OpenOffice.org 2.0 Released

Da Massive writes "The official release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 has been pushed to the download servers, as of Thursday the 20th." From the article: "OpenDocument is an XML file format for saving office documents such as spreadsheets, memos, charts, and presentations. It was approved as an OASIS (Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards) standard at the beginning of this year. OpenDocument, set as a default in OpenOffice, is cited by proponents as a way of fighting vendor lock-in associated with proprietary formats. Already, it is the required office format for internal archives of the US State of Massachusetts." You can download, or read past coverage including a preview or a comparison with MS Office. Update: 10/20 17:22 GMT by Z : Made date reference more topical.

Ehh

[carguy84]

Did some one read the date wrong? 20/10/2005 is the 20th, not the 10th.

Can't help but wonder what kind of press release MSFT will put out today.

Torrent Links

[lawpoop]

This page [openoffice.org] has bittorrent links.

Looks Great!

[B11]

I'm upgrading tonight.

After using OO for nearly 6 months, I wonder why anyone is still using MS Office? Is it habit? If it is its like cigarettes, an expensive habit to keep that is bad for you.

Re:why is this under Linux?

[Iriel]

I see your point, but keep in mind that when OO.o has been a major factor in companies switching from Windows systems to Linux ones.

"What will happen to all our Word documents, and spreadsheets, oh! oh! and what about PowerPoint?"
Say it with me together now: OpenOffice!

Yes, MSOffice compatibility has become a nearly ubiquitous feature by now, but not too many offices switch from Windows to use Joe. So the strength it has given to the Linux community as an alternative to 'get everyday tasks done' can't be stated enough. Hence, this appears in the Linux section of Slashdot.

This public service annoucement was brought to you by penguins, and a OSS/Linux advocate.

Re:Looks Great!

[Solr_Flare]

It's habit and name. Your average Joe doesn't like a lot of change. For the longest time MS Office was "the" way to go. So, it is easy to get latched on to the software suite because you know the name and software.

That said, more and more people are slowly switching over to OO or an equivilant, in large part because they are free versus MS's insane pricing of MS office. The trick is getting people to make the leap to try it out. But once they do they usually go "Hey, this works pretty good, and you can't beat free."

Re:Ehh

[Mjlner]

"Did some one read the date wrong? 20/10/2005 is the 20th, not the 10th."

Argh... All these problems stemming from different systems. We non-US people always forget that the American year has 30 months (sometimes 31) and 12 days in a month.
In other news:
Rest of world still waiting for America to adopt the metric system

Sure, mod me a trolling flamebait, you humourless twat.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[GooberToo]

I don't understand why they don't go with Python and jump Java. Python is already cross platform, easy to learn, and can be easily embedded into the binary.

All problems would be solved. Not to mention, the memory foot print required for OO would probably drop considerably.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[MojoRilla]

Either someone could do the impossible (converting from layout data back into semantic information is very difficult if not impossible), or Microsoft could get off their lazy, arrogant asses and implement an import and export filter, like they did with five versions of Word Perfect, two versions of Works, three html versions, or eight older versions of Word. At least those are the options in Word 2003.

But clearly, supporting an extra set of filters is far too difficult. Clearly Microsoft customers don't want this. Clearly the unencumbered Open Document format is anti-competitive and unconstitutional. And clearly the only people that care are freaks and hippies.

The bottom line is that Microsoft can't compete with better products, so it is trying to bully the market with file format control.

Re:Looks like they didn't solve the Java problem

[mechsoph]

Because open OOo is sponsored primarily by Sun.

Also, the best way for them to drop the memory usage would be to stop bundling every library known to man and just use the shared versions already on the system.

Re:why is this under Linux?

[Tim C]

That may all be true, but it doesn't change the fact that OO.o is not available only for Linux, or even mainly for Linux. Unless v2 is only currently available for Linux, it's in the wrong section.

Re:Solution to MS Office + OpenDocument

[n0-0p]

You're kidding right? Just because you get the text and formatting doesn't mean you'd have a usable document. You'd lose all of the necessary metadata. That includes most of the important functionality (such as text flow and soft line breaks) in the word processor. You'd lose pretty much everything useful from a spreadsheet because you'd have to try to rebuild the rows and columns based on text placement.

Re:America uses backwards date formats...

[Isaac-Lew]

Yeah, the rest of the world has it right... smallest units to largest units. It's more consistent that way.

ISO 8601 [wikipedia.org] is more consistent (to me at least, biggest to smallest). It also seems that it would be easier to sort.

Re:Torrent Links

[GweeDo]

"has more seeds than a farmer at harvest time"

Um, aren't the farmers reaping what they sowed at harvest time? So in turn...they won't have to many seeds then. Maybe you meant at planting time?

