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An Early Look At New Features In OpenOffice.org 3.1
ahziem writes "With the final release two months away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy, better charts, replying to notes in the margin, overlining, macros in Base, RTL improvements for Arabic and Hebrew, and (believe it or not) better sorting. Download and report any bugs you find."
I just finally upgraded to 3.0 from 2.0 on my workstation and installed 3.0 on my laptop, and just now there's a hint of an update coming soon... although a few months away, but still I hate being outdated. ;)
I haven't even bothered to check, but does openoffice.org finally support automated updates like firefox instead of the old, a bit annoying, download and unpack to install latest version routine?
This space is not for rent.
Among personal favourites is sql syntax highlighting, more advanced notes, collaboration tools.
o_O
... is the one feature I never see under OpenOffice release notes: Improved performance.
I keep trying OpenOffice, under multiple OSes... and I keep removing it in frustration. Eye candy? That's the last thing we need when the program is already so very painful.
The ringing of the division bell has begun... -PF
OO.o is NOT Microsoft Office. If you want Microsoft Office, go bite the bullet, pay the price, or deal with the hassles of your bootleg copy.
However, OO.o has reached the point where it really and truly is "good enough" for most anybody. Enough that we now recommend it to our clients - it's on the privileged "recommended software" link in our product, effectively putting OO.o front and center for hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students.
Killer? No. I honestly don't know how many people pay attention to our "recommended software" download link. However, we've been pretty up-front about all-but-requiring Firefox for all our users, and we have about 80% hit rate on Firefox.
Officially, we support Firefox, IE, and Safari, but FF is in first place. We develop for Firefox and backport reported bugs in IE or Safari as they are reported. Honestly, since we stick to relatively simple HTML for our web-based product, we haven't had much problem with this strategy.
But the killer reason why most of our FF switchers have switched? When you hit the "Back" button in FF, it remembers what you typed in on a form. IE forgets. Such a simple thing, yet we've switched thousands of users (possibly forever!) to FF for this one feature ALONE.
Now, back to OO.o - I use it on my Fedora Core laptop, and have used it instead of MS Office for years. It's plenty good enough. I can read/write Office dox with minimal translation problems, and it does everything I've ever really wanted.
The only limit I've run into is that when I produce a presentation using Impress, where it's going to be displayed in MS Power Point, I open the file in MS PowerPoint before presenting to make sure it's going to display OK. Sometimes, fonts will be different, carefully aligned elements will be out of order, graphics scale the wrong size, etc.
But there have been a few times that I had to present "in the raw" and still haven't had much problem. The dirty secret of MS Office is that it's often incompatible with itself! If you're using Office 2000 or 2003 and try to use 2007 to render your presentation, you are probably about as likely to experience similar issues!
Perhaps the only issue is that if you open a file in MS Office and it's "corrupted", people will tend to fault the file - "these things happen!". But if you open the same file in OO.o and it's "corrupted", people will tend to fault OO.o - "Software just doesn't work right!".
And this may take a while to overcome. But OO.o is clearly doing it!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
No matter how many times you post this story, I still say overlining is underappreciated.
I know it's hoping against hope, but I still hope someday some spreadsheet program will do sorting that will actually ignore the "A, an, the" that can begin lines, along with extra blank spaces. Most suggestions in this area tell you to put those words in a separate column then do the sort, which isn't particularly elegant.
Here's an enormous sigh of relief. As a statistics professor, my #1 gripe with Open Office has been my inability to easily create an x-overbar (sample mean) character. That alone has been the reason I've had to keep booting up a copy of MS Office to edit student handouts.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I'll switch to OO.o writer when it can actually put together a decent legal-brief table of authorities. It's not like the M$ one is great, but it IS there.
Yes, I know there's a feature request, yes I know I should go code it myself. I really don't want to hear that. (I'm not a programmer)
A HUGE segment (don't we need MORE lawyers :) ) of the professional writing population can't use your software without having to manually compile a table of authorities; it needs to add in this functionality. This is literally a deal breaker feature for any large or small law firm that does any sort of litigation, trial or appellate work. I.e. firms won't even consider it until it has a ToA feature and not just a quirky workaround.
So I labor on with Word or WP, until OO.o or Pages comes up with something better.
BTW - calc totally rocks, and since I dont need any VB macros, I've ditched excel.
Macro support in Base? Hmmm.
I did some extensive testing of Base a little while back. It's OK for very limited use, but let's be brutally honest ... you don't create solid, complex systems on Base.
But people still want to create database front-ends on Linux, and have to use God-aweful web-based UIs.
