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Sneak Preview of New OpenOffice 3.2
omlx writes 'The last developer milestone (DEV300m60) of OpenOffice.org has been released. The next version of OpenOffice.org 3.2 has more than 42 features and 167 enhancements . The final version is expected to be available at the end of November 2009. Many companies have contributed to this version, like RedHat, RedFlag and IBM, making OpenOffice more stable and useful. I couldn't stop myself from seeing new features and enjoying them. So I downloaded the DEV300m60 version. After playing with it for many days I could say that OpenOffice developers have done very good work in it. Well done!"
"Many issues have been fixed in order to make OpenOffice.org faster. The happy news that OpenOffice.org 3.2 is now faster than before in many aspects. The startup now 30% faster in Windows."
Thank God. If it got any slower and more bloated... I just hope Linux is also faster.
Will this be backported to Ubuntu 9.04? I'd like to upgrade to OOo 3.2 because there are some features that I need, but I don't want to have to update my entire operating system and my other applications. Compiling OOo myself is beyond my capabilities.
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Based on the section headings from TFA, I gather that version 3.2 is more secure, faster, more international, and more easier.
Apparently a grammar checker isn't one of the 42 new features.
Remove the password length limitation:
“ The current minimal password length limitation ( 5 characters ) is outdated and makes no sense any more. Thus the limitation is removed, although the password is not allowed to be empty. “
This was an interesting note, but they didn't explain it further. Why did they change the minimum from 5 characters to 1 character now? It sounds it might be pretty trivial to bruteforce it.
Yay! I think people were beginning to dislike me a little when I'd ask them to convert and resend an attachment that I couldn't open. Looks like I'll have to hunt around for some other subtle way to annoy my co-workers :)
No more bloat please, I've had enough already...
Now now...
If you have used Microsoft Word to write your blog you would have seen that "more easier" is kind of green-underline (i.e., it does not make sense).
That hurt even *my* eyes... and my native language is not English.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
While I'm sure that a lot of people will enjoy more convenient typing in of passwords on openoffice documents and typing in Tamil fonts, I'm a little more concerned about the proposed ribbon interface from a while back. In the one screenshot in TFA that showed the toolbar, it looked like the usual icon driven interface. Can anyone confirm that a non-ribbon UI will still be available?
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
And does it render the same as Excel/Word yet?
Until these and other niggling incompatibilities are resolved, my wife will still be nagging me to install Office in Wine...
Tom...
Me first, me first with the 'doesn't have $X feeture' :)
Now if this version is 30% faster on my Kubuntu box AND AND AND has the List function that Excel 2003 has (instead of the g*****n f***ing POS filter function), I will officially never return to MS Office.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
One of the "fixes" is that it will convert text cells to numbers in formulae if it can. This is one of the major differences from Excel that led Microsoft to move all their formulae into a different namespace, in order to prevent users from seeing behavioural inconsistencies across products. That's the way they put it, The Internet described it as deliberately breaking interoperability. I'm agnostic on that distinction, but OOo is now in line with just about every other spreadsheet in existence including Excel, Gnumeric, and Google Docs in this respect. It will be interesting to see what happens to the msoxl namespace when this comes out. I don't know if 3.2 will convert the msoxl namespace formuale to the default namespace when it opens an Excel ODF file.
Send them all their "database" data that people tend to want in Excel spreadsheets in a SQL import for MySQL instead, and suggest that they use an actual database for data analysis instead of a spreadsheet? ;)
Excel: Strong enough for a primitive database, but made for number crunching.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
They were using the preschool language mode.
However, the TFA is more slashdotteder at the moment.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
People complained about Windows 7's GUI "tricks"/tweaks.
Default button in password dialog now is "OK"
That's the first entry under "more easier." Amazing. I bet it took a developer a long time to fix that, too. Probably weeks! ... ?? It doesn't even seem worth mentioning, really.
I -really- like the ribbon bar in Office 2007 so it will be hard to part with it.
But,
1) I'm still so happy that Linux booted up after I transplanted the hard drive from an old opteron into a new xeon with a completely different motherboard, that I'm thinking I can live with Open Office for now.
2) There's still an empty socket for another xeon on my new motherboard.
3) Windows 7, Visual Studio, all start to pile up in terms of costs, or, I could get another xeon, or upgrade my xeons, get more ram...
The hardware argument is pretty compelling...
This is my sig.
"Yay! I think people were beginning to dislike me a little when I'd ask them to convert and resend an attachment that I couldn't open. Looks like I'll have to hunt around for some other subtle way to annoy my co-workers :)"
Why not point them to where they can download Open Office?
'Import of password protected Microsoft Office XML documents has been implemented in CWS dr72'
It's interesting to see how many companies are putting work into this product considering the gradual rise of online based office suites like Google Docs.
In early 2008 I went through some personal events that caused me to suddenly lose access to my primary desktop. When a co-worker introduced me to Google Docs, I immediately liked the idea of having all my important documents be stored somewhere that I could access from any Internet enabled device. Since then I've also come to appreciate the ease of collaborations using Google Docs. I've had whole discussions about requirements documents that went on completely through Google Docs - the client would type in some basic concept of what they'd wanted, I'd reformat it to more formal requirements while they watched, they'd edit, I'd start working and add in notes or questions as they came along, they'd add in replies... It's been absolutely fantastic for streamlining off-site development processes.
