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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."
Maybe they only pushed the update to the main website, not the self-update servers.
Have you filed bug reports regarding these problems, including example documents when possible?
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
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
Yup, it's changed in Finder. Find a document, either right-click or go to the File menu, select Get Info, change the application in "Open with" and then select "Change All".
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
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.
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.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
Still only 256 columns per sheet? I frequently need a lot more than that.
1024, actually, since version 3.0.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
Did you still have the installation files on your hard drive that the 3.0.0 install dropped on your desktop? I removed mine.
I actually went out and found a copy of 3.0.0 on a shareware site, and put the files there. 3.0.0 still refuses to uninstall. 3.2.0 says 3.0.0 has to be uninstalled first. The 3.0.0 installer refuses to uninstall 3.0.0 - it says 3.0.0 is not installed, even though I can go to the start menu and start up OO apps, and they are version 3.0.0.
I think there are some holes in their installation process. I usually don't have trouble either, but when I do, they're usually a huge pain in the butt to fix. That's a pretty typical statement for Windows, actually.
IBM's Lotus Symphony is based on the same code and has had that effort put into the UI. It's based on much older code, though, and suffers for it.
I would agree that OOo does tend to look a bit dated and lacking in the polish you see in MSO2003.
--srj/mmv
It did two disagreeable things to me - firstly, attempting to stretch or move an image would make it distort the image so you couldn't see what it was doing, and secondly, it was unable to save documents correctly.
I was using it to make a 4-page document for a CD booklet with the lyrics etc in a bunch of frames. When the document was reloaded, it had reduced to 3 pages and splattered the frames everywhere, seemingly at random.
The primary solution to these problems at the moment seems to be uninstalling the broken Canonical version and installing the official OOo binaries instead.
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?
We've been using OO for about 5 years, I've never had a single person in our office ever have a problem with anything I could call a bug.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
640 columns should be enough for anyone
The fact that you have had this problem more than once tells me that you are a willy-nilly file deleter, and it is likely that you will have the same sort of problems with other operating systems if you continue to be a willy-nilly file deleter.
I dont know why it dropped files essential to uninstallation on your desktop, and its hard to believe that the installer was coded specifically to do that. Did you tell it to install directly to your desktop? If so, don't do that. Really.
Just say'n.
"His name was James Damore."
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!"
Nonsense. Even with proprietary software developers can only fix bugs that they know about. If you don't report a bug, then you have no business complaining that it isn't fixed. I've fixed bugs in code that have been there for years, but not fixed because they don't impact the developers' use of the system. When someone encounters them and provides a test case, I can fix them. When I never see them, I can't. Even if the developers are paid, they're not omniscient.
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only you can answer that question. Nice thing about open source is that you can download it, try it and decide for yourself. for the record I'm not a big fan of OO..
It's the default location; specifically "C:\Users\\Desktop\OpenOffice.org 3.2 (en-US) Installation Files\" (Win 7) - though I've never had any problems upgrading after deleting the install files because Windows should cache any required MSI files in C:\Windows\Installer\.
Though I still don't understand why MSI-installed apps need the original MSI to uninstall or change them - I thought Microsoft had abandoned that stupid behaviour when they stopped requiring you to have the Office install CD to uninstall Office 97. I've seen a few machines where a deleted or corrupt .NET MSI cache has made it impossible to upgrade, repair or remove said framework(s).
I've written several 100+ page, extensively formatted documents, and only found one bug. It's minor, and I can work around it, but it's easily replicable.
If I create a paragraph style with a border, and change the line spacing from default, the bottom border is often rendered THROUGH the last line of text when the paragraph crosses between two pages (or two columns). If I make an edit in the paragraph, it will fix itself... but be incorrect again the next time it's loaded.
I suppose I should file a bug report, eh?
I moved to Open Office from Word because the document became an unmaintainable mess in word. Styles broke, page numbers broke... I simply couldn't have done it properly.
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 "don't" really have anything "to reply to" in your post, but I just wanted to make sure somebody on "Slashdot" is mocking your insane use of quote "marks." "Consider" this a "public service."
Comment of the year
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?