OpenOffice 2.3 Released

ClickOnThis writes "Surely I'm not the only one who noticed that OpenOffice.org has announced the release of version 2.3! From the website: 'Available for download now, OpenOffice.org 2.3 incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities. It is a major release and all users should download it. Plus: It is only with 2.3 that users can make full use of our growing extensions library.' You can download it but be kind and use a P2P client instead, such as bittorrent."

I wonder

When will they focus on usability and speed rather than adding features. It may or may not be feature-complete (whatever that is) but it certainly is not yet quite as easy and streamlined to use even as some early nineties suites... Just my $0.02, don't bite my head off =)

Re:I wonder

You must be the other guy who used AmiPro back in the 90s. Man, now that was a good word processor!

Story about Michael Schrayer of Electric Pencil.

Electric Pencil!

In 1976 I was in a computer store owned by a friend, a very nice store in an upscale area.

Someone walked in who I assumed would be asked to leave because he looked so disreputable. He had poor skin and unkempt hair. If you had looked in the dumpsters in that area you could not have found clothing as old and trashy-looking as this man's. (That is not an exaggeration.) Back then you would have called him a bum, because we didn't have homeless people in that area until after Reagan was elected and had a chance to work his corruption.

After a while my friend came over to me, and I asked him why he didn't ask the disreputable person to leave. He said, "That's Michael Schrayer, the man who wrote Electric Pencil!. He may look poor, but he is at least a millionaire."

Re:I wonder

For me, the only two missing features is quicker startup and better performance during use... I couldn't care less about anything else they might add.

Re:I wonder

Speed has a lot to say about user experience. It feels slow, which makes it fell like a huge bloated application. Somehow that needs to change, at least before I personally would feel better using it.

Then egain, I may really just be in the market for a .pages -> .odt converter, rather than a full OOo suite...

Re:I wonder

Too true, I'm doing all my office type work on windows and MSOffice again because I couldn't stand how slow OpenOffice runs. I'll still download this to try it, but I'm unlikely to use it regularly until they make it somewhat more efficient.

Re:I wonder

Have you tried turning off Java and increasing memory usage?

Doing that makes OO on Linux run about as well as MS office on Windows on a P4 with 1Gb (I know, I know, but its the only comparison I have).

It is still slower than Gnumeric or Lyx, which start up instantly and are never sluggish, but that is not an altogether fair comparison either.

Of course Oo are still at fault for using defaults that MOST people would be better off changing.

Re:I wonder

Yes, I have tried turning off Java and increasing memory. Makes no difference. The problem is this 'adapt row height' thing that it does on opening a workbook. I have some array formulas, and it simply takes forever to get through it. Its not acceptable. The row heights are all defaults in any case, so it must have some other than its literal meaning. There seems to be no information on it, no way to turn it off or find out what it is really doing.

This needs fixing asap, or its not competitive.

Re:I wonder

Presume you've filed a bug with a sample spreadsheet? Do it ASAP and you'll find that someone will probably take it up and fix it, even if it takes a while. The beauty is that it helps everyone else too...

Re:I wonder

It is always good if someone bothers to post about an application that (s)he is not impressed with (Like you did). But it will help more if users like you give specific examples of what's missing or what's slightly difficult to use etc. In my case, I got so frustrated by the slow loading of documents in MS Office, the ever-so-frustrating virus-scanning of every document, and the lack of flexibility and anti-virus/anti-spyware mess of Windows (I know that the topic is not OSes), that I decided to move to Linux completely (After 5-6 years of dual-booting - Linux for work and Windows for gaming and office documents etc). Surprisingly I haven't had a single format problem in any MS document that I have imported, and I am very happy with my odt documents that I just save as Word doc before sending and nobody has complained. Although I know that I am no power user. So maybe you are saying that OpenOffice is not ready for the power user. But in that case, I would like to know where and why.

Re:I wonder

Well I didn't want to come across as a whinger and I did want to get the first post so I had to make it quick ;) but I was referring to a general sluggishness. It does work. It does work well and I use it as my main suite at home, and I have never had any problems with MS formats (other than some obscure PPSs with macros but I understand why this is like that [and how to fix it] so I don't complain about that). Nevertheless it does take its sweet time to load the application and to open large, heavily-formatted files. Also the fact that it freezes while saving is annoying. So my point was: it is good, but rather than adding extra functionality I would like it better that they made the excellent stuff they have now to work faster. Like somebody else rightly said, making it feel smoother adds a lot to the "it's a serious and professional app" experience.