Despair no longer - I have created a cross-platform, open-source framework to implement 'forms', 'dataasheets' and 'reports'. I'm even part-way ( 30% or so ) through creating a GUI builder to tie everything together. But the libraries are already complete and in production ( heavy use, I might add ). To download / view screenshots or just check out what's going on, it's all on my website: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/
Now even more like the latest version of Microsoft Word! How innovative! OO.org is great, and I've used it off and on for years, but I'd like to see them be a little more innovative. Copy the good stuff from Word but leave out the crap and add some differentiating features maybe?
read some interesting stuff at mightyinteresting.com
It's free ..... it must be a scam. I'd better stay with Microsoft because I know what I'm getting.
I still insist of having a copy of Office 2007 installed because there's that RARE occasion where something completely stuffs up in OpenOffice.
Late last year (after OpenOffice 3 was released), as part of my postgraduate enrollment I had to fill out a form detailing the work done during the year. The idea was for the student to fill out the form electronically and then print it out and submit it. The form was a .doc file and contained various interactive elements such as checkboxes, which I didn't even know Word supported. In Office 2003 and 2007, it loads up just fine. In OpenOffice 3, Writer HANGS INDEFINITELY. It doesn't even bother crashing, it just stays there using all the CPU for no obvious reason.
I suppose I could have printed it out, filled it in by hand and submitted it, but instead I took the easy way out and resorted to Office 2007. Now obviously the Uni should have supplied something like a PDF where I could fill in the details, which would have worked well and worked anywhere, but they didn't, because everyone uses Office right?
Now obviously such .doc files aren't that common, but when you absolutely positively need to read a .doc file the way it was meant to be seen, using MS Office is pretty much the only choice. It's not 100% guaranteed to show things perfectly (as people have already mentioned), but it's still the best chance, particularly for esoteric forms like I had.
And before someone points out that I should have submitted a bug report - (a) I couldn't work out how to, (b) It wouldn't have helped me at the time, and (c) The fact that only now a 2005 bug is going to be fixed in 3.1 shows that bug fixing isn't always a priority with Sun.
Macros in Base
OpenOffice.org Base gets a huge boost now that OpenOffice.org 3.1 allows macros in .odb files. Furthermore, Base macros can be bound to events. Helping it compete with Microsoft Access, Base developers will save time and enjoy new possibilities such as creating navigation forms (called switchboards in Access).
SQL syntax highlighting
SQL is a first-class citizen in Base. In OpenOffice.org 3.1 the SQL editor highlights SQL syntax, which is helpful for finding typos such as a missed quotation mark.
Good thing that there are finally macros in .odb files - and shocks me that before, there hadn't been?! Well, last time I played with Base was some time ago, and I was appalled at the features (or lack thereof), being a former Access developer. TFA makes me want to play with the new version, see if it is at least possible to create simple applications with it.
Isn't that an oxymoron ?
End users use Access
Developers use anything but
Here at work, we all ditched MS Office in favor for OOo. But I still got one major concern with OOo where I still have to ressort with MS Office or better, Excel to work it out.
I have a few Excel spreadsheets that are saved as html. Excel can open them just fine and everything looks, OOo opens them but the (simple) layout is all messed up!
Those html spreadshits are generated by an application automaticaly. Renaming them to xls doesnt do the trick either.
So here is something I am waiting for years for OOo to solve, but still nothing!
Two things I really want fixed before I consider Open Office full-time (and I don't know if 3.1 does so I apologise if they've already been addressed) are: a) font rendering; and b) performance.
Now, the font rendering issue might seem a bit of a nitpick, but if I have to spend over 9 hours a day looking at the thing I want the fonts to look nice. MS-Office is not perfect. But I find it better than Open Office. My experience with Open Office has been horribly rendered fonts that can be ignored if I were just typing a page or two but I need to be comfortable if I am using it day-in-day-out. If I make adjustments to freetype (or whatever the normal OS renderer is) then I want Open Office to render it the same. It needs to render fonts exactly the same as the OS in general.
The performance issue is, for me, less of an issue. BUT it cannot feel 'sluggish'. If I am typing I want my applications to be responsive. Start-up time is less of an issue that I can ignore.
Office 2007 made me feel stupid! I couldn't find the button to bold something. It's openoffice at home and 2003 at work from here on until the end of time!
I use OO.org at home and have been doing that since the 1.2 times. OK, it's still slow as molasses and the font rendering is still very bad, but I can live with these issues.
However, typing a lot with 8859-2 characters, I need the ability to assign certain characters to key combinations. MSOffice had this ability since at least ver. 97, why OO.org is still missing it?
