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Open Office Plans To Party Like It's Version 3.0
Posted by
timothy
on Sat Oct 11, 2008 07:11 PM
from the undervalued dept.
from the undervalued dept.
penguin_dance writes "The Register reports that 'OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on 13 October' to celebrate eight years, and hopefully announce the release of version 3.0. Some notes: [OpenOffice.org 3.0] will support the OpenDocument Format 1.2 standard, and be able to open files created by MS Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X." As maj_id10t notes, though the OO.o site does not yet carry an announcement, "Lifehacker has posted an entry stating the final release of OpenOffice 3.0 is available for download via their distribution mirrors."
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OpenOffice.org V3.0 Sets Download Record, 80% Windows 451 comments
thefickler writes "The newest version of OpenOffice, version 3.0, has set a download record in its first week of availability. Most surprising is the fact that over 80% of downloads were from Windows users. As one commentator noted, when it comes to a choice between almost identical software (e.g. Microsoft Office and OpenOffice), price is the determining factor."
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Openoffice? no thanks. (Score:3, Insightful)
There is such a huge difference in features and usability that there is no way that OpenOffice would gain any ground over Microsoft, in my opinion.
OpenOffice was an absolute torture. I had originally expected that after moving to OpenOffice, I would be able to convince everyone else in my office to make a move as well (eventually).
I guess that takes care of that.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What exactly were you missing? My two major gripes with OpenOffice were poor implementations of comments and tracking changes in Writer, and those are fixed now.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You can use PowerPoint templates from within Impress and you can download many more from oooextras [smalldataproblem.org] and OO.o does have animations.
OO.o Calc has had some pitfalls, but version 3 is much improved. With several well-documented numerical errors that have survived in each new version of Excel, I don't know if that is the paragon to strive for.
Re:Openoffice? no thanks. (Score:5, Insightful)
OK, i just popped open OO.org to verfy your claims. here's what i found:
unless you're just trolling, you might make a more convincing case if you actually listed specific complaints instead of, oh i dunno, pulling things out of your ass? honestly, there are a lot of things to get used to when switching from MS Office to OO.org (i spent most of my life using MS Office), and that transition can be pretty frustrating. but don't blame your own inability to adapt (or to even try to adapt) on the software.
neither MS Office, nor OO.org are perfect. personally, i've had problems with both of them. but so far i haven't heard a single legitimate complaint leveled against OO.org. so i have to conclude that these groundless criticisms are just knee-jerk reactions to having to adapt to a new office suite application.
the only problem i've had to OO.org is trying to make PDF documents with complex layouts using tables with varying column/row spans. but i've had the exact same problem in Word. all WYSIWYG editors have quirks like these, and i can't say that one is better than the other.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Same with hardware. That's why Dvorak keyboards are worse then QWERTY ones. Despite the fact they're not, you know, actually worse but are in fact better.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
No, it's not. Some times, you just have to recognise that some people are full of shit, and fullgandoo is definitely one of them.
Re:Openoffice? no thanks. (Score:5, Informative)
It sounds like you should have tried Oxygenoffice [sourceforge.net] instead of Openoffice,as it comes with a lot more with regards to templates and such out of the box. Of course it takes them a little while after the latest Open Office release,so why not bookmark tham and check it out in a month or so when version 3 comes out?
That said I don't really think OO.o is really for the "power users" of MSO,because they get more use out of the little features that a good 85% of the public probably doesn't even know is there. Where I have had luck switching folks is the basic home users,where they are just writing docs,working up some basic spreadsheets,and maybe cooking up a contact list database. They,along with my older users who can't stand the stupid ribbon seem to have no problem making the switch to OO.o.
I have personally always been a believer in the right tool for the job. Since I have a copy of MSOffice 2K I picked up several years ago for cheap at the shop I worked at that is what I primarily use. But for my home users it would simply be stupid to spend even $100 on the student/home edition of MSOffice when OO.o does everything they'd use an office suite for for free. I also like how I can whip out a copy of OO.o 1.5 for those folks around here that are still using older machines and give them an office suite that doesn't slow their machine to a crawl. Both MSOffice and Open Office seem to be getting a lot more bloated IMHO. But if only MSOffice gets the job done for you please stick with it and enjoy. But even as a MSOffice user I'm sure you'd agree having choice in the matter is a good thing.
