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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."

30 of 327 comments (clear)

  1. Will be include in F11 by levell · · Score: 4, Informative
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    1. Re:Will be include in F11 by Kaeso · · Score: 4, Informative
  2. What, half a million lines of code changed... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    and still no Clippy the paperclip to help me write a letter?

    1. Re:What, half a million lines of code changed... by Corpuscavernosa · · Score: 4, Funny

      Due to copyright concerns, OO3.1 will have "Stapley" as the office assistant

      "I see that you're writing a document that will undoubtedly take up more than one page. Would you like help affixing these multiple pages together?"

      --
      We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
  3. .5 million lines of code by zindorsky · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!")

    --
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    1. Re:.5 million lines of code by gurutc · · Score: 4, Informative

      So far the product (update) does seem to work great. Better than the previous version. I use the Calc program a lot, and it seems faster on some basic functions like loading files with forumulas.

      --
      Moderation in All Things... Especially Moderation - gurutc
    2. Re:.5 million lines of code by jhfry · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Lots of lines of code CAN mean exactly what you say, bloat. However it appears that in this case many of the line changes were fixing issues and adding needed features.

      For example, they significantly reduced some bottlenecks in Calc... they made Base more like access in that you can actually create an "application"... and they added some very nice contextual help in places where non-power users will find it very handy, like when they are trying to use a Calc function and can't remember the order of its arguements.

      I would say that this is a decent point release for the OOorg team, evolutionary but not revolutionary. My only complaint is how much it is beginning to resemble MS Office; nice for adoption rates, bad for innovation.

      --
      Sometimes the best solution is to stop wasting time looking for an easy solution.
  4. Congratulations by Abreu · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Screw the naysayers, congratulations to everybody working in OpenOffice.org

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    No sig for the moment.
    1. Re:Congratulations by Etrias · · Score: 4, Funny

      Completely off topic, but if you have a bunch of hot female naysayers at your house, what on Earth do you hope to accomplish? It's like the kid in college who lined his room with posters of women in bikinis and never ever talking to a real live girl.

  5. Improved looks? by B5_geek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)
    1. Re:Improved looks? by mdielmann · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The point of icons and menus is so that you don't need to know cryptic keyboard commands. If the preferred solution to the updated icon system is to use the keyboard, they've failed. If the system is so changed that experienced Office users can't find the things they always did in the old version and there is no simple help for "how do I do x", they've failed. (It took me 30 minutes to just see the macro ribbon in Excel the first time. Now I just use Alt-F11 if it's not on the system I'm using.)
      Or to put it another way: The Ribbon system reminds me of the MacBook Wheel - everything you want to do is just a few hundred clicks away.

      --
      Sure I'm paranoid, but am I paranoid enough?
  6. Word count by simonwalton · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Word count by rs232 · · Score: 5, Informative

      "Does it offer the ability to have an auto-updating word count in the status bar yet?"

      I don't know, but if you msg the developers I'm sure they would give it full attention. I see here that someone in 2006 wrote a Macro to perform such a task.

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    2. Re:Word count by bwalling · · Score: 5, Funny

      2006? How am I supposed to get back to 2006 and get it? It's not like I have a time traveling phone booth or DeLorean sitting around.

  7. Anti-Aliasing! by AtomicDevice · · Score: 5, Funny

    "OpenOffice.org now uses a technique called anti-aliasing..."

    WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF TOMORROW!!!!!!!

    --
    Ze Atomic Device! It iz Ztolen!
  8. Re:antialiased! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    The new anti-aliasing feature is on the graphics (charts, etc). The text in writer has been anti-aliased for years, ass.

  9. Re:Sorry but... by Tokerat · · Score: 5, Funny

    You had me until "Microsoft"...

    --
    CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
  10. Well, Duh! by camperdave · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...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!
  11. sod off dancing monkey boy ! by rs232 · · Score: 4, Funny

    "OpenOrifice is still just a lame piece of software for people who are too cheap to buy quality Microsoft software

    Dancing Monkeyboy

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    davecb5620@gmail.com
  12. Re:Oracle? by segfaultcoredump · · Score: 4, Informative

    Technically, at this time oracle does not own sun.