You can disable all that. Go to Tools -> Settings... -> Update
(Actual names may vary, I'm using Firefox in Spanish language)
There uncheck the three boxes under "Automatically search for updates..."
Then you'll have to click on Help -> Search for updates every time you want to update, but at least thou shalt not be nagged at (yes, I do understand you prefer to have Firefox update itself automatically and naglessly, but in the meantime...).
OOs is usable. I appreciate it at home on non-Windows machines. As a programmer I don't do Office much. I made up my mind to stop using MS Office more than 2 years ago unless I absolutely have to (like my timesheet or open an Access db file). Nobody knows I'm getting away with using OOo or Google Docs most of the time. It's amazing how much you can do without (like other aspects in life).
The thing that really concerns me is this Quixotic quest to match MS Office. By the time OOo v.X is "as good as Office", Office would already be living and moving most of its paid users to the cloud (or whatever web+mobile platform MSFT is moving to). Sun used to have a motto: "we are the 'dot' in 'dot-com'". For all the money and time it could have thrown at the problem, the Dot was stuck on the desktop. Good for Ubuntu I guess. Let's hope it survives on netbooks. (Doubt Negroponte will ever use it.)
I don't know of any statistics professors who don't already know LaTeX. How would you publish? In my experience, most math and statistics journals either require or strongly encourage authors to submit their manuscripts formatted in LaTeX.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
A lot of FOSS projects fall into a similar mentality and lose sight of their objectives. Rather than writing a great program for the community, it's a great program for the core users.
You've reminded me of an older Slashdot article: Michael Meeks Says OO.o Project is ..., well, stagnating from a development perspective, with only 24 developers at lowest count.
I think OO.o can be improved if we can attract more developers. But how? (Other than implementing another ribbon-like interface.)
Maybe improve PowerPoint compatibility, ensure Excel docs work flawlessly, etc.?
And I don't just want margin notes. I want that old WP idea back that you can have 'special characters' inside your text to anchor things on. I mean, it already exists essentially in OOo, in the form of page breaks. But there the concepts ends, somehow. Why can't I have special anchors in the text (to be made visible in a certain mode, for example by using coloured dots) to hang things on, like, for example, margin notes ? Or images ? It would make put an end to page breaks being a special case, and it would put an end to images being 'superimposed' on the text. Instead, any anchor would just flow with the text.
And the other thing I want (aside from the pony) is for fonts to (optionally) travel with documents. And to be prompted for the installation of said font when I open up a document on a machine that doesn't have it. So that my documents look the same on whatever machine I choose to open it on.
Religion is what happens when nature strikes and groupthink goes wrong.
Isn't that an oxymoron ?
End users use Access
Developers use anything but
End users who like to think they're developers, have an idea which could be thrown together in Access inside a couple of hours (provided you don't bother with such pesky things as design or testing) and they don't want to "mess around" with asking the IT department to resolve use Access.
About a year or two later you discover that their database has grown to manage the entire department and is therefore now business critical, it's got all the problems you'd associate with something thrown together in Access like this and the person who developed it left three weeks ago.
..the new ribbon does indeed SUCK big time.
It's too big, confusingly laid out, and it doesn't include basic file operations like new/save/save_as or print/preview, and doesn't seem to support customization (or at least I can't figure out how to do it, so gave up after 10 minutes). And where the hell has the old 'Tools/Options' disappeared to ?
I'm sure the OP and I share the frustrations of millions of Office users who suddenly found their productivity reduced by Office 2007 (when compared to previous version upgrades which did indeed improve usability and productivity).
Especially on a single core CPU. Any coder worth his salary knows how to do single threaded non blocking/asynch I/O , using multithreading is just a lazymans approach plus it gives rise to potential deadlocks and race situations.
Or, as I like to say, my current job supporting 5 stupid access database shit. It could be worse sure. My colleague supports over 40...
http://stoploudness.org/
I've been using the MacOS X port for years via X11. I was obviously quite happy that 3.0 had a native MacOS X version. However, version 3.0 is severely lacking in terms of MacOS X UI compliance. Example: the command and control keys are wrongly used by OpenOffice (wrongly = different than in all other apps on MacOS X). I learned via this link provided in another /. story yesterday, that there are 47 issues directly targeting MacOS X and that the keyboard shortcuts have been fixed it seems. Great! Hope the 3.1 will be become a real good software for the Mac! :-)
Animoog.org
And the other thing I want (aside from the pony) is for fonts to (optionally) travel with documents.
