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."

Don't Hate!

[TheRealMindChild]

I will probably get crucified for this, but one of the new features seems to be support for VBA! While this may not appeal to folks creating NEW solutions, at least we got a stepping stone for supporting old solutions on a non-windows/office platform.

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[swimin]

Maybe a bunch of users should get together and form a bounty on it. I'd gladly throw in $10 to have reveal codes.

*STILL* no outline mode.

[xeno]

Ugh. I sound like a broken record: Every OOo update, I hope that the OOo developers will add an outline mode to Writer. And every release I'm disappointed. I really like OOo, but this one missing feature keeps me from using it for serious work becuase it makes large document planning and writing production in Writer sloooooow. It's been requested of the OOo team quite a few times over the past 4-5 years. ODF intuitively matches this concept, but implementing it apparently requires some nontrivial change to the Writer codebase. And a little more enthusiasm by those who could code it (wish I could). If I could direct my OOo donation to this one feature, I'd give $XXX instead of my paltry $XX donation. There's some background available here: http://serendipity.ruwenzori.net/index.php/category/writing

And to quote myself (http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=322381&cid=20912291): "...before some n00b who's never written a 200-page document jumps all over me: No, the OOo "Navigator" does not provide an outline mode. It provides something akin to a re-organizable TOC in a floating window, but it doesn't provide the productivity enhancements afforded by inline hierarchical control within the editing window. This is one function that MS Word got right. For example, in Word I can start typing and make a list in normal text, click into "outline mode" and either use a key shortcut or a single click-drag to promote/demote some text to headings (while leaving other items as content), or re-order paragraphs of text or headings. To do the same thing in OOo's Navigator, I need to switch to a different window to reorganize headings, but switch back to the editing window to resume editing content. I also need to switch between two windows to split a heading into two sections, switch back to move it, and switch again to resume composing content -- something I can do with a CR and single mouse-drag in Word.

Word: type, type, drag, type, type, [enter], key-combo, type.
OOo: type, type, switch-window, drag, switch-window, type, type, re-style, switch-window, drag, switch-window, type.

Come on guys, suck up the Not-Invented-Here pride and adopt this one feature that MS got right! Or do it one-better and improve on the similar inline hierarchical editing from FrameMaker+SGML. Or innovate some collapsible tag interface from something like the old HotMeTaL from SoftQuad. (But don't trash the Navigator; it *is* useful for final proofing, just not composition)

Re:Don't Hate!

[MightyYar]

I don't understand why people think that OpenOffice gets better the more it's like MS Office.

It depends on what the goals of the project are. If they want to go after users of Office, then they will need to import - more or less flawlessly - from Office formats. Since there are 10-15 years worth of VBA macros out there, it is reasonable that you should support that part of the file format.

I know that I personally have a few GB worth of data in Excel and Word formats, and much of the Excel stuff is macro-enabled/enhanced. If OpenOffice did not support the Macros, I'd have to keep a copy of Office... at which point, why download and use OpenOffice?

Now, please note that I am playing somewhat the devil's advocate here. I'm a user of NeoOffice (even paid for the early access thing) and do in fact use both Office and OpenOffice together on the same machine - in part because I don't want to be locked in to a specific package again in the future. I was just trying to convey the vantage point that I think typifies the office market.

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

User base, yes. Contributions, unlikely. The OS X community is renowned for its exclusive commitment to Apple. I can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux, for example.

Still low limit on Calc rows?

[danaris]

From what I've seen, this release still has the absurd 65535 row limit on Calc—the only reason such a limit was acceptable in previous versions was because MS Office didn't yet support more, but now that Office 2007 supports up to 4 million-some-odd rows, there is absolutely no excuse for putting that many or more into OpenOffice.

More than 65K rows is the killer feature that has gotten parts of my company to upgrade to 2007. Until and unless OOo supports it, there's no way we'll be able to use it as a full replacement for MS Office, as much as we'd like to.

Dan Aris

Re:Still no Reveal codes feature?

[Viduliya]

I have not looked at any code, so I do not know this for sure. If you can convert the document on the fly to an XML like format then reveal codes should be trivial to implement. Heck, I would accept the XML in a another window/pane as reveal codes.

Sadly, I believe that the OpenOffice developers are thinking the same way, Microsoft has thought of MS Office. The must be thinking, all users are dumb enough to never want anything more abstract than WISIWYG editing with some useless hidden formatting characters shown.

I think Openoffice Writer is a nice product, it is too bad they do not aim to improve it beyond MS Word.