And now I hear Google is planning on capitalizing further on that aspect with the upcoming Google Wave... And Microsoft is planning to release an online version of Office 2010... And I'm yet to hear of similar plans from the OpenOffice scene.
Which makes me sad. I've been an OpenOffice user for most of the last decade... Started using it when it was still StarOffice, before Sun bought and open sourced it. I'd hate to see it fall by the wayside.
Not just more easier... but the wiki is "no more installed" and "not installed any more." "This new feature make saving password..." I guess he's from a non-English speaking country, though.
The site is slow and may be intermittent, so here's the text:
--snipsnip--
Home
A sneak preview of new OpenOffice 3.2 part 1
By FahadTue, 10/20/2009 - 17:20
The last developer milestone ( DEV300m60) of OpenOffice.org has been released. The next version of OpenOffice.org 3.2 has more than 42 features and 167 enhancements . The final version is expected to be available at the end of November 2009.Open Office 3.2
Many companies have contributed to this version like RedHat , RedFlag and IBM, making OpenOffice more stable and useful. I couldn't stop myself from seeing new features and enjoying them. So I downloaded DEV300m60 version. After playing with it for many days I could say that OpenOffice developers have done very good work in it. Well done !
I will review in this post some interesting features : more secure , faster , easier and more international.
more secure
Detect if non-encrypted streams are in encrypted document:
OOo expects that an encrypted document does not contain any non-encrypted streams starting from ODF1.2 version. The exceptions are the streams that are part of the ODF format: "mimetype", "META-INF/manifest.xml" and signature streams that follow the pattern "META-INF/*signatures*".
The manifest.xml is part of the document signature now:
In OpenOffice.org 3.2, the manifest.xml will be signed . This will introduce the limitation that macro signatures can't be introduced after the document was signed, because this would need manipulation of the (then) signed manifest.xml.
ODF document integrity check:
The document integrity check proves now whether the ODF document conforms the ODF specification. It mainly affects the ODF1.2 documents. If an inconsistency is found, the document is treated as a broken one, the office suggests to repair the document in this case. The macros are disabled in repaired documents.
Faster
Many issues have been fixed in order to make OpenOffice.org faster. The happy news that OpenOffice.org 3.2 is now faster than before in many aspects. The startup now 30% faster in Windows. Many issues have been ironed out in Writer (6 issues) and Calc (10 issues) regarding loading and saving times.
Now I can see that OpenOffice is faster than before but still there are many things have to be done in speed side.
More easier
Default button in password dialog now is "OK" :Default button in password dialog
Although it is a small change but it makes OpenOffice more usable . Now The OK button in the password dialog is the default button again .
Remove the password length limitation:
password length limitation" The current minimal password length limitation ( 5 characters ) is outdated and makes no sense any more. Thus the limitation is removed, although the password is not allowed to be empty. "
Import of password protected Microsoft Office XML documents:
This is a great feature. Many people asked me how we can open password protected docx/xlsx files. All document types are supported including: MS Word 2007 documents (*.docx, *.docm) - MS Word 2007 templates (*.dotx, *.dotm) - MS Excel 2007 documents (*.xlsx, *.xlsm) - MS Excel 2007 binary documents (*.xlsb) - MS Excel 2007 templates (*.xltx, *.xltm) - MS Powerpoint 2007 documents (*.pptx, *.pptm) - MS Powerpoint 2007 templates (*.potx, *.potm).
Encryption support for "Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP" :
This new feature make saving password protected Microsoft Word document possible with Microsoft Office standard RC4 algorithm.
Keyboard shortcut configuration dialog now supports "ALT" modifier:
supports ALT modifierBefore OpenOffice.org 3.2, the dialog for configuring keyboard shortcuts never allowed to use the ALT-key. Now ALT as well as SHIFT-ALT, CTRL-ALT and SHIFT-CTRL-ALT modifiers can be used in the dialog.
Impress and Draw now support comments:
To support collaboration, it is now possible to add comments to a presentation or drawing
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
I really wonder if you two have actual jobs and how do you manage to keep them.
As the data warehouse guy here, I fight the export to Excel battle regularly and that has nothing to do with my comment. I was talking specifically about Word documents that OO won't open correctly with the version I'm using.
Here are some of my pet peeves:
Need Comment/UnComment button in Macro Editor
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=87296
Generated HTML changes default spacing
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=14600
Outline View (aka MS Word)
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3959
(Vote for mine and I'll vote for yours if I can!)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Request 1) Feature parity with Microsoft Office 2000
Request 2) Interface parity with Microsoft Office 2000
Request 3) Complete document compatibility with Microsoft Office 2000
How does OOo 3.2 shape up?
Someday, when we are all enlightened,
progress on a software product will be measured by the number
of unnecessary features that have been removed, making
a more focussed and easier-to-use product.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
OpenOffice, like Word and everything else I can think of, gets
one fundamental thing wrong in the user interface design.
Documents are 8 1/2" wide x 11" tall with say 6.5" x 9" tall
useable writing area.
Screens are not very tall, but quite wide these days, on average.
