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OpenOffice 3.2 Released
harmonise writes "Version 3.2 of the OpenOffice.org office suite is now available. This marks the tenth anniversary year of the office suite, with over three hundred million downloads recorded in total. The new features include faster start up times; improved compatibility with open standard (ODF) and proprietary file formats; improvements to all components, particularly the Calc spreadsheet, with over a dozen new or enhanced features; and the Chart module (usable throughout OpenOffice.org) has had a usability makeover as well as offering new chart types."
Right on the heels of MS 2010 beta. Doesn't appear to be much new things, it's just faster. Still. Openoffice is the best office suite out there in my opinion.
First off, congrats on getting the release out the door. I do appreciate the project.
That being said, in 3.0, supposedly there was support in Calc to external references (to values in other documents). In 3.1, it was supposedly fixed. It still didn't work.
I'm curious to see if it finally works in 3.2. And for those who don't know, you should check out Novell's fork/non-standard builds over at go-oo.org. Many Linux distros use these builds automatically, but if you're on Windows, that is the version I'd grab. They have several nice improvements over the upstream version.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
OOXML, despite having "Open" in it's name and despite the rigged voting process in the ISO is *hardly* a standard for anything.
Even Microsoft, whose baby it is, doesn't support it.
I'm sorry, but I refuse to use any office suite that doesn't have animated characters telling me what to do.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
OO Fan Boy here. I am happy to see the success that OO is having, the continued development...and most importantly...starting up to a blank document in less time than it takes me to walk to the fridge for another can of Pepsi. Thank you OO development team!
Seriously, though, I like to use OO and it is the only my wife has used at home for documents, but making it start up faster should have been a number 1 priority all along.
Bearded Dragon
Looks like the self update function is still broken, at least on the Mac version. It's telling me 3.1 is up to date.
so that any powerpoint email attachments etc will be opened in open office instead of microsoft office. This feature cannot be turned off. Uninstalled because of it.
Does it still count an open quotation mark as a whole word? That really bugged me about v3.1
"The new features include faster start up times; " Is that a special feature? it should be normal. not that I hate OO, but it has a long way to go before being an app I truely love. It's the best office suite out there(to me.) but it still isn't great.
Not a very useful metric, considering how on the most popular desktop OS OpenOffice requires downloading of installation package to upgrade. Yes, OSes with package management and OOo included, together with using the same download for installations and/or upgrades on several machines, swing the usage upwards; but I doubt it's anywhere enough to compensate.
One that hath name thou can not otter
http://www.softpedia.com/screenshots/OpenOfficeorg-for-Windows_2.png
http://img.labnol.org/di/visio-2010.png
It certainly isn't your standard open source UI nightmare but with all the effort that has put into this project over the years how is possible no one in charge of the project has been capable of spending the tiny amount of cash relative to paying engineers and the rest of the project's overhead it takes to pay for some professional UI artists to spend the short amount of time it would take to update the clunkly and half-assed widget/UI element source art so this actually fantastic piece of software isn't passed over because it looks amateurish compared to Microsoft Office?
Word processors cannot be improving in terms of features forever and, anyway, people only use a small percentage of those, so I think "just" faster is "just" right.
Dear
The lack of a tabbed interface in OOWord renders it nigh unusable, IMO. OO needs to stop trying to play catch-up to MS Office and start focusing on meaningful innovation and usability.
My machine has 3.0.0 installed, but I deleted the installation files and have no copy anywhere.
I can't uninstall 3.0.0 without the installation files, and there doesn't appear to be anywhere to download them.
The new version won't install until I uninstall the old version.
Looks like I'll be using 3.0.0 forever.
Still only 256 columns per sheet? I frequently need a lot more than that.
Bibtxt is the biggest item to get OpenOffice working.
If I can import and export Bibtxt files Bibliography files and use Templates for writing styles.
That is I can write in APA then tell OpenOffice to reformat for IEEE. Though it can be done with Tex this is the killer feature people would like in Academia. With enough people using it for this feature then many people would ask for it in their business.
So the question is: Does OpenOffice support
-the bought and approved ISO standard OOXML
Or
-The OOXML that MS' own Office programs create?