Nothing worse than having garbge/redundent/misplaced formatting staying hidden just to bite me on the next change on a large document. This is still my prime reason to not use OpenOffice (or MS Word) to create any serious document of a substantial size.

Re:Still low limit on Calc rows?

[f8l_0e]

I once read a quote that more than 65k rows was overkill and that if you needed that many rows, you should be using a database instead. If you're not under some kind of NDA, what does your company do that they need that many rows on a spreadsheet? Can anyone else chime in on legitimate reasons to need that many rows in a spreadsheet?

Re:Aqua

[dotancohen]

Not ported per se, but half of KDE looks like it was lifted from the Mac. Quicksilver has spawned a dozen clones.

What about OpenType font support?

[lorand]

I can't believe they got to 3.0 and there is still no OpenType font support...

Re:Aqua

[Anonymous Coward]

Right, and a huge portion of OS X was lifted wholesale from FreeBSD, so what? Pointing out clones or copies of applications is not what I was asking.

So I'll ask again: Name a single significant open source application that originated on OS X and now runs on other platforms. You can't, because OS X is designed specifically to prevent cross-platform development, and the Apple development community likes it that way.

Your inability to honestly answer this question proves my point that Mac users will certainly enjoy downloading and using OpenOffice for free, but very very few will contribute anything back: because OS X developers simply don't care about other platforms. This is also proven by the existence of things like Darwin ports, where the contributions are all one way. Again, an absolutely MASSIVE use of open source by the Apple community, with almost nothing given back.

Of course, you all have the right to do this since it is open source, just don't expect the rest of us to give you guys any respect as true members of the community.

Re:Aqua

[2nd Post!]

Um, how about KHTML, which started open source (like Open Office), got adopted by Apple into WebKit and (eventually) saw much use of contributions as well as adoption in terms of Nokia's web browser, QT using WebKit, rollbacks of code into KHTML, etc.

I mean, OpenOffice was a Linux exclusive app that moved to Mac, so you're quest for a OS-X only app that runs on Linux seems pointless.

Re:Hang in there guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Some poeple consider features to be more important than compatability.

Microsoft Word has many more (and more mature) features than OO.org and your post does not dispute this at all.

+4 "Informative" indeed.

Re:Hang in there guys

[compro01]

i agree with all but the WP one. word opens WP files just fine, usually.

Re:*STILL* no outline mode.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I used outline mode a lot in Word when I still used it, and I think that navigator is really superior to outline mode - what you need to do, though, is dock both the navigator and the floating styles palette on one side of the program window, one above the other - that way you don't have to switch windows, even if you still need the mouse.

Since version 2.4 there are also keyboard shortcuts for heading levels 1 to 3: ^1 to ^3.

I do a lot of outlining, it works very well for me, and I prefer it to the word outliner - others may prefer the word way of doing it.

On the whole, I think that writer is a much better WP than word - and I used everything from Word 4 for DOS to Word 97 at home and at work, and I still use Word 2003 at work sometimes - we have Openoffice installed as well. I also tried Office 2007 - came with my son's laptop, but didn't like it, and neither does he. He needs MS office for some school projects, but usually writes everything in writer, exports to .doc and then opens and saves in Word once, to check for formatting problems.

The one thing writer needs, in my opinion, is better spell checking, and maybe also grammar checking.

Re:Aqua

[Winckle]

The handbrake project.

http://handbrake.fr/ [handbrake.fr]

UI argument

[cheros]

I've got no problem what-so-ever with cloning-just wish the cloners paid half as much attention to UI as they do to the features.

That's funny, I've had a company switch to OOo precisely because of the UI. Their sound argument was that Open Source products in general do not change UI so quickly and dramatically, allowing staff to grow with the changes.

The reason for that is simple: FOSS doesn't need an argument other than improvement for a new version. It doesn't need UI drama to give a bunch of sales people an argument to sell a new version, so once staff has been retrained (as they would have been anyway for a new version of Windows -Vista- and Office -2007-) it was equally possible to switch to a Linux build with OO.

The showstopper was in the backoffice to adjust available skills in dev and support in time, so they went half way and switched to OOo only as test. I suspect they'll take the Linux step as well once they've seen how OOo worked for them, but that's at least half a year away.

Re:Aqua

[cp.tar]

I can't name a single significant open source project that originated as an OS X-only application but now runs on Linux, for example.

Um... Transmission?

It's only the best BitTorrent client I've ever used, and now it has become the default client in Ubuntu. Though AFAICT the Mac version is still superior.

Re:Hang in there guys

[encoderer]

No, it's just that for most people compatibility no longer an issue.