Re:I wonder

I am by no means a "power user". I've used OO.o for a few years when doing mostly linux-work. Now I'm transitioning into project management more and more and in this world, almost everything is Microsoft. Documents are put into sharepoint, all documents exchanged are MS-Office and MS-Project is the standard tool.
Sharepoint connects nicely into MS-Office and so does MS-Project. Everything is "interleaved" or whatever I should call it. This doesn't mean that I can't use OO.o or KPlato or something else, but it does mean that its harder for me to do so.
Yes, the filters on OO.o are great, but are they good enough for me or do I have to do some extra work to convert those documents? Most likely there's something that won't work and I'd hate to be the one to explain that I broke document just because I wanted to use OO.o instead of the MS-O that the company provides.

Microsoft is damn good at making sure that it's harder to use competing products than it is to use theirs. Let's hope that the EU will make them open up all specs so that all companies can compete on equal terms.

.haeger

Re:Not compatible ?

The problem with your slightly flippant reply is that some of us did once file and vote for bugs, but after seeing some of the most popular bugs in the whole system stay dormant for literally years and given that the OO bug reporting system is ludicrously overcomplicated for casual users, we don't generally bother any more.

Too easy to make sheets that don't work on Excel

My biggest problem with OOo was that it was far too easy to create spreadsheets that simply didn't work for other people looking at them with Excel. For a new user, playing with spreadsheets for the first time, to find this out having created some quite big and complicated spreadsheets in OOo was a huge turn-off. I now invariably use my old version of Excel '97.

AFAIK, there is not even a snag list of things to be careful of, that will work on OOo, but will break the sheet on Excel.

As well as formatting and display issues, as far as I remember the most systematic mistake I'd made was using mathematical formulas on ranges of cells including cells that are empty or contain strings. OOo would just treat them as having the numerical value zero, and carry on fine; but on Excel it would make the whole formula return an error.

Going through and debugging this (finding workarounds to make it work on Excel) is something I don't want to have to do again. Because I don't know what other things are there that may then not work on Excel, I no longer use OOo for spreadsheets.

Re:I wonder

When will they focus on usability and speed rather than adding features.

"they" being every software developer who ever existed

Re:I wonder

I agree, but let's come up with some specific examples for the OOo developers,

1. Use Tango Icons [freedesktop.org] (another example [musichall.cz]).
2. Ditch the floating toolbars, dock everything by default.
3.1 Simplify the toolbar: only show toolbar icons by default that are used every hour (eg, open, save, bold/italics, etc.). Eg, I haven't tried 2.3 but in Ubuntu 2.2 there's a button to toggle AutoSpellCheck. It's not used that frequently -- move it to a dropdownlist. And then we might even see the OpenOffice.org help button.
3.2 Group toolbar items into tabs (call them the Office Ribbons if you want... the Office Ribbon is just a ripoff of Dreamweaver UI Tabs [webindexing.biz] anyway and I'm sure they borrowed the idea from someone else. Stealing good ideas is a good thing).
4. Don't flicker in the spreadsheet when scrolling through lots of selected cells (eg, select a whole page and scroll)
5. Choose good default graph colours and design. Get gnome's jimmac to pick some... he may be colour blind but that guy knows colours [musichall.cz].
6. Grey-out icons with alpha, not with a every-second-pixel-grey mesh.
7. Make better HTML output targetted at profiles of browsers... the current one doesn't understand shadows or borders, and with CSS3 you can support that stuff. For older browsers that don't support CSS3 drop shadows then fake it with nested DIVs or something.
8. Have a strict ISO OpenDocument profile to save documents as... not just ODF 1.0 but check for proprietary stuff all through the document.
9. Don't use Java for ODF... well allow it as an option but come up with some JavaScript syntax (Java is too heavy to type, prefer Javascript/Python/Ruby or something). Use a P4X syntax for accessing a document object.
10. Allow arbitrary border images. Allow acronyms and abbreviations for disabled users.

Some of these are probably addressed in 2.3... sorry for the dups :)

Re:I wonder

OK, I'll play too. Some of these are really usability flaws and some might be classed as bugs but feel like usability flaws to the user:

1. Fix mail merge in Writer. The whole data sources mess is broken, and the mail merge feature itself is unable to do simple things like merging to a single document that can subsequently be edited.
2. Fix handling of fonts and typography (starting with being able to draw OpenType fonts properly and export them to PDFs at all).
3. Fix the style selection mechanism. I don't generally use around 100 styles in one document, and I don't need 15,746 different views of the styles. I just want a list of the dozen or so styles I actually care about.
4. Provide commands to revert the formatting of selected objects/text to the default for the current character/paragraph/whatever style individually. The vague "Default" command on the menu is unhelpful.