Therefore, all (yes, ALL!) of the available vertical space in the application
window should be devoted to displaying the document.
There is plenty of room for controls to the side, or perhaps sliding down
from the top on demand. A one-line control bar at the top might be
justified for inherently horizontal things like font and style names, but
that's it.
As it is, we are editing our documents through the letter slot in the door.
Maybe that will be version 4.0
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Currently RTF support is horrible for both reading and writing. We are evaluating and tring to replace Microsoft Office 2003. To our suprise while doc support has gotten better in the last revision, RTF is so broken in the current stable release it's not even funny. Save a file as rtf and open in again: usually it does not look the same. Lists, numbering, picture support - almost everything is broken. We are trying hard to replace MS Office, but damn....
Why use Open Office when the university installs Windows and MS Office on your PC for you and everyone you work with uses MS Office except for that weird guy over in IT? The reality is that short of a university wide switch to Open Office, I will continue to be that weird guy in IT running Linux and using that Open Office thingy.
Any feature that allows me to work with MS Office easier is wonderful from my perspective.
Actually, Microsoft Office isn't all that compatible with Microsoft Office, when you are talking about different versions. In my 6-7 years running Linux at work, I used OpenOffice exclusively to write and edit documents, and to create and modify spreadsheets. I never had a problem exchanging documents with others. Of course, I was careful to save documents in the Microsoft Word "DOC" format, and spreadsheets in the Microsoft Excel "XLS" format.
It's true that sometimes Word will fail to render a document properly. But it's not the fault of OpenOffice - sometimes, Microsoft Word fails to properly display other Microsoft Word files. An example I wrote about a few months ago:
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Sorry, I was answering your specific stated issue of wanting another subtle way to annoy your co-workers.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
That's a good point, and I've always wondered the same thing. The weird thing is that Word *used* to let you do this-- you could move all the toolbars, and even the menu bar, to the side of the screen. (Of course, in practice this did more harm than good as users would accidentally drag the menu bar all over the place, then lose it, then call support...)
I wonder if Microsoft has considered a "vertical mode" for the ribbon. Seems to me that it would work just as well laid out vertically as horizontally.
Comment of the year
My school didn't. They recomended Open Office to people who did not have MS Office, and the "weird" guy in IT was using TeX.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Wow, I guess OpenOffice.org really is the answer.
This is not my experience in the least. In my day-to-day, I have far more documents created in OO.o that end up looking mangled in all versions of Word than ones that come out looking right. And it's also a rare occurance when a .doc sent to me displays properly in OO.o, and I'm certain many are made in 2003 and some in 2007.
For example, I recently had to make a .doc format resume for a job application, and it was completely mangled on the other end even though it looked fine in OO.o. The only thing this had was some alignment changes, headers, and paragraph text. After getting the job, I had to coordinate with background check people, movers and the like, which included sending lots of word documents, some including forms, back and forth. The forms didn't work at all (they showed up mangled, I couldn't click them even though the fields were visible), and the layout of the non-form-encrusted documents were usually mangled.
In fact, I can't recall a single instance where a somewhat complicated word document (one that contains more than just text of various sizes in standard paragraphs) displayed correctly in Open Office when it was created with Word or displayed correctly in any version of Word when it was created with Open Office.
...Therefore, all (yes, ALL!) of the available vertical space in the application
window should be devoted to displaying the document.
There is plenty of room for controls to the side, or perhaps sliding down
from the top on demand. A one-line control bar at the top might be
justified for inherently horizontal things like font and style names, but
that's it.
As it is, we are editing our documents through the letter slot in the door.
Maybe that will be version 4.0
Running OpenOffice.org 3.1.1. The default toolbars can be docked to either side of the document window, or dragged off onto floating palettes. This leaves only the horizontal ruler above the document.
(One bug: If you have the toolbars as palettes, and you arrange two document windows side-by-side on your screen, the palettes will jump around whenever you switch from one window to the other.)
OpenOffice, like Word and everything else I can think of, gets
one fundamental thing wrong in the user interface design.
Documents are 8 1/2" wide x 11" tall with say 6.5" x 9" tall
useable writing area.
Hey!!! In my country, documents are 210 × 297 mm, you insensitive clod.
(Okay, so I'm actually an American too. Fine :-P.)
My bicyles
In Word 2000, you can simply drag the Standard and Formatting toolbars (or any other toolbar) and dock them to the left (or right) of the screen, causing the icons to be displayed in a vertical strip.
If OpenOffice is "open", then why does a preview need to be a "sneak" preview? That term should be used for a review of something that has been developed behind closed doors, that we are only now being given a brief glimpse of...
Opinions my own, statements of fact may contain errors
If this really bothers you, you can always turn your screen sideways.
... for things that likely shouldn't be used much anymore.
Just because everybody does 'database', mission-critical calculations, and pretty formatted page layout in spreadsheets doesn't make it right. Just because people do form letters in word processors, doesn't make it right. There are better tools.
It'd be nice if corporate cultures had fostered doing things a better way, and wordprocessors and spreadsheets remained in the realms of one-off papers/letters and what-if/preliminary design/research respectively. Most features added in the last decade have been pretty useless for that type of use, which is really where the use of these tools should be focused.
Imagine if the effort put into adding those features had been focused on other projects and useful software that is currently lagging.
