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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.
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'
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...
5 characters isn't much to bruteforce anyway.
I suspect they eliminated a password length requirement because the security of the password is really up to the needs and desires of the user who set that password. If I have a password length of 5, then someone who wants a trivial password to keep casual lookie-loos out is going to choose 12345 anyway.
("Amazing! That's the same as the combination on my suitcase!")
Allow me to choose one character minimum and I'll choose one character and use it. No real loss in security, and since I'm choosing the level of security it's my decision to make. I can't sue OO for "lack of security" because OO is simply allowing me to choose how secure I want my stuff.
Someone who wants to protect (as in really protect) their document is going to choose a 50-character password with a mix of uppers, lowers, numbers, and scrunchy special characters. Then it'll be so secure, even the original author can't open it.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
Any dialog box that has 'OK' instead of a meaningful verb as a button title is an automatic usability fail (this is one of the first things everyone learns about HCI, it's really not hard to get right...) so that quote alone tells me that OO.o is still not tackling usability issues properly. Someone has obviously looked at that dialog box, but not fixed the important issue with it, so the odds of them fixing the more serious issues is quite slim.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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.
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
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.
Human Computer Interaction
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I was going to say post links to the RTF issue that you are talking about but I did a Search and H01y$hit!
229 issues!
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?issue_type=DEFECT&issue_type=ENHANCEMENT&issue_type=FEATURE&issue_type=PATCH&issue_status=UNCONFIRMED&issue_status=NEW&issue_status=STARTED&issue_status=REOPENED&issue_status=RESOLVED&email1=&emailtype1=exact&emailassigned_to1=1&email2=&emailtype2=exact&emailreporter2=1&issueidtype=include&issue_id=&changedin=&votes=&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=&chfieldvalue=&short_desc=rtf&short_desc_type=allwords&long_desc=&long_desc_type=allwords&issue_file_loc=&issue_file_loc_type=fulltext&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=fulltext&keywords=&keywords_type=anytokens&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time&Submit+query=Submit+query
I voted for the big ones I could see but all you can do is vote for the big ones for you.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
That's one of the things wrong with MS Office.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
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 ...
"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.
The thing is, OK translates as "OK" into pretty much every language I know of.
"Accept", "encrypt", "agree" and any other suitable verb I can think of do not.
But - what do you suggest they should use instead? And considering that the "OK" button is quite common if not omnipresent in Windows, I take it you doubt that anyone has ever looked into any of Windows' issues.
Another possibility is that the people working on the GUI don't consider themselves suitable or knowledgeable enough to work on the more deep rooted things, and figured they'd pitch in where they couldn't do much harm. Is that really such a bad thing?
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)
Any dialog box that has 'OK' instead of a meaningful verb as a button title is an automatic usability fail
No, it's perfectly valid in many dialogs, particularly confirmation dialogs and warning dialogs. "Warning: This operation can not be undone. [OK][Cancel]" is perfectly fine. "Continue" is too weak, sounds like an info screen. "Agree" or "Accept" sounds like you actually have a choice or that you're positively agreeing with it which you don't. "Ok" is intentionally netural, like "objection noted, but I'm still going forward with this". Granted, OK could have been used a lot less compared to useful verbs like "Save", "Connect", "Create" and so on but it's not that useless.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
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'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.
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.
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?
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.