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OpenOffice 3.1 Released
harmonise writes "OpenOffice 3.1 has been released. According to the release announcement, this update received 'The biggest single change (half a million lines of code!) and the most
visible is the major revamp of OpenOffice.org on-screen graphics.' See the OpenOffice 3.1 New Features page for a full list of changes."
It's still ugly looking.
Usable, maybe... but I get MS Office free so I won't bother. I'll wait to be labeled flamebait.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
Finally with antialiasing !
Fedora 11, which is due to be released in about 3 weeks, will have OO3.1
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
and still no Clippy the paperclip to help me write a letter?
Having a lot of lines of code is not necessarily something to brag about. In fact, it's more likely to be an indicator of badness than goodness.
If the product works great, people won't care how many lines of code it has. If it's buggy or sluggish or in other ways wonky, people might look at the code line count and point to that as the problem. ("It's bloated!" "It's so big no one can understand it or fix it!")
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
Screw the naysayers, congratulations to everybody working in OpenOffice.org
No sig for the moment.
I have heard for a long time how horrible OOo looked. Personally, I never understood what the problem was. The icons were clear and easy to dostinguosh between them, and the text-buttons were obvious.
Compared to the newest version of MS Office, I'd say that any version of OOo wins hands down.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Does it offer the ability to have an auto-updating word count in the status bar yet? It's absolutely essential to many people, particularly copywriters who are paid to hit a particular word count. It seems like such a trivial thing to implement and has been requested many times.
"OpenOffice.org now uses a technique called anti-aliasing..."
WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!!!!!!
Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
Forgive me, but I am a bit ignorant on this, could someone tell me when and how it came to pass that Oracle now has relationship with Open Office? I see nothing of that on neither Oracle website nor Wikipedia, and not even OpenOffice website either. So why the Oracle icon on the story's headline?
:) let us count the trolls ...
davecb5620@gmail.com
This is by far the best Office Suite ever made, finally a company turns out quality for office software. It's cross platform, it's stable and it's free, what gets better!!!!
Stop trolling already. OOo is GREAT open source project.
The new features are nice, but does it have anything that beats Microsoft's offerings?
DRM & sharing for companies ?
Integration with online services (like google office) for home users ?
Obviously I mean other than running on Linux & mac natively, but does it beat gnumeric & abiword yet? I mean when im doing graphs OO (2.x) simply isn't as easy to use as gnumeric and is missing quite a few options.
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Personally, I am waiting for go-oo.org 3.1, as that is what goes into Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, Gentoo and others.
Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
I get some weird "download chooser" page, and if I select MacOSX from there, it won't download either. This is with Safari 4.
I think somebody is trying to be too "smart".
...the most visible is the major revamp of OpenOffice.org on-screen graphics.
Well, Duh! I'll bet the least visible is the off screen graphics.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
The UI is still the Office 95 clone, which works how we used to design user interactivity *15* years ago. That has begun already hurting OpenOffice's appeal to users, there are several competitors that make office suites that simply have better usability. Remember kids, usability is what matters in the end!
There is experimental Flux UI design for OpenOffice. It has great potential. However usability hasn't been sexy enough for the programming people, so... I guess OpenOffice's interface will suck even still at OOo 5.0 :-(
I'd use it but I heard, it's not compatible with the OpenDocument 1.1 standard... :-P
"OpenOrifice is still just a lame piece of software for people who are too cheap to buy quality Microsoft software
Dancing Monkeyboy
davecb5620@gmail.com
For fonts anyway. You want font hinting.
Antialiasing is horribly slow and is one of the things which makes Gnome in particular seem so sluggish. Go on, turn it off and watch those menus fly.
Deleted
Love the program, updates are kinda meh though, let me know when they put in an auto-updating word count in the status bar. Also when it lets me fit a polynomial trendline to a scatter-plot, I hate having to switch to Excel when I need one.
When it encounters a ODF 1.1 document with formula arguments separated by commas created by the MsOffice2007 SP2, does it throw up a really really big nasty warning dialog that says, "MsOffice2007 is using ODF 1.1, please contact the vendor and urge them to start supporting ODF 1.2. We will be nice this one last time and hack around the commas and make them colons. But best if you could persuade the vendor of ODF1.1 docs to upgrade to ODF 1.2"?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Dirty mouth?
Try Orbit gum!
Brilliant!
No incumbents, not no where, not no how.