Here is a list of the new features (in case you can't access the page like me, because the server is busy)
Your Ad here
XUL is rendered in Firefox the same way HTML is. It's just a slightly different, parallel path to the rendering engine. As for Opera being faster, well, that's very very debatable.
I would agree with you, except that your range of motion tends to be greater left to right than it is forward and back. That means that it's easier to move your mouse along horizontal controls.
Rotating your screen solves the problem much better. You maintain the horizontal mouse-friendly controls and get more vertical viewing area.
OpenOffice, like Word and everything else I can think of, gets
one fundamental thing wrong in the user interface design.
Documents are 8 1/2" wide x 11" tall with say 6.5" x 9" tall
useable writing area.
Screens are not very tall, but quite wide these days, on average.
Therefore, all (yes, ALL!) of the available vertical space in the application
window should be devoted to displaying the document.
There is plenty of room for controls to the side, or perhaps sliding down
from the top on demand. A one-line control bar at the top might be
justified for inherently horizontal things like font and style names, but
that's it.
As it is, we are editing our documents through the letter slot in the door.
Maybe that will be version 4.0
Modern computer screens are high-enough resolution to display an entire page in the available vertical space and have it easily readable. Screens are now so wide that you can display two complete pages side-by-side comfortably.
Maybe it's time to buy a new computer screen.
As well, you know you CAN move the menu bars around? If it really bothers you that much, then move them yourself. However, most other applications put the tools and menus at the top.
That's one of the things wrong with MS Office.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
I completely agree, though I think it's a lot worse than you say.
Why do we insist on displaying information that is probably read more often on-screen than on-paper these days in an area that lends itself to printing on standardised paper sizes, and that was never very good for readability with the typical margin set-up even then? Basic text layout could be handled much better for on-screen use: see numerous discussions about layout for web pages. Supplementary content like charts, tables, diagrams, footnotes and citations/cross-references could be displayed in many more helpful ways, given the typical properties of a modern widescreen monitor, than the fixed, paper-based layouts typically available today. Again, even basic web pages are better at some of this stuff, and the layout and presentation tools in HTML/CSS are crude by professional design standards.
Why do we still present a bazillion hard-coded formatting options, when most possible combinations are only ever (a) ignored or (b) over-used with horrendous results? Pretty much everyone else, from serious publishers to people writing papers in LaTeX to those working on web content using HTML and CSS has been using structured, semantic mark-up with separate formatting rules since roughly forever.
Why do we still have all the emphasis on presentation anyway? Sure, formatting documents and laying out the information for good readability is important, but the content itself is also important. There are all kinds of things tools could do both to help streamline the editing process and to help authors to write better content. Sadly, the most help we get from typical word processors today is a spelling checker (in your country's variation of your native language if you're lucky), a grammar checker (which is wrong more often than it's right if you are a reasonably competent author writing in your native language), and simple metrics like word count and a few mostly-incomprehensible reading ease indicators.
And why are document review and process support tools, such as version labelling, adding comments and proposing edits, tracking changes, and recording approvals, all still in the Stone Age by computing standards? These are very important in a lot of business and other formal contexts, and form a major part of the way a lot of people work with digital documents. I shudder to think what the world economy loses just because of time wasted trying to pass basic feedback from one colleague to another while working on documents of mutual interest.
Clearly even niche markets in document editing have pretty vast potential, because it's one of the most common reasons many of us use computers and even if the media change, the need to communicate in more than 140 characters isn't going to die out any time soon. Moreover, some people do produce rather nice alternatives to heavyweight applications like MS Word and OpenOffice Writer, and there are various apparently successful small businesses (or groups within large businesses, in the case of companies like Apple) doing so. I don't understand why most of these seem to be confined to Apple systems, though, with few decent choices available for either Windows (where you'd think the dominant interest would lie from commercial developers) or the freebie platforms (with their legions of volunteers ready to contribute). There must be a killer business waiting to be born somewhere out there...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Hmm, I just had a PDF yesterday that looked different (=wrong) in KDE's okular than it looked in PDF XChange (Windows version). When I printed it from PDF XChange, some of the text underlines were so thick on the printout that they covered the text. Finally, I printed from Adobe's Reader to get the expected result ...
No. It's the screens that have it wrong.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
"Not just business, students for instance better make sure that what they wrote is going to be seen by their teachers in exactly the same way as they composed it"
The only way that would happen if viewed in the exact same version of msOffice using the exact same printer installed. Using a different printer and the displayed layout gets mangled.
Word does allow you to collapse the ribbon and have it slide down on demand as you want, this leaves pretty much all the room except for the status bar and the ribbon tabs. And the title bar of course.
In OpenOffice you can remove everything except the title bar and menu bar and put the toolbars on the sides (which is what I do, incidentally).
That is interesting, but I would suggest that, if they do that, that they find a way to work the icons/ribbon such that it can work either way. Text documents are typically done in portrait orientation, but spreadsheets are often done via landscape orientation. If the UI adjusted to the orientation, that would be cool (but time consuming for some developers, I'm sure)
Well, there ARE differences between a manual install and a maintained package in the repos.
