Sneak Preview of New OpenOffice 3.2 377
omlx writes 'The last developer milestone (DEV300m60) of OpenOffice.org has been released. The next version of OpenOffice.org 3.2 has more than 42 features and 167 enhancements . The final version is expected to be available at the end of November 2009. Many companies have contributed to this version, like RedHat, RedFlag and IBM, making OpenOffice more stable and useful. I couldn't stop myself from seeing new features and enjoying them. So I downloaded the DEV300m60 version. After playing with it for many days I could say that OpenOffice developers have done very good work in it. Well done!"
WIll this be backported? (Score:3, Insightful)
Will this be backported to Ubuntu 9.04? I'd like to upgrade to OOo 3.2 because there are some features that I need, but I don't want to have to update my entire operating system and my other applications. Compiling OOo myself is beyond my capabilities.
Re:WIll this be backported? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Faster... (Score:2, Insightful)
But to be fair, it's somewhat similar issue with Firefox too. I do understand that its because of XUL:
XML User Interface Language, is an XML user interface markup language (developed by the Mozilla project) which operates in Mozilla cross-platform applications such as Firefox and Flock. The Mozilla Gecko layout engine provides an implementation of XUL used in the Firefox Browser.[1]
XUL relies on multiple existing web standards and technologies, including CSS, JavaScript, and DOM. Such reliance makes XUL relatively easy to learn for people with a background in web-programming and design.
And that it's easier to develop UI elements with it, but you lose a lot of speed and UI efficiency along the way. Anyone who has compared Opera and Firefox in UI responsiveness know this.
Open Source software usually have the mentality of making everything as open as possible and easy to modify, but it brings these issues then too. People should find some middle road to this; have it still possible, but god hell make it work faster. Maybe compiling it to faster format (bytecode versus xml?), or optimizing the apps could do the work. But something needs to be done.
Re:Pass minimum (Score:5, Insightful)
5 characters isn't much to bruteforce anyway.
I suspect they eliminated a password length requirement because the security of the password is really up to the needs and desires of the user who set that password. If I have a password length of 5, then someone who wants a trivial password to keep casual lookie-loos out is going to choose 12345 anyway.
("Amazing! That's the same as the combination on my suitcase!")
Allow me to choose one character minimum and I'll choose one character and use it. No real loss in security, and since I'm choosing the level of security it's my decision to make. I can't sue OO for "lack of security" because OO is simply allowing me to choose how secure I want my stuff.
Someone who wants to protect (as in really protect) their document is going to choose a 50-character password with a mix of uppers, lowers, numbers, and scrunchy special characters. Then it'll be so secure, even the original author can't open it.
Re:Faster... (Score:5, Insightful)
Please concentrate on fixing the problems with fonts/formatting!
Re:Faster... (Score:5, Insightful)
I evaluated 3.1 for use in my company for a department of about 100 people (would have saved $20,000 per year in licensing). The main problem was not speed but compatibility!
It is as compatible as different versions of MS Office... You are only totally compatible when everyone is running the same version of the same program.
Re:Faster... (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenOffice has yet to reach that threshold.
Word processing programs all have wrong UI design (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenOffice, like Word and everything else I can think of, gets
one fundamental thing wrong in the user interface design.
Documents are 8 1/2" wide x 11" tall with say 6.5" x 9" tall
useable writing area.
Screens are not very tall, but quite wide these days, on average.
Therefore, all (yes, ALL!) of the available vertical space in the application
window should be devoted to displaying the document.
There is plenty of room for controls to the side, or perhaps sliding down
from the top on demand. A one-line control bar at the top might be
justified for inherently horizontal things like font and style names, but
that's it.
As it is, we are editing our documents through the letter slot in the door.
Maybe that will be version 4.0
Re:Wow, amazing improvement. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Faster... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Word processing programs all have wrong UI desi (Score:4, Insightful)
I would agree with you, except that your range of motion tends to be greater left to right than it is forward and back. That means that it's easier to move your mouse along horizontal controls.
Rotating your screen solves the problem much better. You maintain the horizontal mouse-friendly controls and get more vertical viewing area.
Re:MS Office isn't very compatible, either (Score:5, Insightful)
An example I wrote about a few months ago:
Your example is wrong. It's *expected behaviour* that documents printed on different computer+printer combinations will look different. What's important - and what Word is designed to do - is make the hard output look like the screen. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get, not What You See Is What They Get.
