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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."

6 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. Overlining by dcollins · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  2. Re:Needs Table of Authorities Functionality by spotter · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://cmchoatelaw.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/table-of-authorities-and-openoffice-how-to/

    while not as "simple" as word, word isn't really that simple either, and the majority of the additional effort here is an initial setup that doesn't have to be repeated, at least if one makes the effort to script it. The hardest part then is tagging which one has to do in word as well. basically, I think this is solvable without major programming skill, just some macro programming.

  3. Re:The only feature I want... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I've been meaning to test out Go-oo, which is purportedly faster.

    Go-OO is the slowest of all based on these benchmarks from the same site as in the OP.

    One thing to keep in mind is that Go-OO is the Novell version of OpenOffice.org and what with the patent threat due to their Microsoft agreement (best explanation of this threat is here) you should be careful not to tie yourself to one particular office suite through proprietary formats. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately) the ODF format is like HTML and you can reference and include proprietary files in it.

  4. Re:Oh come on! by KlaymenDK · · Score: 4, Informative

    Dude, you need Update Notifier, it wraps all those updates into a nice and tiny button, with a sensible reboot-at-MY-convenience option.

  5. Disable updates if you want by Manuel+M · · Score: 4, Informative

    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...).

  6. Re:Good enough by Erikderzweite · · Score: 4, Informative

    I totally love the presentation mode in Impress where you have your slides on projector and slides thumbs (so you can see the next slide coming) along with notes on your laptop screen. And it shows you the time you spent presenting -- priceless during university seminars. Didn't know it was there, now I can't live without it. Don't care if PowerPoint has similar features -- it has to run on my Linux first.