty-four, six days out of seven, you should find a new job.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Nothing does tables with the power and flexibility of Word....worse still, it follows that evil design philosophy that says spreadsheets are a way to make pretty tables.
I'm confused -- your complaint is that the word processor won't let you build pretty tables, but also that the spreadsheet does?
It just plain makes no sense to use these products in any context where someone else might need to work on them.
If you can, it absolutely makes sense.
There was a time when there were some competing products, and they had some compelling features, but it just plain made no sense to use anything other than Internet Explorer.
Firefox changed all that. And the Web is a lot more interoperable because of it.
That said:
YMMV.
Indeed. In fact, some people are still tied to IE -- even just an IETab in Firefox -- because of that one last website that won't work.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Meh. I use Keynote as my main presentation software, but I am thinking of switching back to PPT. It is very easy to use, and looks great, but when you're going to a conference, you end up exporting to PPT anyway, and then you have to edit that PPT in Powerpoint to fix all the things that didn't make the jump. It's wonderful if you're sure that your laptop is going to work perfectly.
Have you tried exporting to PDF? Unless you have some fancy animations is the best way to have a portable persentation. Almost every pdf viewer has a full screen mode for presentations.
So you are in Home Depot and they have two identical hammers. One is god-aweful looking, like all hot-pink and looks like a professional designer never touched the thing. Yeah... let's pick up that one.
You know, I would. A hot pink hammer? Hell yes!
Tastes vary. I'm not going to attempt to defend OO.org's UI, as I haven't touched it in awhile, but there are plenty of cases where I've seen a UI make the right choices -- better choices -- yet be shunned because it is different than what you're used to.
Oldest, best example I know of: How many people use the dvorak keyboard layout? Even among a generation which has never had to touch a real typewriter in their lives, and for whom qwerty is completely pointless?
I've been guilty of that myself. OS X arguably has some better consistency even with certain keyboard shortcuts (home/end), yet it was so different than what I'm used to that I'm grateful to be back on Linux again.
If OO.org was compellingly better than MS Office, then I'd be inclined to agree with you. But it has fewer features and is generally lacking in more areas than it has strengths.
And as long as that is the case, that is also the conversation we should be having -- not whether it's "pretty".
Fact: Ubuntu (via Compiz) has prettier desktop effects than Vista. Yet Vista has more users than Ubuntu. Would more eye candy "sell" more copies of Ubuntu?
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Hi, I'm a Mac. I'd rather pay a lot of money for a proprietary closed source piece of software used to make a document, than to download a free piece of software (and hopefully donate a few bucks) that can make an equally good document, because if the software interface I use to make documents does not exactly and precisely match the look of my environment, I am incapable, and even paralyzed, at even the thought of making such documents with such an unfashionable looking interface.
These numbers speak tones.
That's fucking awesome! How do they make them do that?
As a Mac user, I'm excited to finally be dumping NeoOffice. I hate the system-deep installer. With OO.o v3, it's a proper single-directory bundle. Installation is just drag-and-drop. And no more random boat - the OO.o icon is slick and looks great in the dock.
My biggest complaint with OO.o (and I use it exclusively now, and have moved over my parents from MS Office with no issues) is a frustrating bug with OpenType fonts. They always render fine, but exporting to PDF (something I do often) converts them to some other random font.
Looks like it will be fixed, but not until 3.2 — which feels like forever, since this has been an issue for a very long time. It's especially frustrating since some of the best free fonts out there are OTF fonts.
If you to help increase the visibility of this bug, please vote for Bug #43029.
I waited for rectangular cut and paste for about 3 years.
Version 3.2 isn't far away.
It will happen.
Do you mean block selection mode?
In OO 2.4 you can find it under Edit -> Selection Mode -> Block Area
Or you can use Alt + Shift + F8
Ever stop to think
The only issue I have with the iWorks suite is that Apple decided to introduce yet another file format, seriously pissing off their customers who have started a petition to include ODF. Whilst ODF and DOC are supported by the nifty 'TextEdit' most of my work is done in Pages and Numbers and if it were to be possible to use ODF as the default file format Apple iWork users could exchange documents easily with OpenOffice users giving the format another boost.
