OpenOffice 2.3 Released 293
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
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it came with Lotus 123r5
and Lotus AmiPro.
it was definitely badged Lotus.... but who actually did the work, heh I dunno.
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I actually still used Ami Pro until a few years ago, despite it's problems (8.3 file names, outdated (by 10 years!) import/export of
I use TextMaker now because it sucks much less than the others overall, but I still regret Ami Pro...
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I'm another with many fond memories of AmiPro- I suspect it'd still kick M$ Word's backside now.
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Story about Michael Schrayer of Electric Pencil. (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
Then egain, I may really just be in the market for a
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
This needs fixing asap, or its not competitive.
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
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if the document is not confidential, you could provide and i could test whether it is still problematic with latest dev snapshots (or maybe you can try that yourself)
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Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I wonder (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Too easy to make sheets that don't work on Excel (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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This is one reason for me: http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=66871 [openoffice.org]
I guess since I was the first to report it, it might not be such a big deal, but that's kind of bad...
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Re:Not compatible ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
"they" being every software developer who ever existed
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Re:I wonder (Score:4, Interesting)
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
Honestly, (Score:2)
I think OO would do fine for anyone who hasn't spent years living in MSOffice - otherwise it's torture - I had to buy Office for an Admin who threatened to walk over OO formatting frustrations.
Wahhhh! Where's the frickin format painter???
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But still, they just need to get power users to use the thing and lots of low hanging fruit will magically appear.
Problem is much of it requires confidential docs I don't want to post..
For example in very long text documents I would sometimes see it try to split it into pages to display it even though not displaying in print view.
Also I just tried the db forms thing for a client to be able to access a mysql db. It is total
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Actually the Office Ribbon are probably more properly considered 'ripoffs' of the Blender Button panel - the tabs for Blender are icons instead of text but other than that the resemblance is quite strong.
LetterRip
Re:I wonder (Score:4, Informative)
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:
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.
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well, there's "applied" view and "hierarchical" view, which both improve usability.
though the bug where set view is forgotten after closing/opening stylist is annoying...
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well, there's "applied" view and "hierarchical" view, which both improve usability.
Sure, but the one thing I'd guess most people want — a view that shows a list of styles they are likely to need (whether or not they are used yet) for the current document type — is still missing. If the default list of styles only had a small number of things in it, that might be OK, but since it has vast numbers of things I doubt many people ever use, all the "show everything" views are cumbersome. Meanwhile, the "show applied" alternative is no use when you're starting from a blank document
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there's also "automatic" mode, which seems to produce similarly short list, but i am unsure about criteria used for it
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FWIW ...
Fix handling of fonts and typography (starting with being able to draw OpenType fonts properly and export them to PDFs at all).
Agreed.
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.
Also agreed. How hard would it be to have the stylist remember which view I was last using (normally "hierarchical"), instead of always presenting me with the default?
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.
Here maybe I can be helpful: for text, select text and ctrl-shift-space; for a paragraph, put cursor within paragraph without any text selected and ctrl-shift-space.
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.
Don't let that stop you. I'm quite sure that none of the actual important stuff that impacts on people on a day-to-day basis will have been changed --
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A slimmed down version would be a plus (Score:2)
-wb-
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Absolutely the most streamlined WP ever... great for touch typists... didn't use any of those dammed F* keys and didn't need a mouse for navigation.
WordStar should be good enough for anybody.
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A few years ago I had the argument with a guy about features. He was saying the wonderful thing about Word is that it DIDN'T have as many features as other word processors. (I can always be called upon to laud WordPerfect.) To me, that's insane. Don't use what you don't need and don't tell me I shouldn't have what I can use and we'll both be happy.
As an aside, the comparison between OOo and Word the other day was interesting because it looks like Word still h
Error bars - woohoo! (Score:5, Informative)
With any luck, I won't have to fire up MSOffice ever again...
Re:Error bars - woohoo! (Score:5, Funny)
Then don't make errors
Re:Error bars - woohoo! (Score:4, Informative)
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A lot of work went into eye-candy like all those toolbars that pop up and disappear, which is extremely annoying when you just move the cursor through the document and your view jumps up and down as the toolbars came into existence and disappear, but many reported bugs
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Take a look at Veusz (Score:3, Informative)
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Depends (Score:2)
As for data analysis, there are innumerable other packages available for that,
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Anyone using excel for scientific purposes is compromising the integrity of their research.
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Extentions (Score:2)
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, fo
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* Are rarely used
* The developers don't have time to code
* Things the application can't do better natively
If there are features that are used regularly and can be done better natively, its certainly worthwhile coding them in. Beyond the speed at start up, I haven't found it to be particularly slow.
When complaining about missing features (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:When complaining about missing features (Score:4, Insightful)
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! (Score:4, Informative)
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i vaguely remember this being problematic in some cases - maybe that was with some widgetsets or something. you also might could try reversing ctrl holding.
in any case, trying the latest version is a good idea
As a Gentoo user... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:As a Gentoo user... (Score:5, Informative)
So be troubled no more
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Sign the damn installer (Windows) (Score:4, Interesting)
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) (Score:5, Insightful)
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) (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
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Certification isn't just about paying $100, it's about meeting a standard. Here's an html version of the MS doc saying what a package must be/do to be certifiable (as 'twere).
In a sense, that's even worse. If it's not intended to be a "financial bond" but actually a human-verified, technical standard, then there is no reason to charge for it at all. Microsoft has more than enough resources to provide this service for free, or for some token sum of money just to prevent flooding the system ($100 is not a token sum of money if you're a hobbyist giving away your code for free).
This is a problem entirely of their own making, and expecting all the small commercial outfits and fre
Use the bittorent - it's fast (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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Source Code Cleanup (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
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
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Well, to play devil's advocate (I happen to agree with you, actually), it may be true that, given the scale of large open source projects, and the nature of the collaboration (anonymous over the intarwebs), it may simply be necessary for developers to write cleaner code, as that code is one of the primary forms of communication between the various team members. After all, it's not like koffice developer #1 can just walk down the hall and a
British English. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:British English. (Score:5, Informative)
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).
Office wins this one my friend (Score:2)
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Maximized Macintosh Spreadsheets (Score:2)
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? (Score:2)
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 (Score:2, Interesting)
What no OOXML support yet? (Score:3, Funny)
[ducks and runs away and hides]
Mass Network Installation for Windows (Score:3, Informative)
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].
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From what I see, you can do rather nifty things with them.
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But when I do need to do something, I find OO.org to be easier to get it done with then MS office is. I have both and I'm not really sure why we are at the exact opposite of the experience unless experience in using the app is the big difference.
I guess it would make sense that someone who isn't as clued in to MS Office might take to something else easi
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The only people who prefer msoffice, tend to have never really used anything else. A lot of people try openoffice very briefly, before giving up on it. Not giving it a proper chance to get used to it. Conversely, most msoffice users are forced to at work, so they have to use it long enough to get used to its quirks.
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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.
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I find boot times for open office pitifully slow but I'm running version 2.0 or earlier.... it runs fast enough for my home use but I want to kill it every time I try to do work on it.
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Seems to me that if you work with 40 MB spreadsheet files, you're using the wrong tool for whatever it is you're trying to do, anyway. Are you using Excel as a database?
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