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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
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.
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.
It's free ..... it must be a scam. I'd better stay with Microsoft because I know what I'm getting.
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.
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...).
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?
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.