An Early Look At New Features In OpenOffice.org 3.1 260
ahziem writes "With the final release two months away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.1's new features: eye candy, better charts, replying to notes in the margin, overlining, macros in Base, RTL improvements for Arabic and Hebrew, and (believe it or not) better sorting. Download and report any bugs you find."
Sorting still lacks... (Score:2, Interesting)
I know it's hoping against hope, but I still hope someday some spreadsheet program will do sorting that will actually ignore the "A, an, the" that can begin lines, along with extra blank spaces. Most suggestions in this area tell you to put those words in a separate column then do the sort, which isn't particularly elegant.
Needs Table of Authorities Functionality (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll switch to OO.o writer when it can actually put together a decent legal-brief table of authorities. It's not like the M$ one is great, but it IS there.
Yes, I know there's a feature request, yes I know I should go code it myself. I really don't want to hear that. (I'm not a programmer)
A HUGE segment (don't we need MORE lawyers :) ) of the professional writing population can't use your software without having to manually compile a table of authorities; it needs to add in this functionality. This is literally a deal breaker feature for any large or small law firm that does any sort of litigation, trial or appellate work. I.e. firms won't even consider it until it has a ToA feature and not just a quirky workaround.
So I labor on with Word or WP, until OO.o or Pages comes up with something better.
BTW - calc totally rocks, and since I dont need any VB macros, I've ditched excel.
Base not up to it (Score:4, Interesting)
Macro support in Base? Hmmm.
I did some extensive testing of Base a little while back. It's OK for very limited use, but let's be brutally honest ... you don't create solid, complex systems on Base.
But people still want to create database front-ends on Linux, and have to use God-aweful web-based UIs.
Despair no longer - I have created a cross-platform, open-source framework to implement 'forms', 'dataasheets' and 'reports'. I'm even part-way ( 30% or so ) through creating a GUI builder to tie everything together. But the libraries are already complete and in production ( heavy use, I might add ). To download / view screenshots or just check out what's going on, it's all on my website: http://entropy.homelinux.org/axis/ [homelinux.org]
Re:The only feature I want... (Score:5, Interesting)
Start OO writer. Mash the keyboard, perhaps inputting FGSFDS. Hit save, enter "fgsfds.odt" as the filename. Press enter. Why does it take a significant fraction of a second to save this? Kword and Abiword both save and are ready to type again in about the time I can blink twice. Last time I tried with OOo I seem to recall being able to follow a progress bar in the lower status display.
This is supposed to be one of the flagship FOSS programs, and it's so slow to save things it's embarassing.
Re:Good enough (Score:3, Interesting)
What hassles? My pirated version is pre-activated, which makes it more valuable than the legit version because I don't have to worry about hitting some arbitrary limit of installs if I reformat. Same with Vista/XP.
The only hassles of pirated software are when people don't have enough experience acquiring such software. If you get stuff through Limewire, then sure, things probably aren't going to be that pleasant. But looking for something like "microsoft office" on the pirate bay, sorting by seeders and skimming the comments ensures you'll get something of quality, for the most part.
Heh, it's funny. I actually bought a legit copy of Office 2007 since I'm a postgraduate student and hence qualify for that special promo where it costs AUD$79, far cheaper than normal. However, I felt so uncomfortable in having to activate it every time I reformatted than I just got the same version off the torrent sites, pre-activated. I figure, I've payed for the legit copy, so morally I've done nothing wrong. Have I?
Re:Good enough (Score:1, Interesting)
Hmm. Dunno if this carries over into the "I make presentations for a living" crowd (who probably buy MSOffice anyway), but I've always found that .pdfs made in OO.o Writer (landscape size, of course) make for very reasonable slideshows that have never had any presentation issues, whatsoever.
Re:The only feature I want... (Score:2, Interesting)
"A Faster application
From first-time startup, where we sort I/O to reduce seek cost, to a highly optimised second start application and a systray quick-starter on Linux we are faster. We use less memory than up-stream, we link faster, use better system allocators, and don't waste so much time & memory in the registry. Go-oo performance is hard to beat. "
http://go-oo.org/ [go-oo.org]
Re:OpenOffice is nice, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Now obviously such .doc files aren't that common, but when you absolutely positively need to read a .doc file the way it was meant to be seen, using MS Office is pretty much the only choice. It's not 100% guaranteed to show things perfectly (as people have already mentioned), but it's still the best chance, particularly for esoteric forms like I had.
In most environments however, they are rare enough that while you need a copy of Office 2007, you don't need a copy of Office 2007 for everyone. At one of the sites I work with the 10 executives have Office, and the 2 IT people have MS Office, and one guy who does brochures and ad work has it. The other 120+ staff have OOo. The execs get it mostly because they want it, and they legitimately deal with enough powerpoint and exchange docs with other companies enough that its worth it for most of them.
The IT people have it primarily so that if someone gets a document that doesn't work, they send it to IT to deal with it for them; usually to simply convert it to PDF. So, they have 13 copies of Office instead of ~130, that represents quite a savings. The amount of time IT has spent dealing with incompatible documents over the last 5 years is almost nil, maybe a dozen documents a year need attention, and as I said most of them can be resolved simply by converting to pdf and forwarding it back.