My guess is the latter since nothing supports the first.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
Is Calc still slower than thick shit, unlike Excel or Gnumeric? It's faster than it was but still much slower.
Can you have more than 64k rows, like Excel or Gnumeric? No? Fail!
Sticking with Gnumeric.
Although I hated Clippy with a great passion, I liked the professor office helper. If Microsoft had chosen the professor, I don't think they would have gotten the vitriol they did. Clippy was a smug jackass. Not a helpful, humble character like the professor. He looked like Einstein, so he seemed to be smart, but he was also old which made him seem like a kind grandparent. I'm slightly ashamed to admit that he did teach me some things about word, I didn't already know.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
There's no point in mentioning ODF if you aren't going to mention the other open standards in the parenthesis.
There is no other open standard in the same category as ODF. Mentioning it by name still helps those who only know the proprietary DOC format.
I like Open Office right up until the point where I have to edit documents using those keybindings. Unfortunately, the features don't include any mention of improved alternate keybinding support. Surely not everyone wants to adapt to Windows keybindings?
As an example, Firefox supports emacs editing keybindings via a simple Gnome option.
Having to create keybinding files from scratch is a chore. Worse, new OO releases often don't support past keybinding files. I don't think it would be a major effort to include alternate keybinding files, and make switching a bit easier? I'm sure quite a few of us would volunteer to make that happen.
Wouldn't it be funny if OpenOffice supported OOXML, and MicroSoft had to write their code to be compatible with the OO version.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
"improved compatibility with open standard (ODF) and proprietary file formats"
So, is it finally able to save RTF files without losing random formatting information?
Actually, I don't care any more. I just sucked it up and bought a heavily discounted copy of Office 2007 and installed it on two of my Windows machines (Desktop and Laptop) instead of dealing with OO.o's document mangling.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
I downloaded it a couple of days ago.
Well?
It would be even funnier if OpenOffice.org supported OOXML and Microsoft wrote their own OOXML that has all these extensions and crap that makes it not backwards compatible with the OpenOffice.org version.
-- gid
The Search Dog is a retriever!
Mmm... no... not this time... :-(
Am I the only one who is waiting for some kind of DOM to create docs via PHP? Possibly with updated fresh modules?
I installed 3.1 just last week because I needed some office on my machine and tried to paste some cells from calc into a writer document, a process that MSOffice 2003 does perfectly, and got some kind of embedded spreadsheet WTF with tiny font that actually distorted when you moved the handles at the side. Seems to get a table you need to actually 'paste as html', and even then there's no way to get to the bits that overflow off the right of the document...
I really want to love openoffice and will update, but my advice right now is clone Office 2003 first and worry about new features later. (Except give Calc a MD5 function, excel does not seem to have one)
Come as you are, do what you must, be who you will.
think he means bibtex (a LaTeX bibliography tool/format)
Works fine with 3.2.0 -- the bug is gone.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Did not work for me in any of the 3.1.1's (Mandriva or direct download, 32- or 64-bit). Had to revert to Mandriva's 3.0.1.
Just checked, and works for me in 32-bit direct download of 3.2.0.
"My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
Can search & replace, replace styles ?
Does it still have this drawing resizing bug ?
Is it possible to see paragraph, character and list/numbering styles at the same pane ?
Does it support the ALT key for shortcuts ?
Does it still claim to require Java to run ?
Does it have table styles ?
Does it still paste OLE objects as GDI metafiles by default instead of their native application type (eg. Smartdraw), which means you can no longer edit them ?
Do I still have to set colors at the options instead of the built-in Windows color palette ? And when I change computer my colors lose their names ?
A simple, honest, question: is it worth it? I've used OpenOffice a couple of times in the past, but it didn't work for me. Seemed too slow, a bit "bloaty" (as for example you would find a java aplication to be "bloaty", not in the Microsoft "and-the-kitchen-sink!" way), and it seemed to be a bit basic (Excel look-alike, I'm looking at you).
