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An Early Look At New Features In OpenOffice.org 3.1 260

Posted by kdawson from the hot-bits dept.
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."
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An Early Look At New Features In OpenOffice.org 3.1 More

An Early Look At New Features In OpenOffice.org 3.1

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  • I just finally upgraded to 3.0 from 2.0 on my workstation and installed 3.0 on my laptop, and just now there's a hint of an update coming soon... although a few months away, but still I hate being outdated. ;)

    I haven't even bothered to check, but does openoffice.org finally support automated updates like firefox instead of the old, a bit annoying, download and unpack to install latest version routine?

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by BiggerIsBetter ( 682164 )

      I haven't even bothered to check, but does openoffice.org finally support automated updates like firefox instead of the old, a bit annoying, download and unpack to install latest version routine?

      Firefox updates are annoying too. It bugs me when it finds an update, then it bugs me to ask to install it, then it bugs me to tell me it updated, then my addons do all of that... plus they open their online release-note pages after I have to restart Firefox! Gah, just pulse an "updating" icon to tell me it's happening in the background, and then apply it all silently at next restart, maybe with an "updated" icon - if I want to know more, I'll click the damn icon. No need to make these processes so in-your-

      • Re:Oh come on! (Score:5, Informative)

        by KlaymenDK ( 713149 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @04:53AM (#26543383) Journal

        Dude, you need Update Notifier [longfocus.com], it wraps all those updates into a nice and tiny button, with a sensible reboot-at-MY-convenience option.

      • Disable updates if you want (Score:4, Informative)

        by Manuel M ( 1308979 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @05:10AM (#26543475)

        You can disable all that. Go to Tools -> Settings... -> Update

        (Actual names may vary, I'm using Firefox in Spanish language)

        There uncheck the three boxes under "Automatically search for updates..."

        Then you'll have to click on Help -> Search for updates every time you want to update, but at least thou shalt not be nagged at (yes, I do understand you prefer to have Firefox update itself automatically and naglessly, but in the meantime...).

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by quercus.aeternam ( 1174283 )
      Just use a package manager.

      Even if you don't run linux, there are various windows-based options [wikipedia.org]

    • Meh, it's coming in near the end of March [google.com], on the same day that Ubuntu 9.04's beta is expected.

  • Can't wait for Beta. (Score:3, Informative)

    by f1vlad ( 1253784 ) Works for Slashdot on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @02:57AM (#26542829) Homepage Journal
    Among personal favourites is sql syntax highlighting, more advanced notes, collaboration tools.

  • The only feature I want... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by caerwyn ( 38056 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @02:59AM (#26542833)

    ... is the one feature I never see under OpenOffice release notes: Improved performance.

    I keep trying OpenOffice, under multiple OSes... and I keep removing it in frustration. Eye candy? That's the last thing we need when the program is already so very painful.

    • Re:The only feature I want... (Score:5, Funny)

      by ejsing ( 1453147 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:06AM (#26542863)

      Eye candy? That's the last thing we need when the program is already so very painful.

      It worked for Apple

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by Tubal-Cain ( 1289912 ) *
        Sun doesn't have anybody that generates a Reality Distortion Field.

      • I am not quite sure were you getting the idea that Apple is full of eye candy. Look at Vista, or Ubuntu with effects on full. Thats eye candy. With graphic elements that look cool but are not useful or hider use (Wobbly Windows Ubuntu), Use Translucent (with blurry filter to prevent you actually seeing what is behind it) Windows XP.
        Most of the visual effects in OS X actually tell you something and makes it easier to understand what is going on. Besides most of the effects are handled by the GPU which is und

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by sunwolf ( 853208 )
      I haven't tried it myself, but I've been meaning to test out Go-oo, which is purportedly faster. From the site:
      "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: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by lorand ( 764021 )
      ... is OpenType font support, but also keeps being ignored, yet these fonts have the widest Unicode support, among other advantages.

  • Good enough (Score:5, Insightful)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:13AM (#26542901) Journal

    OO.o is NOT Microsoft Office. If you want Microsoft Office, go bite the bullet, pay the price, or deal with the hassles of your bootleg copy.

    However, OO.o has reached the point where it really and truly is "good enough" for most anybody. Enough that we now recommend it to our clients - it's on the privileged "recommended software" link in our product, effectively putting OO.o front and center for hundreds of schools and tens of thousands of students.