That's for the font file's copyright and design patent owner to decide, not you. A TrueType font's OS/2 chunk contains flags to forbid all embedding or to forbid embedding in editable documents. Software that edits these flags has drawn copyright threats from type foundries. I would imagine that the fact that so few font files are set to allow embedding discourages software developers from even implementing embedding. Of course, if you use only Free fonts such as the DejaVu series, you can work around lack of embedding by putting the fonts in a zip file.
i wonder when they'll fix issue 89292. it's 7 years old and counting.
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=89232
This is, by far, the most troublesome issue we've had with OOo 3.
We've taken a large number of new computers, removed the trial of Office 2007, and installed OOo 3. Ever since, I've been handling hundreds of support tickets over the most basic of options: file associations.
OOo 3 removed the ability for OOo to take over document associations upon installation. It doesn't even give you choice of whether you want to or not, it just refuses to do it. You can't do an install Repair and re-associate; you have to associate them all manually. Which means walking people through "Right click, Open With, Browse, Program Files, OpenOffice, find something called oowriter... wait, no, it's called swriter.exe now. OK, five more associations to go..."
Removing functionality, even an optional function, from an OSS tool goes against everything that it stands for. IMO, of course
Why the hell is OO.o still missing support for SVG? Users have been bitching about this for years, literally. It was a Summer of Code project in 2007 and still, nothing.
Believe it or not, people actually tell me that they don't want OO.o because it doesn't have clip art. Too bad that there thousands of free clip art images out there but OO.o is too SVG-retarded to use them.
Never approach a vast undertaking with a half-vast plan.
So we have an anti-aliasing when drawing. On my MacBook it was slow, now it is hell slow only with few objects on a canvas. And we have translucent selections. We also have SQL highlighting and an embedded forum in document notes (for flamewars, probably).
But I would ask dev team to better remove all those eye candy, but add a feature that is wanted since project born: PERFORMANCE, please! But while it is not there, I'd rather happy to continue use my Emacs + LaTeX. Works great on Mac, you know...
OO is painful to use because the dialogs don't have apply buttons.
You have to navigate to bring up a dialog, estimate the settings that would look best, press OK, then keep repeating until satisfied.
after years of users asking for an intrinsic outline mode, OO still doesn't have one?
Now before somebody jumps in with the suggestion of using Navigator, I'm aware this feature exists and while it is useful, it isn't even close to a substitute, even for an extrinsic outliner. Even laying aside the fact you can't collapse and expand paragraphs, you can't compose in the Navigator. You can only reorganize what is already there.
It's like OO has a waterfall model for document construction, where you generate a rough draft organization, then use the navigator to reorganize the preexisting headings. If you don't write the way OO wants you to write, you're SOL.
Interleaving composition and organization, with direct manipulation, is what outlining is all about. You are working on a section, are realize this bit needs a section of its own some place else. I'll admit that Navigator is close, but it doesn't provide that direct manipulation experience so critical to making outliners a natural way to compose. It's doable, but clunky; the reason people love outlining is that it is a tool that gets out of the way of the thought process.
It's the very closeness of what OO does have that makes that lack of this feature incomprehensible. Clearly, the pieces needed for the model are all there. Microsoft put them all together over ten years ago. So what is it with OpenOffice? Is there a patent of some kind that 's holding them back? Does outlining violate some kind of subtle user interface requirement? Or is it just a mental block on the part of the developers?
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Themes/Skinning. The sooner I can *easily* reskin OpenOffice, the quicker I can drive adoption by skinning it to look very similar to what my users are already accustomed to seeing, *wink* *wink*.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
LOL @ OpenOffice competing with Microsoft Office.
They cant win any market share and they are giving the goddamn thing away for free.
A random WYSIWYG wiki (deki perhaps?) has way more potential to crush MS Office than Openoffice.
The "lets fit" for A4 mindset is finally evaporating.
If OpenOffice wants to have even the slightest relevence they would turn it into an HTML editor. Save
HTML is the only format that matters. OpenDocument and all that is a big joke, because no one cares about document file formats anymore.
What are you on about?
Who cares what you call it?
I often read daft comparisons made between open source projects and other things to which they bear no resemblance. I call it Stupid Syndrome, and you are suffering from it.
I like OO.o except except it doesn't have $RANDOM feature ..
DEF $RANDOM = go to www.oooforum.org/some issue ....
davecb5620@gmail.com
I can't believe you really typed that bull.shit .. :)
.. Borg and Microsoft
search on borg microsoft results about 36,900
davecb5620@gmail.com
-Formula input in latex (ok thats a special one...)
-use svg directly and withput pain (IMHO trow out oodraw and replace it by inkscape....)