I'm using Windows with Office 2007 (and Office 2010 Beta on my main machine), and I'm happy with those. No, I don't have "bluescreens", "problems", "errors" or "grief", except with 2010 which is beta. And the PC never "ate my paper", although I've done some stupid, data-losing stuff on my own. So you can cut that part of the FUD. I also use just the features I want to use (yes, I do a custom Office instalation and remove the stuff I don't use/care), and I don't find the "ribbon" to be the "anti-christ".
Anyways, I'm a "happy" Microsoft Office user, which doesn't have anything particularly bad to say about it. And yes, I have a legitimate, paid-for Office, so the "but it's free!" argument doesn't quite cut it. And no, something being "open source" doesn't make it the second coming of Jesus. I agree that "open source" has it's merits, but in the end, the "final word" belongs to the consumer, I would say. And since I'm in Windows, the "it's the next-best-thing" argument doesn't cut it either.
So, I'm asking: is it worth it to download OpenOffice, and play a bit around with it, or if I'm a "happy" Microsoft Office user, I can just "move along"? :) I'm a heavy Outlook, Word, Excel, Visio, OneNote user, and I've used to use Access more than I do today. I can't stand PowerPoint (but it's a necessary evil, presentations and stuff), and I've became fond of Project (although I'm sure I'm using it in the "look, I do letters in Excel!" kind of way :)
Seriously, and I don't want to flame-bait, it's an "honest-to-goodness" question.
"A sysadmin is a cross between a detective, a police officer, a gardener, a doctor and a fireman"
Faster startup is nice, but the improvement that would thrill me more than any of these is the option of having file dialogues default to the current working directory, in other words, correct Unix user interface behavior. It drives me crazy having file dialogues default to the last directory used (on a previous invocation of the program) or my home directory. Sure, I can then navigate to the directory I want, but its extra work, and navigating through a gui is much slower than using the command line. If I go to the trouble of cd-ing into a certain directory, that normally means I want to work on files located there. For me at least the MS Windows approach is very much inferior.
I understand that things work differently on MS Windows and that developers of software like OO want to accommodate people accustomed to MS Windows, but I don't think that this should be at the expense of those of us who are accustomed to and prefer the native user interface. Indeed, some migrants from MS Windows might even like the Unix approach once they learned about it. PLEASE give us the option of using the shell for navigation.
Why is it that upgrading OO is so much easier on any version of windows vs Linux? I can upgrade an obsolete WIn2k terminal to oo3.2 with no more than a couple of clicks, but I can't upgrade Intrepid to anything past oo2.4 come hell or high water! How is this supposed to be open and accessible?!
So, they are using experienced Mac users tactic. You know, if something gets updated, don't jump to updates. Go to some site like macupdate/versiontracker and hunt for "omg it broke my computer" comments. IRC can also be used, see if guy comes back after "I got it updated, let me reboot brb".
Perhaps they are doing the exact same thing, waiting for credible disaster stories. If nothing happens, auto update server will have it.
That depends on your Linux distribution. I can upgrade OO on my Centos machines by downloading the program and typing two commands, "tar xzf OOo*.tar.gz", then "rpm -U *.rpm". I could also do the same thing with about three clicks on my desktop.
I'm not familiar with Intrepid Linux, but perhaps you should look at a Linux distribution with a better package management system?
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
No, OS X decides it, based on its scheme of "launch services" of that particular major OS X version. Yes, even OS X version matters since that behaviour has been changed in Snow Leopard, in a bad manner for some.
Having something installed recently, something particular in its info.plist, where it was installed, a lot of things happen.
Bad thing is, bad "trouble shooting" guides and even applications tell/does "clear caches" and the entire database of launch services resides in (~)/Library/Caches . So, in one shot, all prefs (including per file) may be gone and it really matters in graphics/DTP houses.
Pasted from comment #3 on this page:
I have not tried it, but it might do the trick. Proceed at your own risk.
Note: the original source had an additional aptitude -y dist-upgrade command which I removed from the above code.
OO's startup times in Windows XP used to bug the crap out of me. Doubleclick on a spreadsheet, and it might be a minute or so, sometimes more, before you were off to the races. This was on a decent Athlon64 2 GHz with 1GB RAM, not exactly a slouch of a machine.
