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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."
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
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.
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.
Even if you don't run linux, there are various windows-based options
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/
It's free ..... it must be a scam. I'd better stay with Microsoft because I know what I'm getting.
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.
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.
In most environments however, they are rare enough that while you need a copy of Office 2007, you don't need a copy of Office 2007 for everyone. At one of the sites I work with the 10 executives have Office, and the 2 IT people have MS Office, and one guy who does brochures and ad work has it. The other 120+ staff have OOo. The execs get it mostly because they want it, and they legitimately deal with enough powerpoint and exchange docs with other companies enough that its worth it for most of them.
The IT people have it primarily so that if someone gets a document that doesn't work, they send it to IT to deal with it for them; usually to simply convert it to PDF. So, they have 13 copies of Office instead of ~130, that represents quite a savings. The amount of time IT has spent dealing with incompatible documents over the last 5 years is almost nil, maybe a dozen documents a year need attention, and as I said most of them can be resolved simply by converting to pdf and forwarding it back.
They've saved thousands by not buying copies of office XP, Office 2003, Office 2007 for everyone.
Its frankly pretty much impossible to wean the average business 100% off Office. But you can usually easily move 90% off Office.
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!
Dude, you need Update Notifier, it wraps all those updates into a nice and tiny button, with a sensible reboot-at-MY-convenience option.
"Good news, everyone!"
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
Yes, I hope Windows 7 or 8 comes with a package manager like Ubuntu does.
Where can I email Microsoft to implement this?
Yes, I hope Windows 7 or 8 comes with a package manager like Ubuntu does.
Where can I email Microsoft to implement this?
I know that you were going for Funny, but MS does have an Idea Submit service. Request it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/outreach/ideas/ideaSubmit.mspx
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
..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).
Yes, but the real question is; is underlining overappreciated?
I hate printers.
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
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.
I actually *dislike* this function of Ubuntu, at least when it comes to Firefox. I always want the *latest* Firefox available. As I do for a small number of other apps. In Ubuntu, I have to rely on the package managers to decide they want to update the packages, or search out and find an unofficial package or something. Synaptic is great for 95% of the software on my system, but the apps that I use often I want to always be on the latest version. As soon as a new version is released, let me update it.
And don't even get me started on the PITA it is to try out a Firefox beta or nightly on Ubuntu...
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
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
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