-vector import of pdf
-make overall usability of impress better
-easier and more flexible positioning of objects in a textflow (i liked amipro if somebody remembers that)
It's based on Go-OOo, with extensive customizations for OS X.
Home Page
It's interesting that the overline examples they showed did not show overlines in equations, specifically over italic text. This is where the overline feature really fell down.
See: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=21486
And, for eye-gouging images: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=54058
For the record, Microsoft Word (equation editor) also doesn't get it right. But that's no excuse :)
Towards the Singularity.
Yeah, the lack of SVG support mystifies me. It's particularly annoying that I can't draw diagrams in a decent program (Inkscape) and import them, but instead have to try and use the retarded drawing tools in OpenOffice.
But the thing I really hope they'll fix is the inability to change the date format. (Or to express it another way, the inability to use the same damn date format that's set in the OS settings.) Apparently way back in the mists of time some crack-smoking monkey decided that OpenOffice should have its own locale system, totally disconnected from any OS internationalization settings.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I agree, I didn't *see* anything listed about the broken python support either. This is preventing me from using the Zotero citation plugin.
It's there, in the link I provided. See. Yes, this has been fixed.
Animoog.org
Does it have a hidden flight sim?
Usually when I read release notes for an open-source project for a minor release like this, there are maybe one or two user interface features. This one looks more like the MS Office upgrade from version 5.0 to 6.0! I am glad OpenOffice is adding the features for power users. I try to use OO instead of MS Office and often settle with Office because of the feature set. I'll be very glad to try out this new minor release next time I have an office task!
For years I have pleaded for better keybinding support.. In my case, emacs style keybindings. They don't seem to want to change this or accept help to change it. Not surprisingly, not everyone wants to adapt to arbitrary new keybindings for things like 'start/end of line', etc. We're not talking about exhaustive support, just basic navigation.
For every new release it seems I must tediously recreate keybindings from scratch (old files no longer work) and there is no provision to automatically load alternate keybindings at startup.
I would have been happy using the MacOS X OpenOffice 3.0 port...if an official version existed.
I'm using a PPC Mac, and the official download page for OO lists the latest version as 2.4.0. I believe there are alpha or beta ports on some other web sites, but that's not what the average user or the potential corporate user wants.
Forget about 3.1, how about an official port of 3.0?
a.
The one feature I need is the ability to paste cells from a spreadsheet into a table in a writer doc.
what you really need is "instrumental interaction" (http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=332473), or "direct manipulation" applied to instruments: a slider to control the spacing between paragraph instead of an entry box and an apply button.
Apple Pages does that very well.
It varies in different countries. In some countries "professor" is only used of a senior position in a university, above that of lecturer and associate professor.
Yes, that sort of dynamic WYSIWYG would be even better.
Isn't that an oxymoron ?
End users use Access
Developers use anything but
Even in a programming "language" as ugly as VBA, it is still possible to do proper coding instead of just scripting. I quote my boss at that time: "Why are you using more than one module? Why not put everything in one function?"
You may laugh at it, but for all those little tasks, even in a big corporation, MS Access is a good tool. It costs little, can be quickly developed and deployed, and you don't need an SAP developer for a few hundred bucks per hour. Of course, one needs to know the limitations and concerns: MS Access is only for smaller databases (up to 1M records in my experience), is NOT secure, and also not especially reliable. But for internal purposes, it can do a few tricks.
Btw, most of the code I had inherited from my predecessor made my eyes bleed. Needless to say, mostly I preferred to start from a "clean slate". That said, developing Access appz is not something I'd look forward to doing again :p
Using a fork() call is usually simpler and safer than than multi-threading (on an OS that supports it), and you don't need to explicitly make a copy of the data.
Yes, I hope Windows 7 or 8 comes with a package manager like Ubuntu does.
Where can I email Microsoft to implement this?
Download and install the free Windows 7 Beta, then click the Feedback icon on your new desktop.
Replying to myself.
No existe.
> OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy
First on the list is EYE CANDY? Say it ain't so.
How about something useful, like default "paste unformatted"? The lack of a default paste unformatted option in Word and now OO is the single greatest source of needless clicks in my word processing day. Many users never need to paste the source formatting along with the text. Yet, with every paste the user is forced navigate to a paste special list to do the job a single click or keypress should be doing. It's a great inefficiency that could easily be remedied with a simple option setting. So please, spare me the eye candy, or at least, make the damn thing better than Word - not almost as good as Word.
If open office would update their spreadsheet software to act like Apple's Numbers I would be all over this product. I don't know but I find the free form grids the best feature since the spreadsheet.