    Killer? No. I honestly don't know how many people pay attention to our "recommended software" download link. However, we've been pretty up-front about all-but-requiring Firefox for all our users, and we have about 80% hit rate on Firefox.

    Officially, we support Firefox, IE, and Safari, but FF is in first place. We develop for Firefox and backport reported bugs in IE or Safari as they are reported. Honestly, since we stick to relatively simple HTML for our web-based product, we haven't had much problem with this strategy.

    But the killer reason why most of our FF switchers have switched? When you hit the "Back" button in FF, it remembers what you typed in on a form. IE forgets. Such a simple thing, yet we've switched thousands of users (possibly forever!) to FF for this one feature ALONE.

    Now, back to OO.o - I use it on my Fedora Core laptop, and have used it instead of MS Office for years. It's plenty good enough. I can read/write Office dox with minimal translation problems, and it does everything I've ever really wanted.

    The only limit I've run into is that when I produce a presentation using Impress, where it's going to be displayed in MS Power Point, I open the file in MS PowerPoint before presenting to make sure it's going to display OK. Sometimes, fonts will be different, carefully aligned elements will be out of order, graphics scale the wrong size, etc.

    But there have been a few times that I had to present "in the raw" and still haven't had much problem. The dirty secret of MS Office is that it's often incompatible with itself! If you're using Office 2000 or 2003 and try to use 2007 to render your presentation, you are probably about as likely to experience similar issues!

    Perhaps the only issue is that if you open a file in MS Office and it's "corrupted", people will tend to fault the file - "these things happen!". But if you open the same file in OO.o and it's "corrupted", people will tend to fault OO.o - "Software just doesn't work right!".

    And this may take a while to overcome. But OO.o is clearly doing it!

    • Needs Table of Authorities Functionality (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:25AM (#26542971)

      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.

      • Re:Needs Table of Authorities Functionality (Score:5, Informative)

        by spotter ( 5662 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:46AM (#26543073)

        http://cmchoatelaw.wordpress.com/2008/10/29/table-of-authorities-and-openoffice-how-to/ [wordpress.com]

        while not as "simple" as word, word isn't really that simple either, and the majority of the additional effort here is an initial setup that doesn't have to be repeated, at least if one makes the effort to script it. The hardest part then is tagging which one has to do in word as well. basically, I think this is solvable without major programming skill, just some macro programming.

      • Star Trek's Borg, despite supposedly being on a quest to assimilate the best of everything everywhere, go nowhere. They supposedly had interstellar travel 100000 years ago, but despite enough time to cross the entire galaxy at sublight speed having passed they have not accomplished this goal. Apparently they have/had a network of transwarp conduits that grants/granted them near-immediate (years or less transit time) access to anywhere in the galaxy, but still haven't assimilated everything. How can this be? They're not actually out to do that anymore... The Collective has become their perfect little gem and they're content to sit there and polish it.

        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 - screw them, they aren't part of the Collective. I call it Borg Syndrome - ostensibly community-oriented projects that refuse to listen to outside input (esp. "write your own patch"-ers) yet can't understand why hardly anyone in the community uses their software.

        I'm not certain that OoO has fallen into this insidious trap; I really wrote more in reply to parent's second line than anything else - until we fight back Borg Syndrome there's a whole lot of software that's going nowhere.

        ps: Is konqueror ever going to be fixed so preview works on /.?

        • Re:Needs Table of Authorities Functionality (Score:4, Interesting)

          by locofungus ( 179280 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @07:46AM (#26544297)

          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: (Score:3, Funny)

          by cerberusss ( 660701 )

          Star Trek's Borg, despite supposedly being on a quest to assimilate the best of everything everywhere, go nowhere.

          That's because they got crippled in 2374 by Species 8472 [memory-alpha.org] and crippled by Janeway in 2378. Duh. Everybody knows this.

          This is the last time I catch you spouting nonsense, young man. Next time you will log out of this site and hand over your geek card at the door!