I will try the new ooo and see where it is at.
I do like MsOffice 2008, have run the trial but it is a bit slow (despite 4gb ram) and on the expensive side for a small business with 4 users.
Dennis Onstenk
It's true that the world runs MS Office, however that's the corporate world. Small companies rarely have the need to export their internal documents to the outside world. So, OO.o is fine in that case.
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I've come to a conclusion about those who say "write a patch" if you say there's a problem with something. Either they truly don't understand just how powerfully it turns people off from using their software, or they do know and it's an intentional "fuck you" to those they decide are "outsiders."
Either way, the outcome is the same: They actively drive users away, in FOSS's case back into the comforting arms of Microsoft. It creates a rift between reality and the developer's perception of reality, which results in the project not moving towards progress but orthogonally to it, or worse away.
And here enlies the problem with the "write a patch" types: I gaurantee you I can find an aspect of your computer you aren't an expert at, and you'd be pissed at me if I threw it in your face when you asked for help. Your accountant doesn't tell you to fix your own damn tax problem, the mechanic doesn't derisively laugh because you don't know how to re-gap your own spark plugs, and as a user of FOSS I'd prefer not being snidely mocked just because I don't dedicate hours a day learning your little corner of it. For all the egalitarianism of FOSS, there is still fundamentally a business relationship between the programmers and the users. Until we learn that and put a lid on the "write your own patch" people, it will never equal proprietary software except for a handful of diamonds in the rough.
Why so thorny? Because I've been a recipient of that attitude a few times. And not even my hardcore nerd's reverse tact filter could stop it from getting under my skin.
It seems the Windows version of OOo can't open files that are on a Windows file server that happens to have a "_" character in it's name. In our case, there's only one such unlucky server in the entire site, but that's the one that our people most commonly use. MS Office users can click on those files with no issue, but nothing happens with OOo. That is, OOo just closes with no warnings, no error messages. The poor program just dies silently.
In http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=53184, status says it's "fixed", but the activity log shows it's never been merged into the release version. This is the 3rd release since the bug was declared "fixed", but it's still not released. Scroll to the bottom of that bug report to see the story.
Related discussion here... http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=52413
Maybe I should just fix it muself...
I don't sit around pondering the color scheme of my screw drivers
Unless you want to be able to find the right screwdriver in your set. In that case, you might want to label the handles like Craftsman does for its precision screwdrivers: one color for standard, one for Torx, and one for Phillips. Feel free to draw your own analogies to being able to find things in a GUI.
It's like the difference between The Gimp and Pixelmator.
Both do image editing (and in this case The Gimp is a more powerful tool) but Pixelmator fits in with the look and feel of OS X and works extremely well with other Mac apps. In fact look at the two websites - The Gimp's site looks like crap. Having used both to some degree and not needing the full power of The Gimp, I dumped it for Pixelmator a long time back. The UI is unbelievably far ahead of The Gimp.
If you're going to use an app for any length of time, it should be as comfortable as possible. This is obvious for cars, for furniture, for workplaces but somehow it's a debated point for software applications. Aesthetics are important, and for some reason Mac users care a lot about the concept.
That's a long answer to your somewhat troll-y question, but there it is. Mac users can certainly use apps that work on Linux and Windows, we just choose not to if something more usable exists.