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Re:Openoffice? no thanks. (Score:5, Interesting)
There is such a huge difference in features and usability that there is no way that OpenOffice would gain any ground over Microsoft, in my opinion.
I'm not a big fan of OpenOffice myself and I can't really say anything about features, but to praise MS Office's usability seems utterly absurd to me.
I am reasonably computer-savy, but if I have to do anything more complicated than typing a really simple letter, Word drives me up the wall. It constantly feels like I have to work against it, instead of having it do work for me.
Same thing in Excel: I'd rather use pencil & paper or write my own scripts instead for every calculation I have to do, than trying to get Excel to do anything that even remotely resembles what I want it to do
Mind you, I'm not saying OO is any better in that respect. I'm just saying it can hardly be any worse
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Re:Openoffice? no thanks. (Score:4, Interesting)
Apple's got some intereting ideas in terms of Office Applications. They don't highly tout iWork, or even promote it that much, despite the fact that it shows quite a bit of promise.
Keynote is hands-down the best presentation app out there.
Numbers is considerably more intuitive than Excel, with its vastly superior UI. A few minor features are missing, though it's really a joy to work with.
Pages is the enigma of the bunch. Apple seems to want to combine the roles of the layout app with the word processor (Publisher vs. Word). They seem to have done a pretty remarkable job at the layout part, though the word-processing bits could still use some work. It's "different" enough that users might have a tough time getting used to it.
More importantly.... none of the apps are trying to mimic Office, OoO, or AppleWorks. If OoO tried to be daring for once, and adopted a completely new set of paradigms, rather than mimicking MS Office, they might actually have a compelling product. For now, though, it's a second-rate knockoff of an already mediocre product.
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Re:Openoffice? no thanks. (Score:5, Interesting)
Do yourself a favor and learn LaTeX. Yes, it has a learning curve and you need lots of documentation and/or an internet connection to know which packages you need but at least it provides consistent results, doesn't reformat half of your text on a whim and isn't nearly as frustratingly annoying as any Word-like program.
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Re:Openoffice? no thanks. (Score:5, Funny)
That's not a curve. That is a wall.
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Re:Openoffice? no thanks. (Score:4, Insightful)
I largely agree, but every couple of months I check it out again. It's made tremendous strides since that abomination that was StarOffice.
To draw an analogy -- I remember using early versions of the Mozilla suite. It was hideous. Now I can't imagine a web without Firefox.
Give it time. This *is* a major version release, after all. Might be worthy of another go-around.
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Using OpenOffice with no problems?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm always sceptical when people talk about using OO seriously with "no problems".
It's strange that so many people on Slashdot make claims like this, yet for me and various people I know in real life, basic things like sorting in OO Calc seem to fail on any non-trivial spreadsheet. Heck, I even got the Undo command not to undo simple find-and-replace changes properly the other day.
And have they fixed the font embedding that kills PDF export from Writer yet? It's only been a bug since forever, with more votes than almost anything else in the bug tracker.
As long as this sort of thing is going on, usability isn't even an issue: OO isn't even useful for more than throwaway work, and it actually seems to be getting worse in the 2.x series to the point that it's not even useful for much throwaway work either.
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Re:Using OpenOffice with no problems?! (Score:5, Interesting)
I represent over 150 business users that use ONLY OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheet, etc, and I can attest that we do use it seriously with very few problems. Your comment is way-over-the-top wrong.
Are there some missing things that we would like to see? Sure. But that hardly justifies "isn't even useful for more than throwaway work".
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I represent over 150 business users that use ONLY OpenOffice for word processing, spreadsheet, etc, and I can attest that we do use it seriously with very few problems.
Do you? "Seriously"? Or just for quick letters that any old text editor could cope with and trivial data tables in a spreadsheet without any real calculation or data processing?
Your comment is way-over-the-top wrong.
Or your particular users have been very lucky, depending on your point of view. Have you tried sorting spreadsheet data where some affected cells contain formulae? Have you tried undoing a search and replace that used the options beyond plain text? These are data corruption bugs, not some minor UI tweak. These are the sort of crazy b
Re:Using OpenOffice with no problems?! (Score:5, Interesting)
We do everything that a typical business would tend to do with it. Our company newsletter (8 pages, with lots of graphics, columns, frames), wiring diagrams, signs, letters, budgets, expense analysis, small databases, manuals, pdf exports, data parsing, inservice presentations, flowcharts, labels, dealing with lots of Emailed .doc, .xls, and .ppt's, etc.