        • I can't believe you really typed that bull.shit .. :)

          search on borg [technoesq.com] microsoft results about 36,900 .. Borg and Microsoft [ysu.edu]

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by rrohbeck ( 944847 )

      I've seen several cases where OO.o could open files that MS Word or Excel wouldn't.
      Also, the ability to compare and merge two spreadsheets has been a lifesaver once when two people made changes to an important complicated spreadsheet.
      These days I use OO.o as the default and only open with MS Office when I have to (very rarely.) Oh, and I just relegated Outlook to a VirtualBox VM. I think that spare XP license will run in VirtualBox on any host. WGA accepted it without a hitch. Next step: Move the domain-ena

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by GF678 ( 1453005 )

      If you want Microsoft Office, go bite the bullet, pay the price, or deal with the hassles of your bootleg copy.

      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

      • Re:Good enough (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Your.Master ( 1088569 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @04:13AM (#26543195)

        What hassles?

        You partially answer your question in the next paragraph.

        The only hassles of pirated software are when people don't have enough experience acquiring such software.

        Hassle #1: gaining and maintaining experience in pirated software.

        sorting by seeders and skimming the comments ensures you'll get something of quality, for the most part.

        That's hassle #2 right there.

        Hassle #3 can come with the potential for updates not working in the future.

        I figure, I've payed for the legit copy, so morally I've done nothing wrong. Have I?

        Not as far as I'm concerned.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by jabithew ( 1340853 )

      On the topic of corruption, I've used OO.o to rescue a friend's document that was corrupted. It was a research project write up, he saved it in only one place. He learnt a valuable lesson in backing up (with the half hour of ohshitohshitohshit) without any long term harm.

      But yes, my production environment is a mix of Office 2003 and Office 2007, and I run Office 2008. Compatibility problems are rife, especially with equations.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Erikderzweite ( 1146485 )

        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:Good enough (Score:5, Informative)

      by Erikderzweite ( 1146485 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @07:01AM (#26544037)

      I totally love the presentation mode in Impress where you have your slides on projector and slides thumbs (so you can see the next slide coming) along with notes on your laptop screen. And it shows you the time you spent presenting -- priceless during university seminars. Didn't know it was there, now I can't live without it. Don't care if PowerPoint has similar features -- it has to run on my Linux first.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Zebedeu ( 739988 )

        Don't care if PowerPoint has similar features

        It does.
        I know you don't care, but maybe someone else reading this thread does :-)

    • OO.o is NOT Microsoft Office. If you want Microsoft Office, go bite the bullet, pay the price, or deal with the hassles of your bootleg copy.

      If MSO 2007 were available for Linux, I would pay for it today. For all I hate about Microsoft, MSO really is the least worse of the office suites, when it is configured to save in odf format (available since SP1, available as an addon in earlier versions). If anyone knows of another good office suite for Linux, please let me know. I'm a KDE user, and Koffice (even the 2.0 betas) just aren't there yet.

  • again? (Score:2)

    by bugi ( 8479 )

    No matter how many times you post this story, I still say overlining is underappreciated.

  • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Corporate Troll ( 537873 )
      Why not change the data? For example, if it's a list of books, write "Great Gatsby, The" instead of "The Great Gatsby". It's just a suggestion and it doesn't involve extra columns.

  • Overlining (Score:5, Informative)

    by dcollins ( 135727 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:24AM (#26542967) Homepage

    Here's an enormous sigh of relief. As a statistics professor, my #1 gripe with Open Office has been my inability to easily create an x-overbar (sample mean) character. That alone has been the reason I've had to keep booting up a copy of MS Office to edit student handouts.

    • Well, couldn't you have just highlighted the character, inserted a frame, played with the borders and repositioned the resulting character with custom kerning and anchor it to the preceding text?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by iNaya ( 1049686 )
        I did it!!! It only took 20 min!! Yay!! I didn't actually know about frames, so thanks for enlightening me... However, it does take a lot more effort than it does in CSS or MS Word

  • Base not up to it (Score:4, Interesting)

    by vandan ( 151516 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:29AM (#26543005) Homepage

    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: (Score:3, Funny)

      by Psychotria ( 953670 )

      Dan? Is that you? I just read on your website under the GUI Builder section that you've just had a baby. Do you have a link to your peer-reviewed journal article where you described the experience of a male having a baby? :-)

      Seriously though, that's a pretty impressive project you're working on. Keep up the good work. Are you doing it by yourself?

    • 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.

      Have you looked at the state of many critical business "applications" that are in Access? I'm not saying it smart, but there is definitely a market for that kind of software out there.

