OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Released

Sean0michael writes "OpenOffice.org has announced their 3.0 Beta is ready for testing. The new version includes some great enhancements, including MS Office 2007 import filters, an improved notes feature, a built-in Solver component, and an Aqua interface for Macs. The site has a complete list of Beta features. Download your beta release from their site."

Re:Aqua

[Sunshinerat]

Anybody spotted the PPC version of this?
Looks like there is only an Intel version, no universal binary.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd just get the powerpc version of NeoOffice [neooffice.org]. It's not 3.0, but it works great.

PDF Import Extension

[Futurepower(R)]

Yes, is says:

" Available Soon... PDF Import Extension
The PDF Import Extension allows modifying existing PDF files for which the original source files do not exist anymore. "

However, that was August 2007 [sun.com].

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[BigJim.fr]

Lack of outline mode is bug nÂ3959 [openoffice.org] and if you had as much as skimmed its content you would know why it is taking longer to develop than you think it should.

Everyone agrees it is important, everyone is impatient, the developers know all about it, but it is not a trivial hack, so it will take resources and therefore time.

Re:Hang in there guys

[sm62704]

You got that backwards there, son. Even though I know you're either trolling or (more likely) astroturfing, I'm going to bite.

I can open a word document with OO. I cannot open an OO document with Word.
I can open a Word Perfect document with OO. I cannot open a WP document with Word.
OO has the cool cachet of the GPL, while Word is just another boring corporate moneymaker.
OO has fewer bugs and faster bug fixes.
OO costs nothing, while stupid people pay good cash for Word that could otherwise be spent on more important things like beer, games, and more beer.

The only thing Word has going for it is that the Uncyclopedia parodies Bill Gates [uncyclopedia.org] (and even includes a real criminal justice system mug shot [uncyclopedia.org] of him) but not Scott McNealy [uncyclopedia.org]. I mean, if Uncyclopedia doesn't make fun of you your software must really suck, right?

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

...what does your company do that they need that many rows on a spreadsheet?

We're querying data out of a database and trying to do simple processing on it (the type that Excel does very well) in the simplest ways we can, and present it to the bosses. Yes, I could write a Java program to subtotal all our payments by type and spit it out in some kind of elegant format, or we could spring for a dozen more Crystal Reports licenses, but the fact is that Excel does this just fine, and now we don't even have to use 6 worksheets within a workbook to hold it all.

I hate Microsoft, but I just have no way of recommending replacing Office with OpenOffice while this is an issue.

Oh, and by the way (not directed at you, but at the stuck-up git who wrote that quote, which I read, too): when someone says they have a reason to use more than X of something in your product, and all it would cost you to give it to them is (I think) changing the types of a bunch of variables, and maybe adding a couple of extra converter methods, you don't tell them, "No one should ever need that many! Only an idiot would even ask for that!" You either say, "Well, we don't currently have enough demand for that feature to be worth the trouble," or you just darn well do it!

Dan Aris

Re:Aqua

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Yeah, but how long is it going to take before some douche bag starts whining about how it doesn't "feel like a 'real' Mac application?" Probably in 5 . . . 4 . . . 3 . . . 2 . . . .

Ooooh! I want to be that douche bag!

Seriously, this is a great step forwards, but like most ports it is still seriously lacking in real functionality, especially when it comes to features that OS X offers, but other OS's do not. These include:

• - spell checking - OO.org claims to support OS X's built in spell checker, but as of the beta still flags words as misspelled that every other application knows are not because I added them. Training two, separate spell checkers to know all the technical terms I use daily are not misspellings is a hassle and is "not native." Hopefully this will be fixed by the time the final version ships.
• - system services - OO.org cannot use any OS X system services including the built in, universal grammar checker, language translation services, or any of the dozen or so services I use in MS Word, Pages, InDesign, TextEdit, mail.app, etc., etc.
• - responsiveness - whether it is because it is a port, or just because it is bloated, OO.org is still a dog for performance. I sometimes see visible lag when tying in word processing documents and it really, really hogs resources. MS Word is slow and a hog, but OO.org is really the only application I use regularly that is worse in that regard.
• - keyboard shortcuts - OO.org does not use the standardized keyboard shortcuts for all functions, but does use them for some. For example, copy and paste uses the standard (cmd-c, and cmd-v) but increasing the font size does not use the same (cmd+) that native apps do. Sticking with one set across all platforms makes sense as a standard. Using the standards on a platform makes sense. Going halfway in between, however, means I have to guess if a given feature will be like a "real Mac application" or like OO.org on Windows or something else entirely.