Parent is right: you can probably download OOo manually and install the binaries on 9.04. I did this several times with earlier versions. Of course, someone who is experienced in Linux can do this and will be able to fix the occasional dependency problem, etc. There are other issues, as well. OOo extensions can come as packages or can be installed manually in userland. In detail, it's not as totally trivial as you think.
However, this "fiddling around" (=time) brings down productivity a lot. Also it will hinder Grandma from doing it. If she starts, she may even mess up her installation. Therefore, I agree with GP that this is a weakness in many distros: you have to do a total upgrade of the OS if you want to have the latest version of your apps the convenient way. Oh, and with all the hardware-related issues that were changed in the kernel from 9.04 to 9.10, such an upgrade may not be a very smooth ride if you want to have everything working equally and the same way.
Usually, the ubuntu versions get better very significantly from version to version. However, the amount of time necessary for a 1:1 distro upgrade for a nicely tuned system is still considerable. Therefore, I see this as a weakness. Why can't we keep having the latest app upgrades on a tuned system without upgrading (especially if all hardware is already supported)?
They still have not replaced the Windows 95 UI that they mimick. I recommend everyone to stay using Office 2007+ or iWorks until they fix that mess.
Did they fix the default save location? It never fails (OO.o is not alone) when family goes to save or open a new document, many times it will open some obscure buried folder or a temp folder somewhere instead of the standard user's 'documents' folder. I know you can set this but that doesn't help spouses and grandparents that are not familiar with file structure. "I know I saved it, but I can't find it" is a common phrases heard on my family's tech support line.
Bah. That's nothing. They still have buttons! In a text processing app! And modal dialogs!
Even Lotus WordPro was years ahead of that, despite also being mouse-controlled. But at least it was state-based with cascading style classes!
It's really a sad state. What pathetic people do, to be "accepted" by those who have never seen something different than MS default...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
With MS launching Office for the web, I think OO.o's enhancement rates are going to pale in comparison to the 'free' price (and premium price) for businesses to run Office on the web.
Sorry, but it's not just about the *documents* any more. It's about sharing information, about collaboration, about versioning -- all which MS has positioned themselves for. OO.O is fighting the last generation war, and still losing.
I do look forward to the new version though, if I need a simple word processor for my mom it will work while I wait on Office on the web.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
It looks like
you will not
benefit from
this.
Your screen
seems quite
narrow to me.
Back to the old "countries using Imperial measures vs. customs using metric" :-)
Another poster has noted Open Offices identifies 8 American countries using Imperial, rest of world (190 or so countries) using metric. Get with the 21st century, Americans! (and Burmese and Liberians as well I believe).
: -)
This morning I was printing a Powerpoint slide in A3 for a friend (long story) and the default screen asked me if I wanted it 16 1/4 inches by 7 1/2 furlongs or something. Millimetres please, I can't think in inches, I am 43 and I got taught mm and cm and metres at school from when I was 5 back in 1971.... (UK). Nobody my age or younger has been taught to measure in Imperial measures in UK schools. A lot of us know how to use them informally because that helps us deal with old folks, but it's not what we were formally taught.
I myself haven't seen a document saved in Office 95 in, well, many years - almost every document I deal with is either in 2003 or 2007 format. And while I'd really, really like to make the move to Open Office, it's really not there yet in terms of compatibility (at least, as of OO.o 3.1).
I've had the same experience - frequently, a document too fouled up to open in MS office, will magically be "fixed" if opened and resaved from OO.o.
... if you're not trying to collaborate on WRITING a document. They're fine for sending someone a finished product, not so good when you're working with someone on a draft.
I stopped using open office when it started to try competing with every useless feature that is in MS Office. The exact point was when oowriter was suddenly trying to think for me and automatically correcting spelling, capitalization, grammar, and formatting. I went back to using AbiWord instead and wondered why I ever stopped. It does everything you will need to do and is still not even 10MB.
Screens are not very tall, but quite wide these days, on average.
Says the guy who puts line breaks into his post every 80 characters.
You may want to try out Lotus Symphony. Pretty much of the options are at the side, and you can move stuff around. It's free and based on OpenOffice, so there is no reason not to try it out. If you are really into typing, you might also want to get a screen with pivot function. I got to admit though that I hardly use my pivot function and that I expected more from it. It's just doesn't feel right for most applications, and you don't want to turn around your screen every few minutes. So, buying the next screen, I will not buy pivot, but bigger ;)
In Word, View>FullScreen (Alt-V,U). This will get rid of status bar, menu bar, window borders and everything so you see just the page.
You can put all the toolbars and menus wherever you want, horizontally at the top or vertically at the side.
Speaking of the right tool for the job - a friend of mine told me the horror story of his buddy in college, who wrote is term paper... in Excel. Yes, that's right, one word per cell, moving to a new row when he wanted a new line. And he wanted my friend to show him how to double-space it!
So, have they finally made OOBase useful for things like:
- import/export data to CSV files?
- The ability to query remote DBs and write the data into a local table?
- Done away with the compressed zip format that makes working with a few dozen/hundred MB of data impossible?
(I swear that nobody in the Open Office project truly understands Microsoft Access' strong points and why it is so hard to replace. MSAccess is a great glue program, allowing you to easily move data sets around, deal with ad-hoc databases, quickly look at a table, copy/paste to/from a spreadsheet.)