Vote them out every term.
but it has had times where it seemed out of place on either Windows or OSX
And that's exactly why iTunes has been such a success on Windows. It looks just like a native app...
it has had times where it seemed out of place on either Windows or OSX (particular OSX before it was a native application).
I use NeoOffice on my Mac and see no reason to switch right now.
when I'm using a program and I can tell it wasn't designed for the system I'm running it on, I count that as a problem.
What matters to me is whether it is and how much it's usable. That's one reason I won't switch for now, NeoOffice is quite usable. Then again I hardly use it.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
i found an annoying bug, if i make a mistake and want to use the backspace key swriter does nothing, the delete key does nothing, the arrow keys do not navigate, even h j k l (vim style) does nothing, i have a USB keyboard on linux and usbhid is loaded, all other applications work fine with these keys, whats the deal Lucille? i am sure there is a solution somewhere.
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Any improvements in search-replace, with decent regular expressions support?
Last time I checked (2.2; and I believed it had not changed in 3.0) the implementation in Writer was rather crippled, limited the searching scope to a single paragraph... Searching for something as 'three consecutive paragraphs marks', or using the paragraph separator as a special character inside the pattern, was a pain.
So someone decided to run a code tidying tool and dared to check in the results I guess?
I read the script, and I think it would help my character's motivation if he was on fire. -Bender
And still no support for typographic features like ligatures, old style numbers or true small caps :(. This is one thing Word doesn't support, and IMO will help Writer against Word.
Right now on Vista Notepad produces better looking text than either Word or Writer!!
Will this fix the printing issues in Calc? I was getting wild results before. Not even close to WYSIWYG.
Is this 500K lines of *new* code or *changed* code? If the latter, not bad, if the former, yuck!
Free Manning, jail Obama.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
What Plato forgot to mention is that the price good men pay for being involved in public affairs is to become evil men.
It seems to me being on the right side is more important than being on the winning side, though others may disagree.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
Shall we start to press that Oracle now owns MySQL as well?
Enabling antialiasing didn't take nearly as many changed code lines. It was probably counted incorrectly because Openoffice developers do all their work on code branches. These branches get rebased regularly, so all changes from trunk get into the branch too. When a feature is ready the branch gets closed after it has been merged into the trunk. The number of lines was obviously measured by counting every changed line between branch-off point and branch-head. Because of all the rebasing a lot of unrelated lines got counted. Changing all obsoleted and old code in their drawing layer and reimplementing it without regressions was still a lot of work though. Hats off!
So, does it work on MacOS X PPC yet? No, it doesn't, it's either 2.4.0 or wait for NeoOffice to put out a 3.1 patch.
a.
2 things I'm excited about are structured comments (ability to reply to a comment) and bidirectional text improvements.
without snap-to grid, the ruler bar is simply useless for formatting paragraph indentation. I've wanted to implement this feature for quite some time; maybe they've done it for this version.
Apparently I must be the only person on the planet that uses the ruler bar to format indentation.
There is a third option: work for the peaceful abolition of coercive government itself.
Coercive government, no matter how seemingly benign or "democratic," is nothing more or less than the institutionalized belief that some people have the right to rule over all the rest without their consent, but the rest are not entitled to rule even themselves. It is therefore very much a form of slavery. Like all other forms of slavery it is doomed to fail, but will continue to cause untold human suffering and evil of every kind until it ends. That makes it imperative that people of good will work together to alter its coercive and totalitarian nature (at a very minimum), or, preferably, to abolish it completely.
Without coercive government, people will learn non-coercive ways to prevent and when necessary resolve conflict. The link in my sig explains some of the details of how this might work.
Nonaggression works!
They still haven't fixed what I regard as the biggest bug in OO: the fact that file-opening and -saving dialogues default to the last directory it used rather than the current working directory when running on GNU/Linux. It is understandable that OO would use the MS Windows convention when running on MS Windows, but importing those conventions into Unix is a bad user-interface practice. There's a reason that Unix people move from directory to directory. For experienced Unix users who use different directories for different projects, the failure to track the current directory is very irritating.
Even if they feel it necessary to provide the option of using the MS Windows conventions for people switching from MS Windows to Unix, it should be an option, not a requirement. And I doubt that this would be hard to do: determining the default directory for those dialogues is presumably only done in one or two places and should be very simple to code.