I can't recall the last time I sent a Word/Excel doc to somebody who couldn't open it.

Nor can I recall having a WP file sent to me in the last decade or so. Besides, Word CAN open up WP docs saved in the WP5 or WP6 formats.

Now.. as a developer, I have done some pretty great things with Office. Not so much using Office as the platform (although everyones done a bit of that at some point), but moreso just automating it in C#/Visual C++ using its COM wrapper.

A good example is an MRP we wrote in C# that uses Excel as a reporting platform.

Many here just can't get past the idea that it's closed-source, a MSFT product, etc. Me? I just want to deliver the best software I can. We're a small company. Top Line growth is important. And I don't have the luxury of indulging personal preferences.

Re:Hang in there guys

[spasm]

Half my damn students.. I occasionally teach undergrads and every semester I make it clear that I will not accept papers in microsoft works format and every semester without fail a dozen students email me a final paper in works format. It came for free on their computer and by and large we're talking about a level of computer illiteracy where they can't actually tell the difference between works and regular office, let alone acquire a copy of either office or OO and install it..

Re:Hang in there guys

[MrHanky]

That runs counter to my own experience. OpenOffice feels sluggish even on fast computers, but not a lot slower on slow computers -- at least not as slow as you'd expect. I used it a lot last summer on a Pentium III 500 MHz with 512 MB RAM, and speed was never an issue. I've also used it on a 266 MHz laptop with 320 MB RAM, running Debian, and even that was acceptable in use (it did load slowly, though).

OpenOffice's sluggishness is mostly an issue of feeling. I don't think I've lost even a minute, in total, from using OpenOffice Writer instead of Word on slow computers. In fact, I might have saved a bit of time, due to OOo's far superior styles implementation.

Re:Hang in there guys

[trdrstv]

And let us not forget the speed. While I have no qualms giving OO.o to my customers when they have me build them a new box, I would never recommend OO.o to a business that was using hardware older than 1 to 2 years. It is just too damned slow.

Compare OO.o,even the older 1.5,to say,Office 2K(best damned Office released IMHO) the speed will blow you away,even with the hidden Office service disabled.

Though I agree that Open Office is damn bloated compared to MS Office in terms of Memory usage (the same spreadhseet takes over 100 megs of ram in OpenOffice, vs 15 megs in Excel isn't uncommon) I've learned to live with it, due to the cost/benefit of simply buying more Memory. RAM is damn cheap and has Far more utility, so I would rather buy 1 gig of (laptop) RAM for $50, than buy MS Office.

Re:Aqua

[TheRaven64]

If you write applications on OS X using Objective-C and Cocoa you can often port them to other platforms using GNUstep. If you use proprietary Apple technologies (Cocoa is not - it's an implementation of the OpenStep specification) like QuickTime then you will need to rewrite those parts. GNU GCC only got Objective-C++ support a couple of years ago, so applications using this were a problem. In Ãtoilé svn we have a partially-complete reimplementation of CoreGraphics too, if anyone is interested in working on it (in etoile/branches/Opal).

OOo *still* lacking some basic functionality

[zooblethorpe]

I'll ditto encoderer here:

...it's just that for most people compatibility no longer an issue.

Plus, there's one feature that really belongs more in the "Basic Functionality" category, and that's accurate word and character counting. As documented on the OOo bug list for some years now [openoffice.org], any combination of double-byte Asian text + regular single-byte alphanumeric text results in "word" counts that are worse than useless. A number of Asian languages do not count by "word" so much as by character (and for that matter there still isn't much agreement as to what exactly is a "word" in Japanese). OOo gives a total "word" count for either the document or selection, but does not break out any included Asian text -- which MS Word does, and has done for longer than I can clearly remember (starting maybe with MSO 97?). This makes OOo a non-starter for anyone working with such Asian languages in any situation that requires counts -- which includes just about all academic and professional use.

There's a sample .odt file included in the bug report (direct linky [openoffice.org]) that clearly spells out the differences in how the two apps count from a UI perspective (can't speak to the internals). 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. I've still got MSO, so until such time as the OOo team can get around to fixing this long-standing bug, and / or produce more sensible API docs, I'll keep using Word.

Re:Aqua

[dotancohen]

I thought the complaint was that KDE looked like Windows?

When people are complaining about KDE, it looks like Windows. When people are complementing KDE, it looks like OS-X.

http://what-is-what.com/what_is/kde.html [what-is-what.com]

Just this week was the first time I sat down to a Mac. They are rediculously expensive in Israel, and very uncommon. I opened the control center to configure Sticky Keys, and I could have sworn that I had opened Kcontrol, the KDE control center. Worse yet, Kcontrol has two interfaces, one that I like and one that I hate. This was the one that I hate.