Wolde you bothe eate your cake, and have your cake?
Wide screens allow two tall applications side-by-side. Alternatively, they allow two letter-sized pages side-by-side (an option in OpenOffice).
"In the business world it is not essential that the logo does not move by 5mm" What drivel.
I use Linux exclusively and receive, view, edit and send Word documents to colleagues. Most are completely unaware that I do not use a WIndows based machine.
"Every couple of years we put together a team of a dozen volunteers and test it again. OpenOffice has been getting better and it's just a matter of time before it's good enough." Yeah, and I bet you are the one who says "No" each time round. Get over yourself. Your world is disappearing fast and if you don't move soon you will be lost in the rush, and good riddance.
Ooh! I just can't use that naughty Openoffice because the logo can sometimes move by as much as an incredible 5 millimetres. I'm going out of my mind sir. Please help me.
You whack brain.
Just joking.
So ... 43 then? 44? Any higher bids?
This is not a sig
Probably due to having a computer background. The ideal in typography is around 70, but I believe computer terminals standardized on 80 characters per line to account for shell prompts and such, so its common for us computer guys to use 80 characters instead of the sightly more legible 70.
Ever had to read a piece of text with 150+ characters per line? "painful" doesn't even begin to describe it. That's one of the biggest reasons I push for LaTeX over MSOffice or OpenOffice: it may not do as well as a professional typesetter, but it's considerably better than what 99% of people do 99% of the time using a modern office suite.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
Dear Sir,
this might be relevant to your interests.
Yours truly,
Anon
You should always send your reumes as pdf files unless they specifically ask for it in another format.
Sadly this is exactly backwards from what you should do if you want to get hired. As a techie I agree that this is what should happen but I've worked closely with lots of HR managers and recruiters and I can confidently say it is a BAD idea to default your resume to PDF. Your resume is likely to get 30-40 seconds consideration at most. The standard format nearly every HR department works with is MS Word. Too many of them don't even know what a PDF is - depressing as that sounds. If they can't or won't open it they won't read it. Some can read PDFs but virtually all of them can read Word. Sending a PDF formatted resume is unlikely to help you and it is very likely to hurt you. The proper thing to do is use Word (.doc NOT .docx) unless they specifically say they accept PDF.
I've also tried using OpenOffice to send Word formatted resumes. Generally works if the formatting is simple but not reliably enough I'd trust it for a resume. It is not at all uncommon for the resume formatting to get messed up. Even small formatting errors look REALLY bad on a resume. Guess who looks bad if this happens? Not Microsoft. The person doing the hiring is far more likely to assume you are an idiot and toss your resume in the figurative rubbish bin. Depressing but that's the way it is.
You stay playing with your coloured tabs in Excel and the rest of us will get on with the work.
Add the OpenOffice.org PPA to your repos. And you're done.
Obviously you cannot think of kword, which approaches this, almost everything is in the sidebar - except load / save / print. But that can be moved in one click. see: http://www.koffice.org/kword/
In Word, View>FullScreen (Alt-V,U). This will get rid of status bar, menu bar, window borders and everything so you see just the page.
Yes, but most of the editing tools are lost completely. You have to change the settings away from default to be even able to enter text, but there are no editing controls available, e.g. no way of selecting a different style for the text you're editing. There also doesn't seem to be a way to customize the minimal toolbar that is present.
You can put all the toolbars and menus wherever you want, horizontally at the top or vertically at the side.
I don't see any options to do this. How do you do it?
I made a document in Word 2007 That contained a table, some text to the right of the table all the way down the side in a column with a blue background, and at the very bottom (above the footer area) a paragraph of text explaining the information in the table and other tid bits.
It isn't anything extravagant, but neither OO.o or Word 2003 will read the format correctly at all, even when it's saved in Word 2000/XP whatever format.
The column to the right is all mangled into the table and text at the bottom, etc. I could always post the 1 page document if anyone would like to see how bad it gets mangled.
http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?p=341113
Spreadsheets are very useful, but documents and presentation programs seem bloated and useless compared to how they could be. A PDF works just fine as a finished document, and virtually all PDF readers have an option to view it as a presentation - slide transitions don't have any useful function, and they tend to detract from a slideshow's informational value. File formats like .odt, .doc and .ppt get corrupted very easily, making them extremely difficult to recover (ascii text, as well as such text in a markup language, is virtually immune to corruption). There are simply so many efficient, stable, compatible open standards-based ways to make documents and presentations that programs like Microsoft Office and OO.o seem to be unnecessary.
In Office10, to change the style, right-click on the text and choose Style>...
In previous versions of Office, I open up new toolbars while fullscreened with View>Toolbar. I can't remember if I did it just with a keyboard shortcut (Alt-V,T) or by recording a macro which did it and then running this macro while in fullscreen.
Sorry, title should be "hate Office software"
Font rendering now works on OO 3.2? As example, he is unable to render Verdana correctly (lots of kerning and spacing errors) and many others TrueType fonts. And for note, the exactly same Linux box (Slackware 12.2) can draw perfectly the Verdana on KDE 3.5 and GTK2 applications
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
smartest comment yet - thanks
Windows XP called... it wants its theme back. This thing looks horrible. I gladly pay $100 for "real" Microsft Office, thank you very much. Imagine sitting in front of this crap all day.