Obligatory disclaimer/excuse: I haven't yet had chance to install 2.3, so although I've seen no reports that the above have been addressed in this version, some of this may now be out of date.

Error bars - woohoo!

Openoffice's charts have been pretty much useless for any scientific work because they don't support proper error bars.Apparently the new charting tool [blogs.com] will have full error bar support.

With any luck, I won't have to fire up MSOffice ever again...

Re:Error bars - woohoo!

Openoffice's charts have been pretty much useless for any scientific work because they don't support proper error bars.

Then don't make errors ;-P
     

Re:Error bars - woohoo!

I got really excited when I read your post. Error bars were the sole reason I reinstalled MS Office last week. Unfortunately, I just ran Calc and checked out the new chart tool. Nothing seems to have changed, other than a new, fancy interface. It still lacks the ability to use a data range as error bars for a range of data points, and still lacks the ability to display a trendline equation on the graph. Looks like I'm still going to be split between OO Writer and MS Excel.

Extentions

The extensions if done right. As to take out the features that are not used.

So we have the core of the application and then if you want a feature you add it through extensions. Kinda like firefox. Whether it works out that way is another question. I haven't downloaded this release yet to know if they have made it faster.

I am with the stay with the features you have and make openoffice faster. What features are missing? None that I really use and if a feature is missing I could probably get by without it, for my needs.

When complaining about missing features

as is inevitable, it might help if you give details, and leave out things like "doesn't act exactly like Word"

Re:When complaining about missing features

It needs to act like Word in one particular case. It must load Word documents and format them exactly like Word, and when it saves them there must be no way of telling whether it was done in Word or OpenOffice. [...] One of the distribution channels for OpenOffice must be by sneaking in as a faster replacement for Word

I respectfully disagree. OO is never going to be a better Word than Word, nor is it realistic to expect perfect preservation of complex formatting when moving between different software packages that use different models for the data and different file formats to store them. This is a battle that cannot be won, and it is a waste of resources trying to fight it.

In any case, we can readily see that perfect document interchange is not a priority for most users. After all, people open Word documents that were laid out for US Letter paper in A4-friendly Europe and vice versa, even though this typically affects pagination. It's the content that matters for most people, not the round trip, which means you need to be able to import and export readable files but the odd blemish isn't catastrophic. For in-house people, you'll typically be using the same software across an organisation anyway, so round-tripping isn't a problem if you need to do it. And if you really do need exact reproduction for an external source, for example to send to a print shop or for a downloadable brochure, then it's better to use a format such as PDF or PostScript that is designed for that purpose. But this is usually a one-way trip, so that's not a problem.

Of course there will always be exceptions, where people want to round-trip with perfect formatting between different packages. But to be brutally honest, that is unrealistic, and it always has been. Once you can import the content accurately and a good approximation of the formatting, you rapidly get diminishing returns trying to get the corner cases with complex page layouts and the like. Personally, once you've reached that point, I'd rather see the developers of other word processors try to do things in their own way that is better than Word. Fighting for every extra last ounce of .doc compatibility can yield a Pyrrhic victory at best.

The big feature!

The big feature, as far as I'm concerned, is the fact that the page is now centered in print layout view. Until now, it was left-justified, and that absolutely drove me nuts on my wide screen monitor. If it bothered you too, check this version out.

As a Gentoo user...

I am deeply troubled by this announcement.

Re:As a Gentoo user...

That is why we provide the openoffice-bin ebuild for our OpenOffice users who don't have distcc compile farms

So be troubled no more :)

Sign the damn installer (Windows)

This is getting old. In Vista, the UAC elevation process checks the file signature. Since the OOo installer for Windows elevates, it should be signed. So should the actual application binaries, but the installer is particularly problematic.

A code-signing certificate is around $100 per year. This is peanuts for the OOo Foundation.

Mozilla signs their Windows binaries. So do Adobe, Corel, Apple, NVIDIA, ATI, Sun, Microsoft, and thousands of small software companies.

Re:Sign the damn installer (Windows)

You're missing the point. Paying a fee to sign the installer is just a tax on legitimate software developers. Everyone else manages without it, and if all it takes is a $100 bill to get a certificate, then that is exactly what a certificate is worth (and deflation will take place the first time a major trojan is installed by signed software).

Re:Sign the damn installer (Windows)

Certification isn't just about paying $100, it's about meeting a standard. Here's [209.85.135.104] an html version of the MS doc saying what a package must be/do to be certifiable (as 'twere).