Please note. These don't mean OO.org sucks or the developers are lazy or anything else. It just means that there is a real usability and functionality concern when comparing a not quite polished port to a native application. One of the drawbacks of cross-platform applications (especially when they are not designed as cross-platform initially, but try to port to new platforms) is they tend to miss things and also tend to become a least common denominator when it comes to features. Windows and Linux don't have a universal grammar checker, so if you use OO.org on OS X (which does) it is ignored, despite being implemented by default in all native applications.

Re:Don't Hate!

[ianare]

I'm getting tired of this blatant lie. OO is released under the LGPL. There, end of story - it's open source.

And while sun does have the copyright, the community plays a role in the development process.
Furthermore, some other projects do use OO code, eg neooffice [wikipedia.org]

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but that is glacial on a good day...

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[syphax]

I agree that if you have 65k+ records or rows of data, a spreadsheet probably isn't the best tool.

However, there are several reasons why handling such data in Excel/OO is not unreasonable. These include:

• Many people are much more proficient in Excel than in any other software, due to familiarity. The cost of moving the data over to other software and then figuring out how to do what you want to do is often not worth the time required.
  
• Spreadsheets are inherently more flexible than a database. This is both a strength and weakness, but there are plenty of times when you need to do some sort of funky calculation to the data that is much, much easier to implement in a spreadsheet than via SQL (calculating a moving average of X records comes to mind).
  
• I would argue that a DB is often not the best choice, given the difficulty of implementing certain calculations in SQL (yes, I know about Codd and relational theory, but just because something can be done in an RDBMS does not mean it can be done easily). Often, something like S+/R, Matlab/Octave, SPSS, Tableau, etc., is the better choice- they generally allow you to perform manipulations as flexibly as in Excel, with better performance and less likelihood of errors, but more easily than doing everything in SQL. But many people aren't familiar with these. That doesn't mean they shouldn't be, but they aren't.
  

So, the short answer is that if you have only think you have a hammer (Excel), everything starts looking like nails.

I tend to go to R [r-project.org] or Tableau [tableausoftware.com] (which is basically a nice interface that sits on top of a database, Excel file or flat file) when I have many thousands of records, but the former has a learning curve, and the latter isn't cheap.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

There *are* PPC builds so far:
http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/Dev_BEA300_m2/

Re:Aqua

[rbanffy]

Probably no.

Unless there is no OOo for PPC.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[edschurr]

I'm DMing a D&D game right now, and most people are trying to use HeroForge spreadsheets to build their characters and show them to me. Without MS Office, I can't read them.

If you're using Windows, have you tried Excel Viewer [microsoft.com]? Or alternately try Excel Viewer 2003 and the MS Office 2007 Compatibility Pack.

Re:Hang in there guys

[pavon]

I personally think it is because Sun insists on tying OO.o together with the JRE.

You can disable the JRE: Tools > Options > Java > disable. Only a few components [wikipedia.org] use it. Doing so does improve the start up time quite a bit, but I haven't seen any difference whatsoever with runtime performance, so I don't think the JRE is to blame there.

Re:Don't Hate!

[ianare]

From the about [openoffice.org] page :

The OpenOffice.org project is primarily sponsored by Sun Microsystems, which is the primary contributor of code to the Project. Our other major corporate contributors include Novell, RedHat, RedFlag CH2000, IBM, and Google. Additonally over 450,000 people from nearly every curve of the globe have joined this Project

Now, I have never contributed to OOo, so I can't speak for how they actually handle individual contributors. Many open source projects are not always very inviting to individual contributors, especially when their opinions differ from the core devs (see GNOME). But they certainly do accept code from others.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Not ported per se, but half of KDE looks like it was lifted from the Mac.

BFD. Much of the Mac UI, not to mention the rest of OS X, didn't originate with Apple either. And the similarities are only superficial: KDE is skinnable.

Apple rarely comes up with anything original.

Quicksilver has spawned a dozen clones.

Again, BFD. Hotkey command input has been around for a long time, too.

Reveal codes feature: Vote for it!

[denis-The-menace]

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3395 [openoffice.org]

BTW: work has started on it.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Computershack]

I can open a word document with OO. I cannot open an OO document with Word. I can open a Word Perfect document with OO. I cannot open a WP document with Word. OO has the cool cachet of the GPL, while Word is just another boring corporate moneymaker. OO has fewer bugs and faster bug fixes. OO costs nothing, while stupid people pay good cash for Word that could otherwise be spent on more important things like beer, games, and more beer.