Are there some bugs? Yes. Although we have not hit any that have prevented normal use or to cause us to not trust OO. But having conversed with MS-Office users- they have bugs also. There are bugs in just about every huge/complex program on any platform.
And I have reported some of those bugs and (as you also said) watched some of those bugs not get corrected over years. However, they don't prevent us from using the software, "seriously", for many years.
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Re:Font Embedding in PDFs (Score:5, Insightful)
Look at issue 43029.
Notice that it is classified as a feature request rather than a bug and its target milestone is only 3.2, despite being first created more than three years ago, having over 200 votes, and numerous comments on this issue and its various duplicates showing how it's a complete showstopper for using most professional grade fonts with PDF export.
This bug has become the standard counter-example in on-line discussions to all the OSS advocacy that claims many eyes make all bugs shallow, products will naturally develop according to users' needs because people can contribute their own patches, etc.
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I waited for rectangular cut and paste for about 3 years.
Version 3.2 isn't far away.
It will happen.
Do you mean block selection mode?
In OO 2.4 you can find it under Edit -> Selection Mode -> Block Area
Or you can use Alt + Shift + F8
Re:Using OpenOffice with no problems?! (Score:4, Informative)
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I would like to see a feature list. (Score:4, Insightful)
OO.org works pretty well me but I am not really a big user.
I would love to see a feature list.
Also I would really like to see Base fleshed out. Or at least better documented.
I have tired to play with it but it just makes me nuts.
Re:I would like to see a feature list. (Score:5, Informative)
I would love to see a feature list.
Took all of three seconds to go to the website and get it.
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/featurelistbeta.html [openoffice.org]
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Re:I would like to see a feature list. (Score:4, Informative)
Feature list is available here [openoffice.org]
Release notes are here [openoffice.org]
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Mac OS X (Score:3, Interesting)
RC4 is the final version? (Score:3, Interesting)
I tried the PDF import plugin, but it doesn't give me any options and imports it directly as a slideshow with messed up text.
OpenType Fonts (Score:4, Informative)
As a Mac user, I'm excited to finally be dumping NeoOffice. I hate the system-deep installer. With OO.o v3, it's a proper single-directory bundle. Installation is just drag-and-drop. And no more random boat - the OO.o icon is slick and looks great in the dock.
My biggest complaint with OO.o (and I use it exclusively now, and have moved over my parents from MS Office with no issues) is a frustrating bug with OpenType fonts. They always render fine, but exporting to PDF (something I do often) converts them to some other random font.
Looks like it will be fixed, but not until 3.2 — which feels like forever, since this has been an issue for a very long time. It's especially frustrating since some of the best free fonts out there are OTF fonts.
If you to help increase the visibility of this bug, please vote for Bug #43029 [openoffice.org].
Re:3.0? (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, I recently tried the release candidate for the OS X Aqua version. It's horribly ugly (just like on other platforms), but it does seem to work.
Yup. And since Microsoft has dropped the only compelling feature that set Office for Mac apart from other office suites (VBA macros) and STILL hasn't made Entourage into a first-class Exchange client, OpenOffice 3 is now just as good (though not quite as good looking). Grats, OO.o team; adios, billg.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong,but doesn't Open office have a VBA converter? I remember awhile back when I was using Star Office that they had one and since Star Office is based on Open Office I figured they both had it.
That said I never really got the whole embedding code in a document bit. It seems like if your users got used to having code running in a document that it would be a lot easier to pass them a .doc filled with nasty exploits,and why not just,you know,build a damned app to do the job? We've had VB
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
.
When you live within an office suite for nine hours out of twenty-four, six days out of seven, the UI matters.
Re:3.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
When you live within an office suite for nine hours out of twenty-four, six days out of seven, you should find a new job.
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Re:3.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
Know what I enjoy when I'm using a piece of productivity software like OpenOffice? Getting my work done so I can go do something else.