      Then again, I've only skimmed over Base. For all I know it might be worse than Access, but I'd find that very hard to believe.

    • Why would you want create a complex system in access or base? Isnt that like doing scientific analysis using excel/calc

  • OMG (Score:4, Funny)

    by thephydes ( 727739 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @03:47AM (#26543077)
    It's free ..... it must be a scam. I'd better stay with Microsoft because I know what I'm getting.
  • When will this happen. There were two features mentioned in TFA that make me think they are at least moving in the right direction:

    Macros in Base

    OpenOffice.org Base gets a huge boost now that OpenOffice.org 3.1 allows macros in .odb files. Furthermore, Base macros can be bound to events. Helping it compete with Microsoft Access, Base developers will save time and enjoy new possibilities such as creating navigation forms (called switchboards in Access).

    SQL syntax highlighting

    SQL is a first-class citizen in Base. In OpenOffice.org 3.1 the SQL editor highlights SQL syntax, which is helpful for finding typos such as a missed quotation mark.

    Good thing that there are finally macros in .odb files - and shocks me that before, there hadn't been?! Well, last time I played with Base was some time ago, and I was appalled at the features (or lack thereof), being a former Access developer. TFA makes me want to play with the new version, see if it is at least possible to create simple applications with it.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jimicus ( 737525 )

      Macros.... hmmm, bringing viruses in documents to 2009!

    • I'd be happier to see true import/export features in Base. It needs to be dead-simple to import to/from CSV, tab-delimited, .sql files, and MDB files.

      It's still too convoluted to connect to external data sources. There's no easy way to connect to ODBC or MDB tables without creating a "registered" data connection. Often, I'm not interested in a semi-permanent "registered" data source. I want something quick and easy for a one-time import, not something that I'll have to go delete later.

  • Two things (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Psychotria ( 953670 ) on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @04:31AM (#26543277)

    Two things I really want fixed before I consider Open Office full-time (and I don't know if 3.1 does so I apologise if they've already been addressed) are: a) font rendering; and b) performance.

    Now, the font rendering issue might seem a bit of a nitpick, but if I have to spend over 9 hours a day looking at the thing I want the fonts to look nice. MS-Office is not perfect. But I find it better than Open Office. My experience with Open Office has been horribly rendered fonts that can be ignored if I were just typing a page or two but I need to be comfortable if I am using it day-in-day-out. If I make adjustments to freetype (or whatever the normal OS renderer is) then I want Open Office to render it the same. It needs to render fonts exactly the same as the OS in general.

    The performance issue is, for me, less of an issue. BUT it cannot feel 'sluggish'. If I am typing I want my applications to be responsive. Start-up time is less of an issue that I can ignore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Hucko ( 998827 )

      Heh, I've started a grunt it job for the education department so I thought I should get to know Windows better. Installed a dual boot and my diggety damn linux looks better. I have tried everything to get Windows to not look like it has been scraped with a course grain sandpaper. No luck 6 months later I have barely looked at it because it just doesn't work right.

  • Office 2007 made me feel stupid! I couldn't find the button to bold something. It's openoffice at home and 2003 at work from here on until the end of time!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by MosesJones ( 55544 )

      Office 2007 made me feel stupid! I couldn't find the button to bold something.

      Seriously? I mean I'm not a big fan of the Ribbon but if you couldn't find the bold bit, Ctrl-B or its there on the HOME tab, then its not Office 2007 making you feel stupid. Now picture alignment and others can take getting used to but bold?

      Anyway for those of us that like Emacs Office 2007 hasn't gone far enough in hiding stuff, I want obscure macros and at least six key control sequences.

      Complaining about the complexity of Wo

      • Re:It's better because it doesn't have a ribbon (Score:4, Insightful)

        by dargaud ( 518470 ) <slashdot2@@@gdargaud...net> on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @07:46AM (#26544301) Homepage
        Office2007 came with my work PC. After 2 days trying to get used to buttons moving to different spots between each different ribbon mode, I was going crazy and uninstalled that shit for Open Office. At least it does the job in a consistent way.

        Office 2007 reminds me of all the DVD player softwares that come with PCs: they always try to make them look like a remote control. Except you can't tell what the button symbols are. Or even if it's a button or just a decoration. They uniformly suck. But keep it simple as in Media Player Classic, and you have great software.