    They have announced that they will purchase them and the sale is pending, but until that time the two companies are totally independent and functionally must continue to operate as such.

    So sometime this summer the oracle logo will be correct, but currently it is wrong.

  13. Re:Won't download to my mac... by gibbsjoh · · Score: 4, Informative

    I checked the full file list from the path to the Windows download and the Mac version isn't there yet - just the SDK. Checking the mirrors now.

    http://openoffice.mirrors.tds.net/pub/openoffice/stable/3.1.0/

    JG

    --
    -- "...I'm a bad guy because I, well, I sing some rock-and-roll songs." M. Manson
  14. Looks native by sjbe · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

  15. Re:Sorry but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    And Windows is free if your time and money have no value.

  16. Re:Sorry but... by 644bd346996 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The phrase "gratis of charge" is redundant. "Gratis" suffices, although it has the unfortunate side effect of making you sound like a pretentious scholar that likes to toss around latin words that nobody knows.

  17. Re:Sorry but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    OpenOrifice is still just a lame piece of software for people who are too cheap to buy quality Microsoft software.

    I didn't know Microsoft was in that business..

  18. Re:antialiased! by spud603 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I think I got this thread off on the wrong foot. Text anti-aliasing has been around for a long time in OO.o (as a comment above says). In fact the new antialiasing is for the in-document drawings, which makes a huge difference both for working with images and for good-looking presentations.
    It actually is a big deal that they did this, and I congratulate the developers on their good work.

  19. Re:Sorry but... by thedonger · · Score: 4, Informative

    MS Office/Excel won't open two files of the same name, and insists on only one working window, forcing the user to "split" in order to compare spreadsheets. OO Calc does both.

    OO Writer has a button for generating PDFs sans any Adobe integration.

    The advantage to MS Office is that your client is more than likely authoring documents on an MS Office product, and absolute compatibility is not assured. But I don't fault the OO developers for that.

    --
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  20. Re:Sorry but... by x4nit0s · · Score: 5, Funny

    Sorry to pick on you grammer nazi but if your going to do it right you should follow your own advice

    Yes, "YOUR" right his "GRAMMER" was teh sux, also while we're at it when you say you could care less you imply that you do care about the issue, as you have the ability to care less than you currently do about it.

    Get a brane, moran!

  21. Re:Most important question by master811 · · Score: 4, Informative

    FYI ODF 1.2 still hasn't even been finalised yet, so you can't really blame Microsoft for not yet implementing it until its finished.

  22. Re:Great for Home / School use but... by gnesterenko · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Someone has never worked in a corporate park, so let me tell you how things work. Major financial institution gets massive transmission from multiple vendors every day that must be entered into the major financial institution's tracking systems. All is done with proprietary software and has nothing to do with any office application. But when it comes to extracting and dealing with this massive amounts of data on an every day basis, performing yield and variance calculations, performing large-scale data scrubbing (10s of thousands of securities), variable rates, prices, and that doesn't even BEGIN to enumerate all the pieces of data that must be shared across a network thousands of computers large, analyzed by individuals in multiple departments, reported on, transmitted, and then integrated back into proprietary systems tied to the corporate mainframe. When Open Office can do this, then you can come back and talk to me. And this is just one example. The automation capabilities of VBA MAKE the financial industry work. Without it we'd be in the stone ages in terms of the time it takes to do certain tasks - as in, non competitive and out of business stone age... What many people here fail to realize is that very few organizations out there do 'pure' statistics or 'pure' data-basing. They may exist, but they are dwarfed when compared to all the soft inter-mediate companies that need to move and analyze large amounts of data, daily, timely, and across large networks. Open Office isn't even considered an option. It simply cannot integrate with various proprietary systems and enable collaboration like MS Office can. And I'm talking about Office 2003 too, as businesses haven't even migrated to Office 07 on a large scale yet, and that is even more powerful in terms of collaboration. Office is not a professional development platform, I hope you realize. No one is talking about writing major pieces of software. What we ARE talking about is efficiencies that save companies billions annually. Until Open Office can do the same, it is irrelevant in the business world. At home or at school however, like I said, its a perfect solution.