They've saved thousands by not buying copies of office XP, Office 2003, Office 2007 for everyone.
Its frankly pretty much impossible to wean the average business 100% off Office. But you can usually easily move 90% off Office.
It's better because it doesn't have a ribbon (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:The only feature I want... (Score:3, Interesting)
Where is my iPhone/Android version? (Score:2, Interesting)
OOs is usable. I appreciate it at home on non-Windows machines. As a programmer I don't do Office much. I made up my mind to stop using MS Office more than 2 years ago unless I absolutely have to (like my timesheet or open an Access db file). Nobody knows I'm getting away with using OOo or Google Docs most of the time. It's amazing how much you can do without (like other aspects in life).
The thing that really concerns me is this Quixotic quest to match MS Office. By the time OOo v.X is "as good as Office", Office would already be living and moving most of its paid users to the cloud (or whatever web+mobile platform MSFT is moving to). Sun used to have a motto: "we are the 'dot' in 'dot-com'". For all the money and time it could have thrown at the problem, the Dot was stuck on the desktop. Good for Ubuntu I guess. Let's hope it survives on netbooks. (Doubt Negroponte will ever use it.)
Re:Sorting still lacks... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Good enough (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been using OO Portable to restore broken word documents for my colleagues at work on a monthly basis. People do backups, sure, but even losing a couple of hours of work and re-doing it is annoying as hell.
As for equations -- I have yet to see an equation editor superior to LyX's one.
Re:Needs Table of Authorities Functionality (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of FOSS projects fall into a similar mentality and lose sight of their objectives. Rather than writing a great program for the community, it's a great program for the core users. It doesn't matter if the project doesn't serve the needs of anyone else
Obviously there are some people (especially students) who have a lot of time on their hands, love to program, and want a big project to get involved with.
But those same people then go on to full time programming jobs. Even when working full time it can take months and months and years to get to grips with an existing big project from your employer and most programmers are not prepared to give up all their free time to do the same for a big OS project. (Many "professional" programmers never really get to grips with the project they are on which is why you find so many "bug fixes" that actually only fix the symptom - this may or may not be a good commercial decision, personally I think not because eventually that "symptom fix" causes another problem and then someone first has to rediscover the "symptom fix" which is usually some weird bit of code somewhere /* Don't know why but length is one character too long here */ length--; (usually without the comment!), remove it, then find the original problem that caused that hack and finally fix the original problem properly)
Unix got it so right. A small task to solve a small problem. You want to be able to diff two files but ignore ALL whitespace differences (rather than just white space differences at the start and end of the line) and it's probably not going to take an experienced programmer more than an hour or two to add that functionality, including finding the source code, working out how to compile it etc. Feeding it upstream then becomes fairly simple to do.
Want to have a search in open office that ignores all white space when doing the search. I've not looked at open office source at all but I'd guess an experienced programmer would probably have to allow an entire weekend just to get to grips with compiling and installing openoffice (especially as they will want to be able to run their patched version alongside the package installed version). Now they need to find the search and replace code. If it's a one off for themselves they may be able to hack it so that search and replace always ignores white space, but if they want to feed it upstream then they're going to have to learn how to change dialogs, how to get at those flags, how to save the defaults (IIRC open office remembers these flag settings the next time you bring up a dialog, Excel doesn't which is a pain when you're doing a something like "paste special" where Excel keeps resetting your selection of what you actually want to paste)
I don't know what the solution is. Maybe Open Office needs a "framework" like the kernel is to the GNU utilities. Now search and replace can be a "package" that gets installed. I want to change the way search and replace works and I've only got to look at a few thousand lines of code. (c.f. Sendmail and milters.)
I've fed patches upstream when I've found bugs. There's a fix in the postgresql ODBC driver from me (an obscure corner case; IIRC an ODBC driver should return no records found when it does an update and doesn't update any records. It was returning OK which is what it should return when it has updated records and this difference from the ODBC spec happened to break an application I was trying to get to work with postgresql)
Tim.
Re:Good enough (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't care if PowerPoint has similar features
It does. :-)
I know you don't care, but maybe someone else reading this thread does
What about fixing the MacOS X port? (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been using the MacOS X port for years via X11. I was obviously quite happy that 3.0 had a native MacOS X version. However, version 3.0 is severely lacking in terms of MacOS X UI compliance. Example: the command and control keys are wrongly used by OpenOffice (wrongly = different than in all other apps on MacOS X). I learned via this link [oooninja.com] provided in another /. story yesterday, that there are 47 issues directly targeting MacOS X [openoffice.org] and that the keyboard shortcuts have been fixed it seems [openoffice.org]. Great! Hope the 3.1 will be become a real good software for the Mac! :-)
Date format (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, the lack of SVG support mystifies me. It's particularly annoying that I can't draw diagrams in a decent program (Inkscape) and import them, but instead have to try and use the retarded drawing tools in OpenOffice.
But the thing I really hope they'll fix is the inability to change the date format. (Or to express it another way, the inability to use the same damn date format that's set in the OS settings.) Apparently way back in the mists of time some crack-smoking monkey decided that OpenOffice should have its own locale system, totally disconnected from any OS internationalization settings.