      • ..the new ribbon does indeed SUCK big time.

        It's too big, confusingly laid out, and it doesn't include basic file operations like new/save/save_as or print/preview, and doesn't seem to support customization (or at least I can't figure out how to do it, so gave up after 10 minutes). And where the hell has the old 'Tools/Options' disappeared to ?

        I'm sure the OP and I share the frustrations of millions of Office users who suddenly found their productivity reduced by Office 2007 (when compared to previous ver

    • I hate to break it to you. You must BE stupid if you couldn't find the Bold button in Office 2007. Especially considering it's... practically in the exact same place and uses the exact same icon..

      And just in case you still can't find it. I'll give you a hint. It's inside the box labeled "Font". And it looks like a Bolded "B".

      Also if you highlight text... A floater comes up and hovers the bold icon UNDER THE POINTER! All you have to do is highlight. Move pointer up 3 pixels. Click. Bold!

      It's a mirac

  • I use OO.org at home and have been doing that since the 1.2 times. OK, it's still slow as molasses and the font rendering is still very bad, but I can live with these issues.

    However, typing a lot with 8859-2 characters, I need the ability to assign certain characters to key combinations. MSOffice had this ability since at least ver. 97, why OO.org is still missing it?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by dargaud ( 518470 )

      I need the ability to assign certain characters to key combinations

      You can do that with an external tool like autohotkey [autohotkey.com]. Advantage: it works in any window.

  • 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",

  • And I don't just want margin notes. I want that old WP idea back that you can have 'special characters' inside your text to anchor things on. I mean, it already exists essentially in OOo, in the form of page breaks. But there the concepts ends, somehow. Why can't I have special anchors in the text (to be made visible in a certain mode, for example by using coloured dots) to hang things on, like, for example, margin notes ? Or images ? It would make put an end to page breaks being a special case, and i

    • And the other thing I want (aside from the pony) is for fonts to (optionally) travel with documents.

      That's for the font file's copyright and design patent owner to decide, not you. A TrueType font's OS/2 chunk contains flags to forbid all embedding or to forbid embedding in editable documents. Software that edits these flags has drawn copyright threats from type foundries [cmu.edu]. I would imagine that the fact that so few font files are set to allow embedding discourages software developers from even implementing embedding. Of course, if you use only Free fonts [wordpress.com] such as the DejaVu series, you can work around lack

  • What about fixing the MacOS X port? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lord Satri ( 609291 ) <alexandrelerouxNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Wednesday January 21, 2009 @08:32AM (#26544559) Homepage Journal

    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! :-)

    • I too was quite happy with the OS X port until I had to type something longer than a page. Then I found out it will crash if you cut a loud fart or look at it funny. Now it's pretty much useless to me.

  • This is, by far, the most troublesome issue we've had with OOo 3.

    We've taken a large number of new computers, removed the trial of Office 2007, and installed OOo 3. Ever since, I've been handling hundreds of support tickets over the most basic of options: file associations.

    OOo 3 removed the ability for OOo to take over document associations upon installation. It doesn't even give you choice of whether you want to or not, it just refuses to do it. You can't do an install Repair and re-associate; you have

  • Why the hell is OO.o still missing support for SVG? Users have been bitching about this for years, literally. It was a Summer of Code project in 2007 and still, nothing.

    Believe it or not, people actually tell me that they don't want OO.o because it doesn't have clip art. Too bad that there thousands [openclipart.org] of free clip art images out there but OO.o is too SVG-retarded to use them.

    • Date format (Score:3, Interesting)

      by metamatic ( 202216 )

      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

  • after years of users asking for an intrinsic outline mode, OO still doesn't have one?

    Now before somebody jumps in with the suggestion of using Navigator, I'm aware this feature exists and while it is useful, it isn't even close to a substitute, even for an extrinsic outliner. Even laying aside the fact you can't collapse and expand paragraphs, you can't compose in the Navigator. You can only reorganize what is already there.

    It's like OO has a waterfall model for document construction, where you generate

  • Themes/Skinning. The sooner I can *easily* reskin OpenOffice, the quicker I can drive adoption by skinning it to look very similar to what my users are already accustomed to seeing, *wink* *wink*.

  • I like OO.o except except it doesn't have $RANDOM feature ..

    DEF $RANDOM = go to www.oooforum.org/some issue ....

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