Then I tried it on my old Athlon 1.3Ghz with 384MB RAM in Linux Mint, and it started in about 10 seconds.
On my new beast (Athlon II 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Linux Mint) OpenOffice starts in just a few seconds.
I was utterly astonished at the speed difference of OO between Windows and Linux, and it makes perfect sense to me why Windows users don't like it as much - it's a dog. I hope they've improved its Windows performance in 3.2, for the sake of those using it on Windows.
That's because many Linux distros use the much speedier Go-OO fork. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo
"The OpenOffice.org included with many popular Linux distributions such as Debian, Mandriva, openSUSE, Gentoo[5] and Ubuntu[6] uses some of Go-oo patches."
I'm running CentOS 5 on work desktops and I do something similar to install the latest OO.org, although my procedure is as follows:
Go to http://download.openoffice.org/other.html and *untick* the "Include the JRE" option, otherwise you end up downloading a JRE you don't want (since I keep the full Sun JDK updated via downloads from java.sun.com).
Click on the "English (US)" 32-bit RPM Download link (yes, we run 64-bit CentOS, but the lack of an official 64-bit Linux Firefox (if distros and other 3rd parties can build it, why can't Mozilla?) causes a cascade of 32-bit dependencies including Java and hence OO.org).
This downloads a (147MB!) .tar.gz which I unpack into an OOO dir using tar (and no, the dir name doesn't match the root of the .tar.gz file, ho hum).
I cd into the unpacked dir and then cd again into the RPMS sub-dir. I then *remove* .rpm files I don't want to install. Typically this would be openoffice.org3-dict-es, openoffice.org3-dict-fr and ooobasis3.2-testtool, but your mileage may vary.
I also "mv desktop-integration/openoffice.org3*-redhat-menus* ." so that the packages appear in my users' start menu when I finally do an "rpm -Uvh *.rpm" as root. And, yes, there's a ludicrous 47 RPMs at this point to install - there really should be something like 5 or 6 (one core [aka "common"] RPM and one RPM for each app).
One final - often later - step is to download the en-GB language pack from the other.html page I mentioned at the start. Annoyingly for 3.2.0, they haven't released an en-GB pack for it yet, which is ridiculous considering far more diverse (compared to en-US) and much less popular languages have their 3.2.0 packs (e.g. Danish, Polish, Serbian and Slovenian).
FUD. Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows and 2008 for Mac support OOXML just fine.
Yes, there are minor validation errors if you validate documents against the transitional schema (mostly because some attribute values were changed late during standardization, such as true/false changing from 1/0 to "true"/"false"). However, OpenOffice documents have at least as many similar errors when you validate them against ODF, so unless you also claim that OpenOffice doesn't support ODF, your claim is just FUD.
There are legitimate technical criticisms of OOXML, so why do so many of its opponents have to resort to lying about it?
The forms design in base is woefully behind all the other aspects of OOo in terms of quality of functionality. Doing simple things like selecting groups of objects, etc. does not work as expected. Considering that Oracle 'owns' OOo, you'd think that some of the tremendous development that is part of Oracle forms could be brought to bear on OOo base.
I've always felt that base has been woefully under-supported and underfunded. It is a very important part of the suite and needs a lot of work.
It would be nice to see a clear uptick in development support for base. It's a critical component in the open source office environment.
*** Don't be dull.***
You're right in that it might be my distro, but my point is that the different "distros" of Windows have absolutely no inter-relational issues.
FWIW, I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex), and there are no DEBs anywhere for OO > 2.4 (there used to be a group doing unofficial releases, but they've since stopped).
Responding to downloading and installing directly, I did try twice w/ 3.0 and 3.1 and I hit interdependency hell - so much so, I had to downgrade to 2.4 to get a stable OO back up and running. It's a crappy situation, but I don't have the energy to chase releases just to keep my office suite up to date (seemingly a prerequisite these days - "want OO3.2? upgrade to 9.10!")
