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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."

30 of 260 comments (clear)

  1. External references by Enderandrew · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
  2. Re:improved compatibility with open standard by dwiget001 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

  3. Clippy by MrEricSir · · Score: 5, Funny

    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."
    1. Re:Clippy by Duositex · · Score: 4, Funny

      An LOLcat?

      "I seez u r trying to makes lettrz. WordCat help u."

    2. Re:Clippy by Red+Flayer · · Score: 4, Funny

      Does CowboyNeal have an avatar?

      Yes, he does. Unfortunately, you need a six-panel display to render the avatar due to size.

      Furthermore, the advice you're likely to get from the CowboyNeal office assistant may be somewhat suspect.

      It looks like you're trying to set a tabstop. Would you like some help with that?
      Options:
      Link to BBW pron
      Link to mature porn
      Link to hirsute porn
      Link to horseporn
      No thanks, I'm good.

      That's not the kind of office assistant most of us could use.

      --
      "Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
    3. Re:Clippy by natehoy · · Score: 3, Funny

      In other words, about as relevant as Clippy, but far more interesting.

      --
      "This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
  4. Re:Nothing That New or Innovative... by doti · · Score: 5, Insightful

    A minor (3.x) release is not meant to be innovative. That's for a major release (4.0).

    --
    factor 966971: 966971
  5. "over three hundred million downloads" by sznupi · · Score: 3, Informative

    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
  6. Re:Nothing That New or Innovative... by hey! · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Once I bought my father in law a really, really nice hammer. There wasn't made of titanium or anything like that; it didn't have any kind of electronic controls or clever mechanical gizmos to help you swing it straight. It wasn't innovative. It was just a really, really well made hammer.

    He was pleased with it, even though the hammer he already owned was in approximate terms very similar to the one I gave him. In precise terms it wasn't anywhere near as nice.

    --
    Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
  7. Just Faster??? I wish I was just Richer!!! by viraltus · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
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    1. Re:Just Faster??? I wish I was just Richer!!! by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I don't think I've used any new features for a word processor since WordPerfect 5.1. That had just about everything I needed. For 99.9999% of the population, OpenOffice is more than enough. I think that MS will have a hard time maintaining market share in the next 30 years on the desktop market. Software is just becoming too much of a commodity. Easily replaced by free alternatives. Obviously the change isn't going to happen overnight, but over the long term, there's no way that MS can keep on charging for upgrades to software when software with the same features can be had for free.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:Just Faster??? I wish I was just Richer!!! by maxume · · Score: 4, Informative

      In my vanilla install of OpenOffice 3.1, if I select several columns and then right click on one of the selected headers, "Insert Columns" (with an 's') is one of the options on the context menu.

      This is the *first* thing I tried after I decided to see if you were missing something obvious.

      --
      Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
  8. Re:will it still hijack my mac by xZgf6xHx2uhoAj9D · · Score: 4, Informative

    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".

  9. Re:Nothing That New or Innovative... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Just faster"? It isn't just faster. It's so much faster that it's like a whole new program. Great job, guys. I wish we'd see this more often: The same program, just a lot better.

  10. Confession time by Bill,+Shooter+of+Bul · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.
    1. Re:Confession time by CastrTroy · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Nobody is as bad as the Windows XP Search dog. Why would I want a dog helping me find files. This whole idea of little characters popping up to help me is kind of demeaning, but having a dog help me is just terrible. I think they should really try to have a more professional image. There should be no cartoon characters popping up, especially on the XP Professional version. If it was Windows XP Kids edition I could understand, but I think it just makes the product look like a joke.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    2. Re:Confession time by smisle · · Score: 3, Funny

      I had a funny moment yesterday - while teaching an 86 year old lady how to use a computer, she accidentally clicked on the search icon in windows explorer. The little search-pup appeared, and she looked at it quizzically ... When I showed her how to close the search panel, she said:

      "oh, thank you. Good riddance."

      Microsoft (and all the other OS companies) really need to determine their target demographic. It seems like everyone is shifting toward designing for the computer illiterate - removing "confusing" features, and replacing all the text with pictures.

      I've been teaching Word processing to a whole slew of new computer users - and there is a certain sector who always push the new file icon rather than the file menu, when I tell them to click the file menu. These are the people who inspired the "office bubble" rather than a real menu.

      --
      I'm not a bird, I'm a super-advanced flying stealth dinosaur!
  11. Re:ok? by natehoy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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."
  12. Re:bigger tables anyone? by pushing-robot · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?
  13. Re:Hooray! by Tapewolf · · Score: 3, Informative
    Are you using the Ubuntu bundled version of 3.1, by any chance? Canonical have managed to destroy it somehow. What you're describing is a known issue in the Ubuntu version.

    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.

  14. You're Missing the Point About Dogs by dreamchaser · · Score: 4, Funny

    The Search Dog is a retriever!

  15. Re:Hooray! by DrSkwid · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  16. Re:bigger tables anyone? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    640 columns should be enough for anyone

  17. Re:Unable to install by Rockoon · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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."
  18. Re:Nothing That New or Innovative... by tyrione · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    Native OpenType Postcript fonts alone makes it finally worth exploring Writer.

  19. Fixes my "calc" bug from 3.1.1 by coats · · Score: 4, Informative
    Bug 108855: certain names in spreadsheet-to-spreadsheet links were forced to lower-case during "save."

    Works fine with 3.2.0 -- the bug is gone.

    --
    "My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
  20. FIXED:External references by coats · · Score: 4, Informative
    External refs worked for me in Mandriva's 3.0.1.

    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!"
  21. Re:Hooray! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  22. Re:Unable to install by Spad · · Score: 3, Informative

    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).

  23. Re:Is it worth it? by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 3, Funny

    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."