Re:Missing change items

[GeekDork]

I've been looking around. The OO.o people know exactly that their drawing framework stinks out loud, and they announced far-reaching changes for 2.0. What they came up with is XCanvas [openoffice.org]. OO.o and Inkscape were officially started around the same time. Both had a base to work from. In that time, Inkscape has evolved into a quite powerful vector graphics tool with a rendering engine (libcairo) that is extremely capable, and with an interface that's actually fun to work on. OO.o on the other hand has done... what exactly? From my point of view, and judging by the set of functionality I regularly use, they've done exactly dick except changing the icon set every now and then and calling that a release. All issues that I found had already been discussed ad nauseam, but never resolved. Issues I found in Inkscape were actually fixed by the next release (which looked pretty much the same but was much better to use).

If the word processing tool hadn't worked from the start, OO.o would be dead and gone by now, since it has no other working features. I'm not wasting my time on that. (Plus I'm no good with praphics.)

Re:Aqua

[Ant P.]

So I'll ask again: Name a single significant open source application that originated on OS X and now runs on other platforms.

Marathon.

Re:Sigh, all this focus on features. Not speed &am

[barzok]

Perofrmance is one of the reasons I gave up on OOo/NeoOffice and took advantage of the Home Use program my employer offers as part of our MS licensing deal. $20 for MacOffice 2008 is a better value to me than OOo/NeoOffice right now. I can't reliably open Word documents for my wife using NeoOffice, and the whole suite is just a pig. Plus the graphing in the spreadsheet is more trouble than it needs to be as compared to Excel.

New Good Stuff?

[bigal123]

Nice to see this out. However I am disappointed that PDF import even when it is ready will only be added as an extension. It should be part of the core. I was also hoping for a few more big features. Even the improved Crop feature in Draw/Impress was a feature that a developer did as a side job in is free time http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/improved_picture_cropping_for_draw [sun.com] Will 3.0 include some of the features that were forked off with Go-OO http://go-oo.org/ [go-oo.org] ? ie: -SVG support - So we can import Inkscape documents ... remember SVG is a standard also. -MS-Works import - This would be nice as many home users use this as it cost less then MS Office -Improved EMF rendering - I have not done this in a while but EMF quality was poor -WordPerfect Graphics import -GStreamer integration -Rich fields support - some of the features OOo people said they would not support. -Other Go-oo features I am not trying to start a turf war, but there are some nice features. I would think that there might be time to integrate some of existing code i.e. Works support etc into OOo before 3.0 is final. AS the other features have been sitting in Go-oo they might be considered stable enough to port back to OOo at this beta stage.

Re:Clones needed, references checked

[turing_m]

I don't need my hammer to be user friendly, either. I just want to drive a nail and no backtalk from the damned hammer. Like Linux, it is user-obediant.

The great thing about Linux these days is the community. It only takes one "genius" (i.e. anyone who can read a man page) to figure out how to do something via CLI and post the howto on ubuntuforums. He ups his "thanked x times in y posts" count, and the rest of the proles have an easy recipe they can search for.

This is oftentimes superior to the closed source model of the developer trying to brainstorm all the possible uses that users can come up with and coding it all into a GUI. The community gives the CLI both power AND ease of use.

Re:Don't Hate!

[TheoMurpse]

You know what? Fuck you.

I own a Windows and a Mac laptop. The Mac laptop is better. There isn't one particular feature I can point to as to why it's better, but as I use both, I prefer the Mac. There's just a ton of little reasons that make up for the fact that I can't run Windows prog--oh wait, yes I can do that, too.

I was a Windows zealot; I defended Microsoft during the antitrust trials; I've faithfully used Microsoft products (including MS-DOS) since I was in kindergarten (that's 20 friggin years). I've used Tandy, IBM, Dell, and Sony systems (desktops and laptops). I wish the desktop I'm using now were a Mac!

And as for my credentials? Programming since I was 4, formerly employed as a web developer (I've heard from former coworkers that my boss has talked about me to new hires and how he'd hire me back in a second if I applied--I left because of school), experienced in software design and abstract math. I'm not a moron.

So believe me when I say: I have become a Mac fan in spite of my former Microsoft fanboyism, and it's not because I wanted something more geared towards idiotism.

The fact that you've been modded up +2 Insightful means there are two idiots or blind MS fanboys trolling Slashdot right now.