I recently switched to LaTeX Beamer for my presentations from Keynote (my Keynote CD was damaged and my hard drive died so the only way of reinstalling was to pirate or buy another copy - yay proprietary software). The only thing I missed was the presenter mode, where the laptop screen displays the current and next slide, the current and elapsed time, and the notes. I wrote a little app to do this, and now I can't see myself going back to Keynote (I also wrote a little LaTeX package that outputs notes as an OpenStep property list, so you can import them in to the app easily. Eventually I want to store this in the PDF as annotations so that any PDF viewer can view them). It's just much faster to write presentations with Beamer, and the PDF output is much better for people to navigate themselves.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
tables! Now I remember! Tables have driven me nuts with Openoffice. I had a table at the end of my page, and inserted a newline. There was no way to remove the newline without the table. For some reason they got fixed together for ever and always. That and getting the background color of a table cell took me a long time. The old granddaddy of tables is also not perfect: I did have MS Office crash on me last week just removing a table row! The equation editor of OO is excellent however. MS really messed up that one, especially if you are using different office versions at some point, and the equations may or may not show up... Overall, Openoffice is ready for light to normal use at the moment, much more so than two years ago, and will probably surpass MS office in usability and stability in the not to distant future.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
While I agree that the grandparent is engaged in some first-rate asshattery, I'd just like to make one comment. You say:
Your accountant doesn't tell you to fix your own damn tax problem, the mechanic doesn't derisively laugh because you don't know how to re-gap your own spark plugs
The difference here is that you are paying your accountant and your mechanic for their expertise. Most of the people who receive comments along the lines of 'write a patch' have not contributed anything. On the Free Software project I co-run, we have a designer on the core team. He provides a lot of really high-quality artwork and some good UI ideas. If he comes to me with a feature request, then it goes quite high on my TODO list. Why? Because he's contributed to the project in ways that I am incapable of replacing with my own effort. I recently refactored a big chunk of my code to make it more reusable for someone else. Why? Because at the same time as asking me to, he sent me a diff fixing a few of my bugs.
Free Software is about cooperation. I only benefit from sharing my improvements if other people do as well. We both benefit from not having to reproduce the other's work, and so can get on with things we want to do much faster. If you want something done, then you have to convince me that it's in my interest to do it for you, usually by offering something in return. Whether this is code, artwork, documentation, or money is up to you. If you don't offer anything then the reply will be 'patches welcome' which means either offer me something of value in exchange for my time, or offer someone else something and get them to send me the patch.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
If your CD is damaged, you could install the Keynote Demo (http://www.apple.com/iwork/trial/) and just type in your license key...
This assumes that you where using the latest Keynote, but it is probably possible to get a demo for an old release somewhere.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Look at issue 43029.[...] it's a complete showstopper for using most professional grade fonts with PDF export.
Why obscure the situation, why not mention that this is only with "CFF-flavour OpenType fonts (*.otf)". How many people, not using DTP packages, are that fussy about the font they use that they won't accept a near analogue TTF font. Does it real make that much difference if people reading your text do so in Times.otf versus Times.ttf - like I said for professional print jobs you can be fussy but OOo is not a professional print production application (though it can be used as one).
This bug has become the standard counter-example in on-line discussions to all the OSS advocacy [...]
Such an important bug only has 12 subscribers - ie people that care enough to get notified when it is fixed. Doesn't seem like a major bug to me. I'd go with the classification as enhancement - a specific font file format support (not the font per se but a specific file format for the font) seems like something that doesn't actually stop anyone writing documents. FWIW. It will be a good enhancement to add as OTF is on the rise, but it's only really kicking off as of this year IMO and so OOo isn't so far behind the game on this.
Check out Scribus -- it's a F/OSS desktop publishing program. From the Scribus web site:
However, a major essential feature it's missing is import filters to migrate away from other publishing programs - especially that crap Microsoft Publisher so many people have locked themselves into. However, there are free services to convert the files to free oneself from the grip of Microsoft Publisher.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
'If we're content with small closed communities that play only to themselves, that's a perfectly valid goal. It's a lot easier, certainly. You get it the way you want and basically enter stasis.'
No, that is the result of refusing to accept patches. Suggest that someone take the initiative for something they want is simply choosing not to be someone elses bitch.
If I get myself some tea and offer to fill your glass while I'm at it and you tell me you want milk instead I'll tell you fetch it yourself. The same is true when I scratch my software itch.
If you want a feature the developers aren't interested in and they invite you to submit a patch, that is an opportunity. Contribute in some way, hire a developer to work on gimp. Appeal to some of the corporate paid developers who DO have the goal of mass adoption. Hell, write some documentation for the project and you are more likely to get a slice of developer attention.
Some projects like bzflag might well be in stasis. It could be for many reasons but its not for asking people to contribute their fair share. More likely it is because they don't want the features in question and they aren't about to accept your patches at all!