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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."
... 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
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?
Firefox updates are annoying too. It bugs me when it finds an update, then it bugs me to ask to install it, then it bugs me to tell me it updated, then my addons do all of that... plus they open their online release-note pages after I have to restart Firefox! Gah, just pulse an "updating" icon to tell me it's happening in the background, and then apply it all silently at next restart, maybe with an "updated" icon - if I want to know more, I'll click the damn icon. No need to make these processes so in-your-face-irritating.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
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.
Star Trek's Borg, despite supposedly being on a quest to assimilate the best of everything everywhere, go nowhere. They supposedly had interstellar travel 100000 years ago, but despite enough time to cross the entire galaxy at sublight speed having passed they have not accomplished this goal. Apparently they have/had a network of transwarp conduits that grants/granted them near-immediate (years or less transit time) access to anywhere in the galaxy, but still haven't assimilated everything. How can this be? They're not actually out to do that anymore... The Collective has become their perfect little gem and they're content to sit there and polish it.
/.?
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. It doesn't matter if the project doesn't serve the needs of anyone else - screw them, they aren't part of the Collective. I call it Borg Syndrome - ostensibly community-oriented projects that refuse to listen to outside input (esp. "write your own patch"-ers) yet can't understand why hardly anyone in the community uses their software.
I'm not certain that OoO has fallen into this insidious trap; I really wrote more in reply to parent's second line than anything else - until we fight back Borg Syndrome there's a whole lot of software that's going nowhere.
ps: Is konqueror ever going to be fixed so preview works on
I'm not going to learn a whole new markup language just for "x-bar". That's ridiculous.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
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.
Professors, especially ones in real subjects at good schools, tend to have very little time in my experience.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
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
I have to second anonymous's surprise. Every mathematician I know uses LaTeX, not just for documents, but also for presentations. Some physicists use powerpoint or keynote, but always with a LaTeX plug-in for math. MS Office's math support is a joke. Do you actually write mathematical documents?
Office 2007 reminds me of all the DVD player softwares that come with PCs: they always try to make them look like a remote control. Except you can't tell what the button symbols are. Or even if it's a button or just a decoration. They uniformly suck. But keep it simple as in Media Player Classic, and you have great software.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
..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).
Except the way all the Linux updaters seem to work, is that they'll never update major versions in any supported way. So if your distro came with OpenOffice 3.0, it might update you all the way to 3.0.42, but it'll be a cold day in hell before you get 3.1. You need to upgrade to the next version of the distro for that.
-- (ed.: emphasis added)
*cough* Gentoo *cough*
Acts 17:28, "For in Him we live, and move, and have our being."
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.
First off: OpenOffice.org, AND Office, is a lot more than just a word processor. The spreadsheet apps in both get at least as much work, with the presentation software coming in a close second.
That aside though, if you check with grownups actually working in business, you'll find that they still very much use paper printed documents and Word Processors. Just a hint: Frontpage (an application explicitly designed to be an HTML editor as you claim is what everyone wants) never has or likely ever will come close to touching Word or Excel as the crown jewel of the MS Office suite.
Whether or not they should care about paper or not is debatable (and ultimately simply an opinion), but whether or not people still do is a settled issue: they care very much.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Some distros may work like that -- it's one of the things I disliked about (k)Ubuntu which I tried it -- but others, such as Debian, will happily update to a new major version when it becomes available in your repository. For desktop systems using the testing and/or "unstable" repositories that tends to be shortly after the official release.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Debian unstable, also.