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."

Error bars - woohoo!

[Goonie]

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:I wonder

[Virtual_Raider]

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

[the_womble]

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:Error bars - woohoo!

[Radish03]

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.

Re:Wah!?

[sophanes]

I'd have to agree - compared to proper packages like OriginPro (or even Matlab) Excel produces the most amateurish and ugly looking graphs. Simple tasks (like adding error bars) are made much harder than they should be. Data analysis options are non-existent, and forget about being able to export to EPS.

The big feature!

[aurelito]

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.

Re:Error bars - woohoo!

[doxology]

Gnumeric [wikipedia.org] seems to support error bars.

Re:I wonder

[khanyisa]

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:Error bars - woohoo!

[kocsonya]

Charts have been useless for any serious work since always. With every beta test that Sun ran on the StarOffice variants detailed reports of missing chart features have been submitted to them. Nothing happened throughout quite a few revisions.

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 and actual usability issues remained unresolved. I haven't updated for a while: I did beta testing of StartOffice and tried OOo every now and then and decided that it was actually better to use the old stuff, most of the problems were not fixed. GUI changes were plenty but I don't really care how the dialog box looks like, I am much more interested in the dialog being a non-modal context aware box rather than the usual modal boxes with themable icons.

There was an ApplixWare suite a long time ago. It was quite limited compared to OOo, however, they created a user interface that was quite friendly, non-modal dialogs all around, tri-state checkbox (yes, no, inherit) on all hierarchical features, ultra-flexible numbering scheme (OOo's outline numbering is a pain in the neck) and so on. Not to mention a very powerful and flexible chart (although sometimes you needed some creativity to work with it) and an absolute seamless intergation of the tools to each other. It wasn't perfect, had bugs, missing features etc. but it was quite flexible (when you got the gist of it). Unfortunately, it was also closed source, proprietary code and AFAIK it became abandonware when Applix switched from the multi-platform office suite to Windows-only business software service mode maybe 4-5 years ago. Still, a lot could be learnt from the way they did the user interface, for example. They did not copy MS Word, they created an application. IMHO, at least on the user interface and flexibility front, they fared far better than OOo.

British English.

[Ashe Tyrael]

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.

Take a look at Veusz

[xiox]

Take a look at Veusz [gna.org] if you want proper scientific charting on Windows, Linux and MacOS. [plug]

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

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.

Re:I wonder

[carl0ski]

mostly affects the database engines in Base (Access Clone) and some wizards in the other programs

Re:British English.

[Corporate Troll]

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).

Re:I wonder

[FST777]

Plus, with vanilla builds on Linux, Java (when JMF is installed) enables embedded video. For most big distros, this is replaced / complemented with a gstreamer frontend.

Re:I wonder

[Anonymous Coward]

It is used for BeanShell scripted plugins among other things. You can safely switch it off because openoffice will tell alert you when it needs it. In vanilla setup it's typically used by export filters.

Re:As a Gentoo user...

[UberLord]

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 :)

Re:Sign the damn installer (Windows)

[Anonymous Coward]

You are confusing two entirely separate things.

• An installer can be cyptographically signed to prove who created it. This is what the parent posts are talking about.
  
• An application and installer can be certified by Microsoft to show it meets certain minimum standards. It can then use the Designed For Vista logo. That's what you are talking about.
  

The two things are independent.

Re:As a Gentoo user...

[fellip_nectar]

You can set WANT_MP="true" in /etc/make.conf to force OpenOffice to use more than one process, but the build usually fails if you do this.

Mass Network Installation for Windows

[mgpeter]

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].