Google recently (1 week) added the ability to share entire folders in Google Docs.
This is HUGE, previously you had to "invite" people (or otherwise provide a link) to every single Doc individually. This effectively made Google Docs useless as a centralized repository. (Believe me, we tried. Closest we got to a working solution was an unholy crossbreed of Docs and Sites, but it was still overly cumbersome)
Now you can create a folder, share/invite people to it ONCE, and just drop stuff in it, including additional sub-folders.
Seriously, Google Docs just became a killer app with this addition. Centralized, hierarchical, browser-editable, collaborative nirvana. I'm sure there are many valid use cases for local storage (highly sensitive materials, etc), but for general stuff Docs is so superior now to the de facto sharing model of MS Office + shared drive(s) + email/version hell it's not even a contest.
"Mind, as manifested by the capacity to make choices, is to some extent present in every electron." -Freeman Dyson
When are they going to finally dump the '.org' from the name. This is an application after all not a web site. Who came up with that anyway?
It looks like they haven't fixed my biggest peeve, namely the refusal the default to the current directory when opening files. When I start up OO in a certain directory, create a document, and save, the overwhelming majority of the time I want to save the new document in the current directory. The same if I open an existing document: I want to look for it by default in the current directory. Instead, in both cases OO defaults to whatever directory it was last in, or the Desktop if it doesn't havdon't impose it on the rest of us. e a directory saved. I understand that this is the behavior that MS Windows users expect, but it is not what Unix users expect, and in my opinion, it is much inferior to the Unix approach. It makes sense to provide the option of MS Windows-type behavior for people switching from MS Windows, but the absence of Unix behavior on Unix systems is really unfortunate. Many of us use Unix because we prefer it, not simply to save money or avoid unfree software. Imposing MS Windows approaches as a lowest common denominator in order to spread FLOSS is not a good idea.
Somewhat less irritating is the fact that when I do want to open a file in a non-default directory, I have to browse using a slow GUI. I'd love to have the option of something that worked like a UNIX shell, in which I could cd and ls.
I think the problem is a matter of choice, such as Linux vs M$. I've been using OO since version 0.9 at least. For me it's A GREAT software!! Of course it has its bad points, perfection is not possible. In my case those bad points are not a problem. OpenOffice is, in my opinion, an excellent Office Suite, which is VERY user friendly, free of charge, compatible with other Office Suites (of course some things are not fully compatible, but the percent of compatibility is REALLY GOOD!) You may say it's not like M$ Word; of course it's not, but if you need M$ Word then buy its license and use it. You should use the software you feel comfortable with, and assume the responsibilities of your choice. I'm SICK of people's comments saying OO is not good, OO is not compatible, OO startup is slow, OO is not like M$ Word; but at the moment of using M$ Word they crack it or they curse because it has compatibility problems. My advice is USE THE OFFICE SUITE YOU LIKE/WANT! (the one that makes you happy =D) My personal suggestion is use OpenOffice because it's SIMPLY COOL!
It's worth noting that the ribbon, when not expanded, is just a single line the thickness of a standard toolbar - thinner than the way most people have their Office toolbars configured.
You can expand or collapse the ribbon by double-clicking on an active tab. While collapsed, you can also single-click a tab (the tabs are the only part that remain visible) to view the ribbon temporarily, like a menu. Select an option and it hides again.
Office 2007 really should have publicized this better. 2010 has a button you can click specifically to collapse or expand the ribbon, and while I don't personally use it (double-click is faster for me) it's amazing how many people thought it was a completely new feature just because the button was new.
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
There must be a few here that remember that major Word 97 bug. Many documents saved in Word 97 could not be opened by a slightly different burn of Word 97 that was sold in identically marked boxes with identically marked disks. The best answer was to remove all copies of Word 97 in the workplace and reinstall from a single CDROM using the product keys from all the other ones and only send things to the outside in rich text format or ascii.
It's a moving target as anyone that has attempted to use macros over successive versions could tell you.
First as others have pointed out most people use Metric A4. :)
Anyway there is a school of thought and research that human beings are creatures that are built to understand things on the horizontal. This stems back to our cave man days where most of our food/enemies/friends/life was situated on the horizontal. It is natural to scan left right, right left and see everything we need to see. Our spacial awareness is not very good at up down.
We see this pattern all around us. From several written languages to door handles on cars. It's also why the screens we like are wide screen. We simply like scanning for information on the horizon. We train our cognitive recognition from a young age to see left right, right left.
So no it's probably more right than wrong that UI have menu's, ribbons, tabs what have you on the horizontal. The average person is probably just better at understanding and utilizing a horizontal interface.
Is it a waste of space? Yes. But is the space better used for usability? Probably.
Yes Yes, what about language X and it's up down metaphor. What about elevator buttons on the up down. Yes yes you can all find examples that seem to violate the statements above. But it is hard to disagree that the majority of our informational awareness is on the level plain.
I've been waiting for this like two years... Finally rudimentary OpenType/CFF support... Next stop... Full OpenType support... Small Caps, Old Style Figures anybody?
Now *that* is gold... I would kill for an interface like that
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
I can't believe they waited until 3.2 to add the ability to even read OpenType fonts.