The computer is a tool. Especially when using something like office productivity software. I don't sit around pondering the color scheme of my screw drivers, or whether or not my wrenches "go with" my hammer. Likewise, I don't spend time contemplating the visual attractiveness of OpenOffice. It lets me get my work done, that's good enough as far as I'm concerned.
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Screwdriver color schemes (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't sit around pondering the color scheme of my screw drivers
Unless you want to be able to find the right screwdriver in your set. In that case, you might want to label the handles like Craftsman does for its precision screwdrivers: one color for standard, one for Torx, and one for Phillips. Feel free to draw your own analogies to being able to find things in a GUI.
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Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
So you are in Home Depot and they have two identical hammers. One is god-aweful looking, like all hot-pink and looks like a professional designer never touched the thing. Yeah... let's pick up that one.
You know, I would. A hot pink hammer? Hell yes!
Tastes vary. I'm not going to attempt to defend OO.org's UI, as I haven't touched it in awhile, but there are plenty of cases where I've seen a UI make the right choices -- better choices -- yet be shunned because it is different than what you're used to.
Oldest, best example I know of: How many people use the dvorak keyboard layout? Even among a generation which has never had to touch a real typewriter in their lives, and for whom qwerty is completely pointless
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And if you want something native, Apple has iWork (Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
Meh. I use Keynote as my main presentation software, but I am thinking of switching back to PPT. It is very easy to use, and looks great, but when you're going to a conference, you end up exporting to PPT anyway, and then you have to edit that PPT in Powerpoint to fix all the things that didn't make the jump. It's wonderful if you're sure that your laptop is going to work perfectly.
BUT
Pages is useless. No, I don't really mean that... It has a lot of nice features. I love the layout of the way it h
Re:3.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
Nothing does tables with the power and flexibility of Word....worse still, it follows that evil design philosophy that says spreadsheets are a way to make pretty tables.
I'm confused -- your complaint is that the word processor won't let you build pretty tables, but also that the spreadsheet does?
It just plain makes no sense to use these products in any context where someone else might need to work on them.
If you can, it absolutely makes sense.
There was a time when there were some competing products, and they had some compelling features, but it just plain made no sense to use anything other than Internet Explorer.
Firefox changed all that. And the Web is a lot more interoperable because of it.
That said:
YMMV.
Indeed. In fact, some people are still tied to IE -- even just an IETab in Firefox -- because of that one last website that won't work.
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Re:3.0? (Score:5, Informative)
Meh. I use Keynote as my main presentation software, but I am thinking of switching back to PPT. It is very easy to use, and looks great, but when you're going to a conference, you end up exporting to PPT anyway, and then you have to edit that PPT in Powerpoint to fix all the things that didn't make the jump. It's wonderful if you're sure that your laptop is going to work perfectly.
Have you tried exporting to PDF? Unless you have some fancy animations is the best way to have a portable persentation. Almost every pdf viewer has a full screen mode for presentations.
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Re:3.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's true that the world runs MS Office, however that's the corporate world. Small companies rarely have the need to export their internal documents to the outside world. So, OO.o is fine in that case.
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Re:3.0? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:3.0? (Score:4, Insightful)
Then, as a pretty sharp Unix programmer, why don't you make a better looking interface? I think his point still holds water.
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Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You must be a project manager.
Re:3.0? (Score:5, Insightful)
Either way, the outcome is the same: They actively drive users away, in FOSS's case back into the comforting arms of Microsoft. It creates a rift between reality and the developer's perception of reality, which results in the project not moving towards progress but orthogonally to it, or worse away.
And here enlies the problem with the "write a patch" types: I gaurantee you I can find an aspect of your computer you aren't an expert at, and you'd be pissed at me if I threw it in your face when you asked for help. Your accountant doesn't tell you to fix your own damn tax problem, the mechanic doesn't derisively laugh because you don't know how to re-gap your own spark plugs, and as a user of FOSS I'd prefer not being snidely mocked just because I don't dedicate hours a day learning your little corner of it. For all the egalitarianism of FOSS, there is still fundamentally a business relationship between the programmers and the users. Until we learn that and put a lid on the "write your own patch" people, it will never equal proprietary software except for a handful of diamonds in the rough.
Why so thorny? Because I've been a recipient of that attitude a few times. And not even my hardcore nerd's reverse tact filter could stop it from getting under my skin.