Re:Tub of lard

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, Abiword still exists.
LaTeX still exists.
TROFF, Emacs, and Vi still exists.
Some people _like_ usability and features.
Some people think their productivity is more important than memory or processor usage on their machine.

But hey..
complain about a product with a perfectly valid (and rather important) purpose because
it is doing what it needs to do and filling a void in the OSS world while doing
you absolutely no harm.
Whatever makes you happy.

osx version

[raceface]

I dont see the osx version anywhere and there are three days left on my milk.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[joeljkp]

That other poster and I don't want high quality flexible format graphs. We want quick & easy graphs that can display basic information and statistical stuff and have good display flexibility. Excel does that far better than Calc, unfortunately.

Re:Excellent!!!!

[drsquare]

In other word: "We can't do it, so you don't need it."

Sounds like someone the Microsoft PR department would come up with.

Why would I want to pay hundreds for professional graph software? That pretty much defeats the whole point of free software.

Re:Good for the wife factor, too

[DaveM753]

I'm sorry, but I disagree somewhat here. Sure, the Mac Mini's aren't exactly speed demons. But OpenOffice.org takes an uncomfortable amount of time to load, whereas other, similar apps do not.

I have a Mac Mini 1.42ghz, and a Windows box (AMD 1.3ghz) that is about 4 years old. Both of them seem to have similar performance on applications like iTunes, Firefox and Thunderbird. However, OpenOffice.org, opens up VERY SLOWLY on the Mac Mini. It has to open and start X11 first, then X11 starts OpenOffice.org. When I first got the Mac Mini w/256mb of RAM, this process took upwards of 90 seconds. I upped the RAM to 1gb, which helped significantly, but OOo still takes between 20-45 seconds to load (depending on how many other apps are running). NeoOffice/J takes about 10-30 seconds, which is much better.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[dhowe01]

not exactly userfriendly when I can fire up excel and produce a nice graph. Just last week, I tried to use openoffice to plot some chemistry data. I was not able to plot a regression line. So I had to go back to Excel. If your saying the OpenOffice solution is to download another tool, well that's not gonna cut it for the general public.

Re:Ehh

[einhverfr]

Argh... All these problems stemming from different systems. We non-US people always forget that the American year has 30 months (sometimes 31) and 12 days in a month.

Real geeks follow the SQL standard in all dates. That is 2005-10-20 to you :-) Wholely unambiguous :-)

Re:Fantastic

[lahvak]

Who in the world moded this funny? That's insightful! AMOF, I would say that's the most insightful post in this whole discussion!

Re:Excellent!!!!

[Doctor O]

Actually I found the opposite to be true - if Access is the answer, somebody has asked the wrong questions. We have lots of clients for whom we replaced existing Access processes because they find it performs poorly when you put it under real load - and most of those came to us because they found that they had to hunt down heisenbugs with every update of Access and MSSQL.

Please note that I blame the latter on the 'developers' who built the processes, not the software. I haven't been using Access much, but from what I have seen, it seems to be a good tool in the hands of someone who knows what he's doing. So the clients are rather switching from a 'have the secretary click together the logic' approach to an 'hire real developers for real-world stuff' approach.

(I've seen many *really* mindboggingly slow things, however, but this might as well result from bad practices, stupid code or any combination of the two.)

The bottom line is, among our clients are many global players and none of those would touch any solution with a ten foot pole if they include Access anywhere. Most have well-engineered in-house software, we are just helping them in adding web accessible interfaces. It always strikes me as funny that they have great in-house developers but need external help with web applications.

So, now we're as OT as we could be, but I wanted to add another perspective. And yes, I am aware that my experience probably isn't very representative.

Re:professional quality OSS charting

[rtb61]

If you are using excel for trivial purposes, why on earth are you paying for it in the first place (or is yours a free version). Why wouldn't you use quality free software that is widely accepted in the market place. I mean there are some ego points for showing off in an overhyped cars, boats or airplances but computer software (there is soem fun in open office because of the community of users growing around it but M$ office is just a boring bloated excersize in marketing).

User friendliness, thats a laugh. I found M$ software became more and more user unfriendly as they dumped more and more useless features into them whether they worked or not just so they could differentiate it from previous versions basically the same program. Product quality, nah pure marketing and greed, the pointless upgrade cycle, well pointless to the customer, for microsoft it's just more money in the bank.

The best that they have managed to achieve with a clear and simple interface is office 97 and since then it has been doing nothing but getting more bloated and clumsy (who can forget the introduction of clippy).

It is the annoyances in microsoft office and the marketing nonsence coming of of microsoft that gets people to switch open office. I swapped over and have not looked back. Open office it does the job, save the B$ for M$, microsoft the software for you when all your pursuits are trivial, interesting marketing concept, I have to give you a pat on the back for that one ;-).