Let me just say "thank you" to Steve Zaske, a Microsoft employee who helped the OpenOffice.org team make an order-of-magnitude performance improvement. What Excel and Calc can now do in less than two seconds takes over a minute with Numbers 2.0.1 on my 2.33 GHz iMac.
But still useless for any professional setting or high-level business education. Staistical and financial plug-ins are vastly inferior to MS Office. No VBA for business applications. These two alone make a hobby app for basic home uses, nothing game changing and certainly still not a real competitor to MS Office. That's not even mentioning the online collaboration tools of MS Office as well as Live Workspace. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."
Impress now has convenient toolbar buttons to increase or decrease the font size of text quickly and easily. Make your text fit perfectly in seconds!
If this is what I think it is (make the whole slide text larger or smaller with 1 click) it was badly missed. This is IMHO better than the auto-resize approach powerpoint uses (at least by default) which leads a lot of people to inconsistency across their slides and generally too much content, because you can always fit more as it keeps autoshrinking.
I suspect it still doesn't have an outline mode.
From the new features page:
Outline levels within paragraphs
Writers of documents with complex ordering formats can now specify a new paragraph and paragraph style attribute "outline level". This transforms a normal paragraph into a heading, independent of any list style or paragraph style.
Almost looks like it might be it, but I doubt it. They'd have just said "outline mode" if that's what they meant. Perhaps in another 5-6 years OOo will have an outline mode?
I'm torrenting it right now to try, but it will still take a bit of time. Anyone who's installed it care to set me straight?
creation science book
What great timing. I just dumped Open Office 3.0 and bought Office Home and Student 2007, which incidentally is on sale for $99.99. Why? Because last night it destroyed 2 hours worth of homework. You see, there was this tiny little bug in OO that causes the Auto-Recovery option to replace the backup file with the original after a crash. The best part? Open Office closed itself after an internal error without even displaying an error message. The fucking window just disappeared. When I reopened the program it recovered my document to the last state it was manually saved in. The auto-save option? Worthless.
Try and wrap your FOSS loving, ass-licking brain around that for just a moment. A free Office Program.... that MIGHT contain bugs serious enough to cause the program to crash and lose data. But wait!..... There is a recovery feature that will salvage your precious work. Except, it's broken. The one feature that shouldn't break, was, and remained that way for a long time. "OH, FOSS is so wonderful, bugs get fixed in only a few days, while commercial software takes years?" GO FUCK YOURSELF.
I don't give a god fucking damn what software it is. You Get What You Pay For. If you use Open Office for anything serious, you are an idiot.
Ok, just kidding.. :( Sux to be us US PowerPC holdouts and be stuck with a 2.x version.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Any effort to accommodate MS's ODF screwup?
Dirty mouth?
Try Orbit gum!
Brilliant!
Just like the sun!
Burma Shave
I love OOo. I've been promoting it whenever possible to anyone who can use it. It handles a lot of things very well.
Also, I am aware that the Mac version is fairly recent, so I expect some quirks. But it's been long enough, and they still haven't gotten basic editing keystrokes working in Calc. In fact, there is no way to even change those keystrokes. When I'm editing, I regularly use (Shift) Opt-Left/Right to navigate text. In OOo, I now have to use the mouse (ack) or arrow around letter-by-letter.
It was bad enough when only Shift-Cmd-Left/Right worked, but now just about all of the keyboard shortcuts are completely missing on Macs.
And before you suggest Tools > Customize, there are no commands for navigating tokens within Calc. In fact, as far as I can tell, Calc completely ignores text-editing keystrokes now, which is a real shame, since Writer handles them all with aplomb.
Seriously. We have to go through the normal upgrade cycle each time MS Office is released, and I have not seen a single improvement to Office in the last 3 releases. And it's not just because Office is mature and has nothing left to fix. I have a list of things I would love to see done, the top of the list being to kill fucking MDI. For the sake of those oddballs like me that would like to do something completely unreasonable like display two spreadsheets on different screens. Or to display a tall-skinny spreadsheet and a short-wide spreadsheet, and have room to show different application in the left over space. I know, this is crazy talk. No one has monitors larger than 15 inches, and using applications in any mode but fullscreen is heresy. Next thing you know I'm going to be asking for the ability to overlap applications using a concept called "windowing".
For that reason, I've been sticking to MS Office 2003. It's clear, it's reasonably simple, and most importantly, it's the way I expect things to work. So if OpenOffice actually maintains this style of GUI, and MS doesn't, then this is one of the most convincing reasons yet to use OpenOffice.