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Re:3.0? (Score:5, Insightful)
While I agree that the grandparent is engaged in some first-rate asshattery, I'd just like to make one comment. You say:
Your accountant doesn't tell you to fix your own damn tax problem, the mechanic doesn't derisively laugh because you don't know how to re-gap your own spark plugs
The difference here is that you are paying your accountant and your mechanic for their expertise. Most of the people who receive comments along the lines of 'write a patch' have not contributed anything. On the Free Software project I co-run, we have a designer on the core team. He provides a lot of really high-quality artwork and some good UI ideas. If he comes to me with a feature request, then it goes quite high on my TODO list. Why? Because he's contributed to the project in ways that I am incapable of replacing with my own effort. I recently refactored a big chunk of my code to make it more reusable for someone else. Why? Because at the same time as asking me to, he sent me a diff fixing a few of my bugs.
Free Software is about cooperation. I only benefit from sharing my improvements if other people do as well. We both benefit from not having to reproduce the other's work, and so can get on with things we want to do much faster. If you want something done, then you have to convince me that it's in my interest to do it for you, usually by offering something in return. Whether this is code, artwork, documentation, or money is up to you. If you don't offer anything then the reply will be 'patches welcome' which means either offer me something of value in exchange for my time, or offer someone else something and get them to send me the patch.
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Re:3.0? (Score:5, Funny)
These numbers speak tones.
That's fucking awesome! How do they make them do that?
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Kerning by default (Score:4, Informative)
Doesn't Word have kerning disabled by default? [wikipedia.org] What do you recommend to people now? LaTeX?
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Re: (Score:3, Informative)
the hell are you talking about? i'm still running OO.org 2.3.1 and it supports kerning just as Word does.
maybe you should stop using a fixed-width font like Courier/Fixedsys?
Re:Sure. (Score:4, Informative)
Miscellaneous Features
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Re:PowerPC? (Score:5, Informative)
The PPC version is hidden away with one of the openoffice "Projects" -- click on the projects tab, and then you're on your own, but eventually you get to an ftp site. I've found it to be very stable in light use (I mostly use the Linux version).
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Re:Always felt a bit clunky to me oh and a questio (Score:3, Interesting)
I use OO.o daily. 3.0 has some major improvements, and you should check it out.
I largely prefer OO.o Writer to MS Word now that OO.o Writer has better commenting and revision control. I can rely on it for 99% of my work, but I find I still sometimes switch to Word under Wine if I get a manuscript that uses EndNote (rather than Zotero) or very complex embedded equations.
I have grown used to Impress. PowerPoint users might still have grips. I prefer LaTeX Beamer, but sometimes need to make or read PowerPo
Re:Always felt a bit clunky to me oh and a questio (Score:5, Insightful)
Like any other piece of software, there are things you feel like you couldn't live without and things you have to get used to. I remember it felt clunky when I first started using it, but that went away very quickly. Some things are more elegant than in MSOffice, some less. I've been using v3.0 for a while now (beta and fc releases), and I like it quite a bit. One of the big clunkinesses, the graphical depiction of comments/notes, is now very nice. There are still some screen rendering oddities that don't get in my way but do contribute to the impression of clunkiness. On the whole, I imagine it's still clunkier than its commercial counterpart, but the gap is narrowing. However, I rarely edit documents that are more than a few hundred pages long, and I know many of OO's critics say that its shortcomings are especially obvious if you work on long documents. So I can't comment on that.
How has MSOffice come along in the same time? Is pdf writing integrated now? Do files still bloat to ridiculous sizes on repeated editing?
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Re:It was just too slow for me. (Score:4, Insightful)
I am very grateful that Sun released OpenOffice, having a FOSS way to interact with
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Re:pdf saving and editing (Score:4, Informative)
Version 3 has the ability to edit pdf - that could be a killer feature.
Why? PDFs are useful for distributing material in a reliable way. They have never been designed to be an easily editable format, other than for forms and the like perhaps, and it would be crazy to start treating them as such.
Also, in case you didn't realise, PDF export from Word is available as a freebie plug-in from MS in Word 2007, and it doesn't have all the font bugs OO Writer has! (See my earlier posts in this discussion for details.)
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