I've had to deal with crappy installers (I've created a few of them...) and know that it's much easier to deal with a good one, especially when supporting a large number of machines. That bit of certification can help give a sysadmin confidence that this installation isn't going to be a PITA when it comes to upgrading/removing/conflicts/reboots over a large number of machines.

Does that help at all?

Use the bittorent - it's fast

It's faster than their download servers right now, maybe because the story just broke...

As for this release, I'm still a rabid fan of MS Office but when I dual-boot into Linux this is my Office suite (got it under Windows as well). It's nice that MS has some promising competition, even if it's not ready to quite replace MS Office (especially with the advancements made in 2007)

Source Code Cleanup

What I really, really want from OOo is a cleanup of the code to the point where merely-mortal developers like myself can actually do something useful with it. As it is, the codebase is just this great big hairy ball of stuff -- completely unapproachable unless you have someone willing to fork out a paycheck for you to bang on it full time.

Far too many open-source projects miss the point that one of their major "features" is clean code, design and architecture documentation; a big part of the "user base" are the people who might want to live (sometimes) inside the code. That means you have to keep the barrier to entry low for the programmer who is a noob to your codebase. (We could talk about how some OS projects lack developers who are clued enough to actually write clean code or design decently, but we won't go there ;-)

Until a real and deep codebase cleanup happens OOo is "open-source" in name only as far as I am concerned.

Re:Source Code Cleanup

I just have to defend OSS here :)

OpenOffice.org is a horrible mess _because_ it was developed in house with paid developers etc.

Look at the koffice code instead - it's beautiful. It uses KDE parts, the Qt library, the general KDE spelling framework, and so on. It's modular and reusable. The formula thing (one part that I happen to know about) it used koffice, but also has it's own program for standalone math editing, and is also used by another program that uses it as frontend to math engine (maxima etc).

I know reuse isn't proof of clean code, but it's evidence of such :)

PDF Forms & Flash Animations

One of the best features is exporting PDF files especially while using a "Portable" version of OOo. They had some issues in exporting forms (thru the Writer) in the previous versions where the exported form failed to show or work with Adobe Acrobat and Foxit software.

A great future improvement would be the ability to export the presentation animations and transition effects (Impress) to Flash animations & transitions.

It would be also interesting to see the worldwide distribution of the downloaded versions (directly or via Torrent) and the clients used (browsers, torrents, and download clients).

British English.

Depressingly, they still haven't fixed the British English localisation (Not the spell checker, the actual UI and stuff.) There was some hoohah about the en-GB versions after 2.0.2 being broken or something, so OO wouldn't release 'em. Even now, the OO website still has the same guy doing it who doesn't appear to have actually done anything since then.

Re:British English.

No, you're not the only one... However, the language settings are part of the "Character format". Which makes sense... Include it in your styles (e.g. "Body Text French", "Body Text English" and it becomes way easier than in Microsoft Office... Where it really seems to be document-bound (Tool->Languages->Set Language).

Maximized Macintosh Spreadsheets

So will this version finally remember the window size of a spreadsheet and not always open it maximized on the 2048x1536 head of my two-headed Mac? Nothing I do to it changes this behavior. I have to manually unmaximize and resize every damn time!

And how about how if you try to move to another cell while it is recalculating it keeps repeating the recalculation until you wait for the redraw to finish?

What's new that I care about?

What improvements are there that I care about from a user perspective? And how does OO 2.3 compare to the newly released Lotus Symphony suite?

Does the spreadsheet program have a useable Text-to-columns function yet, and can it use web data or consume web services for data? It seems like last time I checked, Excel was still quite superior to OO's spreadsheet offerings.

Non standard standards

My first discovery on installing OOo 2.3 (for linux) is that Open Document files created in KWord no longer load into Writer correctly -- the default text style turns to Times New Roman, no matter what it was in the original document. Since I work on an old Thinkpad T21 (which takes 30 seconds to load OOo), I tend to use KWord for most of my writing, and only load up OOo if I need to do more complex things like tracking changes or printing A5 booklets. I've filed a bug report, reinstalled 2.2, and now wait to see whether it will be fixed before KWord 2.0 comes out, possibly with the features I'm currently missing.

The only thing that matters....

Does it run on Linux?

Gobbledygook new features

After all the effort put into 2.3, couldn't somebody have sat down to write a couple of paragraphs in plain English explaining what the new features are? Do the leaders of this project live in a marketing stone age?

What no OOXML support yet?