Thanks, but as I mentioned, openoffice-pkgs doesn't support much nowadays - looks like nothing before 9.04 (and I'm on 8.10). But I'm really making the point that it's a crying shame that it takes a 3rd party volunteer org to release debs of oo for anything that's slightly behind the curve. Win2k has been obsoleted, and yet still enjoys direct support - why can't it be the same w/ Linux without dependency hell and a hell of a lot of tweaking or recompiling? This is mirrored with all sorts of apps - the minute you or they upgrade, support goes down the tubes. It's really too bad.
The decisive advantage of open formats should be that you can work around any limitations posed by an application. Moreover, every OO-user can send you a pdf preserving all essential properties of the document. I'm curious why none of these options seems to help you. And, by the way, what is an "epub-company"? A company publishing ebooks in epub format, or rather a company pursuing electronic publishing?
I've known people to use OO to convert documents between different revisions of MSOffice - since MSOffice had some poor document upgrade tools (partly on purpose - to force upgrading).
That is a bit rich considering that OpenOffice does exactly the same thing. From TFA:
As OpenOffice.org 3.2 currently requires a superset of the ODF 1.2 specification, the software now warns users when ODF 1.2 Extended features have been used.
Yes, I agree that it would be nice if some office product would correctly support the file format standard that it spawned.
I love OpenOffice. It's saved me and acquaintances literally thousands of dollars over the past few years. Basically nobody needs Word anymore.
In fact, OpenOffice handles Word files better than Word itself - especially corrupted files. My mother got an email with a very important .DOC from her work, and couldn't open it. Nobody in her team could open it either, so she sent it to me. Opened first try in OO.O.
I don't know how they do it. But I hope they keep on keepin' on... it's an invaluable piece of software.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
Hey OpenOffiice.org -- good job! What's weird is .. why is there so much bile and complaining about this complex piece of software that largely solves a whole class of important problems and is free. Point out deficiencies sure, but the comments here dwell a lot more on these oddball more-than-256-columns cases for a tool which works fine for a million common little cases.
Here's my theory -- the teenager wants to be bitchy to their parents to appear independent. But the parents provide the food and roof over the head .. so how to live there and still feel independent? Be even more bitchy!
Open office is just the same -- the linux kernel and many other initiatives to promote an open and competitive software environment would be far behind where they are without the unglamorous work of OO.o helping solve common document problems in an open way. OpenOffice.org has flaws, but it is extremely valuable.
OO.o 3.2.0 consistently crashes for me (KDE 4.3.5 / Fedora 12). This seems like a known issue (#109176).
The workaround is to add:
export OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=gnome
to "/opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice".
rmathew.com
Windows and MacOSX has APIs from a single provider with a single controlled release schedule. Linux has APIs from hundreds of providers with different release schedules. Linux distributions are efforts to bridge this problem and present a stable API within a distro release.
If you want an extremely stable distro, go for Ubuntu LTS or a RedHat/CentOS release. If you want the latest features and releases of software, pick a non LTS Ubuntu / Linux Mint or Fedora release. Ubuntu releases are usually upgradeable, while I usually reinstall my Fedora installation every second release.
Compiling a piece of software yourself is really not that complicated. Most of the time its simply: install required dev packages, then run configure; make; make install. As for OpenOffice it seems to be: install required dev packages, then run ./configure; ./bootstrap; source LinuxX86Env.Set.sh; dmake
I tried 3.1, RTF was f*cked up. 3.2, it still is. Are they ever going to fix it?
Back in 2.3, if I did a SAVE->AS from an ODT file to RTF, the result was messed up. The first paragraph was OK, the rest was defaulted to single-space, no indents. But if I cleaned it up with "format paragraph" and saved it, it would STAY CLEANED UP. 3.1 was a total disaster for RTF, it messed everything up incredibly. In 3.2, the SAVE->AS to RTF gives the same result as 2.3, but YOU CAN'T CLEAN IT UP!!!! TRY, then save, close, and reopen, and once again NOTHING AFTER THE FIRST PARAGRAPH is formatted.
I **NEED** RTF, I **NEED** properly formatted RTF! Lots of places I need to send files won't take anything else. Hey, guys, get with it and fix the damn thing!
Meanwhile I guess I'll keep on using 2.3!
Teen Angel - a Ghost Story