OTF is the most standard, universal font format out there. Except for OpenOffice, every single program on Linux, Windows, and Macintosh with a font selection dialog can read OpenType fonts.
What took you so fucking long? Do you have no fucking sense of priority? It's fucking inexcusable that the biggest office suite on Linux will only gain the ability to read standard fonts at the end of 2009.
Yes, I do. I only have office software installed because I need to read documents my co-workers send me.
Whenever I create something by myself, I use XeTeX exclusively and send people PDFs made from my XeTeX sources.
On a related note - I get annoyed with my browser getting squeezed in this same manner with toolbars and the row of tabs in Firefox - especially when working on my laptop. I put the tabs on the left side of the browser using extension "Tree Style Tab" to help recover some of the space. And I find that I can rearrange the toolbars to comprise just two rows.
That may be the way it is in your company.
Who said anything about my company? I thought I was pretty clear when I said HR departments in general...
When I'm hiring a tech person, a word document is a strike against you.
Do you care about the information contained in the resume or do you truly reject candidates for using the most popular word processing software on the planet for generating the resume? If the later I'd say you are being foolish.
Since most hiring departments actually require Word format, you are only hurting yourself with such an arbitrary bias. I'm capable of providing you my resume in Word, PDF, RTF, ODF, TXT, Postscript and just about any other format you care to request. But if you don't specify it's going to come to you in Word because that what MOST employers want to see. How am I to know that you have a pathological hatred of Word files? I don't like Microsoft either but if it means getting a job versus not I can get over my distaste for Word.
Furthermore, I'm not sure I would want to work in a company that couldn't open PDFs.
Don't confuse the company with the HR minions. Some companies have great HR people but many more staff HR with retards who are unqualified to do much else. You have to get past the HR folks and most of them in my experience are not especially tech savvy.
The "we can't read PDF" excuse got old more than ten years ago. It's short for "we can't change PDF easily so we can't strip your resume...
Actually the reason is much simpler. Companies that receive a lot of resumes have software that parses the documents (for keywords mostly) and this software often doesn't work with PDFs. Since Word is by far the most popular word processing software on the planet that is what they focus on. This has become less of a problem in recent years but it still exists. Most computers can read PDFs now but the institutional inertia takes a while to move.
Besides if someone really wants to strip your resume, putting it in a PDF will not prevent them from doing that. It adds a step but cut/paste isn't exactly hard. In any case, it would be a RARE recruiter that would do this. The overwhelming majority simply don't have the time and don't really care. If they don't want to hire you they simply throw out your resume or ignore it.
The better recruiters can handle most normal formats (DOC, TXT, RTF, PDF, etc) but many companies aren't very sophisticated. Best to assume a basic level of technological expertise. You can wow them once you get the interview. No one is impressed by your ability to create a PDF.
Word is standard for resumes like it or not
We find your wisdom to be disturbingly outdated...
The consensus on /. is that resume.pdf has numerous advantages over resume.doc and marginal, if any, disadvantages.
For me, the telling point has been that I cannot know how many persons will have the opportunity to revise my resume before it gets to the desk where the decision to interview is made. Sending resume.pdf prevents meddling. That excludes me from interviewing with businesses where the lowest paid persons in the HR department get to insert their comments into the resumes that cross their desks, and maybe fiddle with my statements too. That's a good thing: it can save me from wasting further time with a company that is fucked up beyond all recognition. Fucntion foo(bar) has no place in anything that relates to HR or finances.
I do have a disturbing lack of trust in strangers who might have their own hidden agendas, especially with regard to HR employees and used car salesmen.
Will
The topic I was discussing here was whether PDFs are suitable as a means to collaborate on a document. They're not. Your comments about whether Word is suitable in such a situation are interesting, but beside the point.
This is exactly right - ignoring format until the end is fine if your document isn't very long or complex. But for big, complicated documents, it's a big time and money saver to have the format at least mostly right from the start.
Thanks for the insult, but if you actually read all of the above you should have realised that I have been through such a process and have been able to compare the fraudulent resume with the real one in my own case. You should have also noticed there was even a story about this practice here recently.
While many recruiters are ethical there are a lot of unethical recruiters out there that indulge in this practice. I've seen it very obviously once from my end and many times since when applicants have come in and I've asked to see their copy of their resume. I've seen several inflated, some stripped, and large numbers where the agency has introduced spelling mistakes in the process of "improving" the resume. Technical terms get turned into all kinds of weird words when run through a spell checker by a recruitment agency that does not care enough to proofread. Those are the resumes that normally go directly into the rubbish so you'll get nothing via an agency that has made such a mistake.
The GP was talking about finished versions not collaboration. So we are not discussion whether PDF's are suitable for collaboration, we are discussing whether .doc or another format provides consistent presentation.
Here is the GP's post, they do not mention collaboration.
You are right on the fact PDF is not a collaborative tool but it's not meant to be. PDF is for consistent presentation across a variety of platforms.
Personally I find word painful when collaborating, most of my collaborative documents are 6 to 20 pages so its easier for us to use Outlook and then when it is done dump it into word, make the formatting consistent and then dump it out as PDF if we care about the presentation (we just send the word file if we dont).
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.