Pretty soon Turkministan and Azarbaijan and the little tropical paradise of Tuvalu and the Little Henderson Atoll will join ISO as full voting members and ratify not just the speed track of OOXML but also the final blessing. So hurry up guys and start wasting your time coding "pagebreak like in Word5, cutesy£ greek character in front ofî everyæ spaceê likeü inï wordstarÑ 1986"

[ducks and runs away and hides]

Mass Network Installation for Windows

If any admins out there would like to mass deploy OOo 2.3 onto their Windows Workstations, I created a "Mass Install Utility" that enables you to deploy it with a few mouse clicks.

Check it out here [pcc-services.com].

Note that I do recommend Novell's OOo version, but I do create the installer for the standard version as well (which I just updated to 2.3). To download the complete versions of the Installation Utility (which includes all files necessary) you must use Bittorrent and get the files from my tracker here [pcc-services.com].

IBM's Version Lotus Symphony

Don't forget that IBM have recently announced its own version called Lotus Symphony:
http://symphony.lotus.com/software/lotus/symphony/home.jspa [lotus.com] if your interested in the download for Linux and 32 bit windows.
It's free and based on Star Office/Open Office and is ODF compliant.
All you have to do is to register your organization with IBM and download it.

I wonder if they distribute CD versions?

It's too darn slow!!

System requirements for OpenOffice are higher than some versions of Microsoft Office! Everything from Office XP loads and runs very quick on my Pentium 1 w/ 96 Megs RAM. In fact, performance of MS Office on that system is slightly better than my Athlon 64 3000+ w/ 2 Gigs RAM running OpenOffice 2.x. OpenOffice takes longer to load up, uses more RAM when it is running, and simple things like resizing the window cause really slow re-draws of the program window. Throw in the fact that the most commonly used Microsoft Office application I've seen used it *Outlook*, to which OpenOffice does not have it's own version of - makes OpenOffice not even a choice for many companies out there. When OpenOffice's performance gets a major tune-up, and they add an Outlook clone, THEN people will see it as a real choice.

Let me know when they hit v7

I'll so use 00.o7. *cue guitar theme*

faster news plz

I've already downloaded 2.3 yesterday - I wonder why Slashdot fails to announce cutting-edge news fast enough. One would assume that Firehose would help make the process faster, but it looks like more improvements could be made.

Still needs Java? No thanks

I know this is an unpopular position but I just can't stomach the use of Java, especially one that requires the Sun JVM (which is pretty much anything that uses Java)

Back when OpenOffice 2.x was being developed there was some controversy surrounding the Java requirement, then there was an announcement that the problem had been "solved" and that they were going to use GCJ [gnu.org] or some other Java compiler. Apparently this never happened (maybe RMS was insisting that they call it "GNU/OpenOffice.org" ;-) ).

Hopefully once Java is finally open sourced there will be other real alternatives to the Sun JVM that don't suck quite as hard in the resource consumption department, until then OpenOffice is not something I'm going to consider.

Meh...

Ubuntu Gutsy has had 2.3 for at least a week now.

Faster Charts

I don't do a lot with spreadsheets, but one thing I've found that works a LOT better with OOo 2.3 is generating charts. I could usually get what I needed from charts in v2.2.1, but it was bloody slow. They've made some significant changes in the charts Wizard (not all good...), but what really hits me is the time it takes to actually generate the chart. The new version is several times faster than before.

Bug in installer

There is a bug in the installer, I have Open Office 2.2 installed and it
asks for openofficeorg22.msi before it can install 2.3, didn't anyone
even think of actually testing the installer?

Speed is not a problem

Lots of people on slashdot are complaining that OOo is slow. For goodness sake, guys. Just run it on a Beowulf cluster and it will be plenty fast enough. At least according to the overlords.

Open Office or Star Office

The question is, should I use Open Office or Star Office?

Re:OpenOffice has a long way to go

Hopefully the extensions will close the gap.

From what I see, you can do rather nifty things with them.

Re:OpenOffice has a long way to go

How long did you use OOo for? I'm finding it does take some acclimation to and it often requires more steps then Office does, however I would say its fairly close to Office 2003.

Re:don't call me...

It's an entirely different kind of office suite altogether.

Re:An improvement to OOo

I tested this assertion and found that despite your claims Calc, Writer does open as quickly as Excel. The only one that opened significantly slower was Base compared with Access.

Unfortunately Excel is able to open 500KB files significantly faster then Calc, although I've yet to have it freeze on my computer, an Intel Core 2 with 1 GB of ram.

Re:What does this have to do with Linux?

Linux: OpenOffice 2.3 Released - what does OpenOffice have to do with Linux??? I just don't get it.

Is this from yet another clueless Linux person?

Don't blame me. I contributed the story under "Index->Software".