All of that is utterly irrelevent. EVERY BUSINESS CAN OPEN A WORD DOCUMENT and that's all that counts. The corporate market is the only one anyone is interested in because that's what makes them rich. That's why OOo has MS Office compatibility because it knows that without it, it's dead.

Re:Aqua

[spasm]

One of the March builds of 3.0.0 included a PPC version - OOo_3.0.0_080314_MacOSXPowerPC_install.dmg - I can't find it on OO's site any more, but it still seems to be available at http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/download.openoffice.org/extended/ooomisc/MacOSX/ [mirrorservice.org]
and on some torrent trackers.

I've installed it alongside 2.4 - it's a lot slower than 2.4 (so much so that it's close to unusable on my 1.5 Ghz G4), but it has the lifesaving feature of being able to open .docx files, so it's worth the dual install from my point of view - I open them in 3.0 then save as odt or regular doc before working on them in 2.4. A glorified converter, but hey, it works.

Re:Aqua

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

So you did file that in a bug report, right?

I filed the first two years ago. I haven't filed any in a while because they don't have a bug report feature built into the program and to file bugs requires you to register an account, (including your personal info) with Sun.

Re:Aqua

[Weedlekin]

"you insist on writing everything in horrible languages like Objective-C and AppleScript to hideous APIs like Cocoa and Quartz. Makes it hard to port Apple crap to other platforms, you know."

It's actually fairly easy to write Cocoa apps that can be ported to Linux and the BSDs via GNUStep (it has a few extensions to Cocoa, but these can be installed on Macs without the rest of GNUStep). It doesn't support AppleScript, but Objective-C is part of GCC (which Apple themselves use), so there isn't any need to install extra compilers on Linux / BSD systems.

"Unfortunately, Apple refuses to support nice languages, like Python, Smalltalk, or C#"

Apple doesn't need to support everything itself. Here's a list of Cocoa bridges for all the languages you list, as well as various others you didn't mention:

http://www.cocoadev.com/index.pl?CocoaBridges [cocoadev.com]

"or nice APIs, in order to keep the Macintosh platform separate and proprietary"

Apple support POSIX, X-Windows, and OpenGL (to name but three), none of which is proprietary, and as as GNUStep proves, there's nothing preventing third parties from writing Cocoa-compatible systems for other platforms. After all, why should Apple do all the work when Open Source supporters keep telling the rest os to write stuff for ourselves if there isn't a FOSS solution that does what we want?

Re:Aqua

[je ne sais quoi]

Nah... NeoOffice still runs a large part of OOo code. Mostly the differences on the front end are in using native widgets instead of the OOo ones (why reinvent the wheel?). The irony here is that the guys doing NeoOffice tried to work with Sun to do this when they started but the people at Sun weren't cooperative. NeoOffice is running what OpenOffice.org should have done a long, long, long time ago and only now have decided this is necessary.

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[account_deleted]

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Re:Hang in there guys

[growse]

Microsoft Word Viewer [microsoft.com] - it's free.

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[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Aqua - LaunchD, etc...

[Anonymous Coward]

Simple:

LaunchD
Bonjour (Dynamic DNS Stuff (mDNS))
iCal Server

Thats just a few

Re:Aqua

[Zoxed]

> Um, how about KHTML, which started open source (like Open Office) ...

FWIW OpenOffice.org started as the *proprietary* suite Staroffice, which was bought by Sun and open sourced.

Re:OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[WWWWolf]

I'd love to pitch in with the coding, but I sadly cannot afford the time and energy required to dig through OOo's extraordinarily convoluted API documentation to figure out how to update the source code myself; I started the process, but gave up in disgust at how the docs are organized.

Wow, you actually found documentation? I tried writing an OO.o macro once. I have almost gotten back my sanity now. =)

But anyway, there's one part where OO.o differs from Word: Documents are not coupled to the application. You don't have to use OO.o to process OpenDocument.

Theoretically, it'd not be that difficult to whip up an external application that does various word count methods - after all, there's several word count methods for English too! (Some divide character count by six, some pick a page from the middle of the manuscript, multiply lines by average line length, then multiply by number of pages in manuscript, etc, etc...)

I've written a word count tool for my own use for LaTeX text myself in 15 minutes... and there's a bunch of libraries for parsing OO.o. How hard can it be? =)