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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."
Eye candy? That's the last thing we need when the program is already so very painful.
It worked for Apple
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.
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.
Yeah, multithreading FTW!
It's not that simple though, because then you get people complaining that memory usage temporarily doubles when saving because a copy is made to allow the user to continue editing while the saving thread is storing the previous changes.
So then the dev team has to implement a memory data structure that can copy parts of a document that are being edited.
And then they get bored and decide that it's cooler to add SQL syntax highlighting.
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?
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.