And yes, thanks for Anti-Aliasing of figures, this is great. One of the worst things about MS Office is the horrible integration of EPS files into MS Word documents: They only show up as a horrible preview, which appears to be just the opposite of anti-aliased: Extra-crude and jagged. I don't know why they did that (licensing, I presume), but it makes it annoying to work with EPS files, which publishers often request in the authoring process for printed media. Here, the horrible rendering quality and lack of anti-alias is an obvious weak spot in MS software.
Similarly, I like Adobe Illustrator very much for two simple reasons: it uses anti-aliasing during the drawing process, and it has "intelligent" snap-to guides and points. This makes the on-screen work pleasant to look at and intuitive to interact with. Compared to that, many 2D CAD programs suck because they don't use anti-alias during the creation/drawing process, and your work looks "crude" by comparison.
An pleasant-looking GUI and intuitive interaction are major usability factors. In the 3D world, I like Alibre Design for that reason, which has snap-to and click-select-edit abilities in 3D similar to Illustrator in 2D, and yet still makes it easy to work with precision: You create your rough shape(s) with the mouse in a few clicks, and then fine-tune things like exact dimensions, chamfers, etc. with a combination of mouse and keyboard. All the while, your piece of work is pleasantly rendered, drag- and rotate-able in single 3D window.
OpenOffice with good object rendering (full anti-alias, hopefully also good EPS support) and intuitive interaction (classic menus, transparent shapes for dragging, etc.) sounds like a very attractive package.
Release candidate works fine (for a home PC) on my ancient clamshell iBook. I was surprised at how not-heavy OO.org is on that guy. 300MHz G3.
Starts a bit slow, like Java, but once it's running, it's useable.
I installed the release candidate to check a bug in the part where the installer sets up the boot partitions and walks on the Mac OS 9 drivers, which means you have to boot from something else, run the Mac OS 9 hard disk setup for the version of the OS you're running, and "refresh" the drivers if you want for to multi-boot with Mac OS 9 so your kids can run the bundled games. Nope. I need to send the guys working on that bug a working clamshell iBook with maxed RAM and a largish HD. But I guess I put a higher priority on my kids playing games than on getting that bug fixed.
The games RC installs are working much better on PPC than they have in the past, too.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
There was a nice addin that let me clear the history, but in 3.1.0 that addin no longer works. I wish OOo would just add that in (if they did, I missed it somehow.) That would really be nice to have.
All my graphs are ASCII art.
Will there be an updated Novell fork, too?
Kriston
the peaceful abolition of coercive government
You do realize how incredibly much that is not going to happen, given the very definition of coercive.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
There are noncoercive methods of resistance. No government, no matter how violent, could last long without at least the implicit support of those whom it enslaves. If people were willing to refuse to be enslaved . . refuse to support the violence done by it in their name . . . it would collapse overnight. That has not happened very often but it has happened on occasion, for instance in Romania and a few other Eastern European states circa 1989. It could happen again. It could provoke a violent response of course . . . and probably would if only a few of us resisted. But if enough of us resisted, it could never get us all. If enough of us cared enough for freedom to risk even a little for it, we would have it. The fact that we don't is therefore at least as much our fault as government's. I have trouble looking at myself in the mirror when I recognize this. It is very easy to point out the corruption, cowardice and decadence of our so-called "leaders" and I do so regularly. It's much harder to admit one's own. But we must. Revolution truly does start in hearts and minds, and by far the most successful kind is the kind that occurs without violence, at least on the part of those who resist. Perhaps one day I will truly be ready for it, but until then, I suppose I deserve to be a slave. But my children, and their children, and all of our children, do not. I hope and pray I will leave them a free world, or if not, at least the most free world I can help to achieve.
Nonaggression works!
Thank you for the Eastern European examples. I had forgotten about them.
In most of those countries, though, most of the same people are in power, and many pine for the "good old days" of state control.
The older I get (in my mid-40s, and remember cursing being 12.5 months too young to vote for Reagan), the more I think that most people want to be ruled. I.e., that (among other classifications!), there are (with some overlap between "(1) and (3)" and "(2) and (3)"
"Followers" are the greatest chunk of humanity (some American Revolutionaries even wanted to make a king of George Washington!!), although many want the "petty freedom" of being left alone until something bad happens. IOW, there's a reason why Ben Franklin came up with his security/freedom aphorism.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1