I think it just goes to show: if you have a document that absolutely must preserve formatting, send it as a PDF.
Exactly. If you want something that is guaranteed to look identical on someone else's screen (and printer) as it does on yours, then you want a program that's designed to do that - and Word is not.
Re:Why no online version of OpenOffice? (Score:4, Insightful)
the computational and storage requirements for editing and storing documents locally are trivial. Even the added cost of an SVN repo for off-site backup and sharing is trivial.
Online document editing can never be as fast and responsive as local editing.
There are severe issues with reliability, availability, security and accountability.
"The Cloud" is imbued with magical fairy dust and can solve all your problems, even the ones you didn't have. You just have to trust that the internet is a nice, safe place to keep all your important and private data.
Re:Faster... (Score:5, Insightful)
I wrote my resume in Word 97. I needed to update it recently and found that it did not look correct at all in Office 2008. I was forced to use open office. After saving it as Office XP in open office it opened in Office 2008 just fine.
totally compatible only when... (Score:3, Insightful)
That's one of the things wrong with MS Office.
seen the same way as they composed it (Score:3, Insightful)
The only way that would happen if viewed in the exact same version of msOffice using the exact same printer installed. Using a different printer and the displayed layout gets mangled.
Re:Wow, amazing improvement. (Score:3, Insightful)
The thing is, OK translates as "OK" into pretty much every language I know of.
"Accept", "encrypt", "agree" and any other suitable verb I can think of do not.
But - what do you suggest they should use instead? And considering that the "OK" button is quite common if not omnipresent in Windows, I take it you doubt that anyone has ever looked into any of Windows' issues.
Another possibility is that the people working on the GUI don't consider themselves suitable or knowledgeable enough to work on the more deep rooted things, and figured they'd pitch in where they couldn't do much harm. Is that really such a bad thing?
Re:Word processing programs all have wrong UI desi (Score:3, Insightful)
That is interesting, but I would suggest that, if they do that, that they find a way to work the icons/ribbon such that it can work either way. Text documents are typically done in portrait orientation, but spreadsheets are often done via landscape orientation. If the UI adjusted to the orientation, that would be cool (but time consuming for some developers, I'm sure)
Re:Faster... (Score:3, Insightful)
MS office isn't compatible with _ITSELF_ on the formating issue.
problem with MS office is, it relies on information from the printer driver to format documents. test it this way, install 2 printers on your system, say one HP the other a xerox, set the default printer to HP, format your documents on ms word, note where page breaks are, save the doccument and exit office.
change the default printer to xerox, open your document again. check the page breaks, margins, etc.
are they different ? yes ? congratulations, you'll have to reformat everything.
i got bitten in the ass several times before by this annoying "feature". then i learned to print everything as PDF first when there was the possibility of printing in anything other than my own printer.
Re:MS Office isn't very compatible, either (Score:5, Insightful)
Your example is wrong. It's *expected behaviour* that documents printed on different computer+printer combinations will look different. What's important - and what Word is designed to do - is make the hard output look like the screen. WYSIWYG means What You See Is What You Get, not What You See Is What They Get.
A large part of this is that as part of the printing API, Windows allows applications to find out what printers are capable of. Word in particular takes full advantage of this, and renders documents according to what the default printer can do.
The Unix way, OTOH, expects the application to produce Postscript and it's the driver/printers' problem to render this appropriately on the page. Which, arguably, is the whole damn point of a printer driver
Re:Wow, amazing improvement. (Score:4, Insightful)
Any dialog box that has 'OK' instead of a meaningful verb as a button title is an automatic usability fail
No, it's perfectly valid in many dialogs, particularly confirmation dialogs and warning dialogs. "Warning: This operation can not be undone. [OK][Cancel]" is perfectly fine. "Continue" is too weak, sounds like an info screen. "Agree" or "Accept" sounds like you actually have a choice or that you're positively agreeing with it which you don't. "Ok" is intentionally netural, like "objection noted, but I'm still going forward with this". Granted, OK could have been used a lot less compared to useful verbs like "Save", "Connect", "Create" and so on but it's not that useless.
Countries using imperial measures vs metric! (Score:3, Insightful)
Back to the old "countries using Imperial measures vs. customs using metric" :-)
Another poster has noted Open Offices identifies 8 American countries using Imperial, rest of world (190 or so countries) using metric. Get with the 21st century, Americans! (and Burmese and Liberians as well I believe).
: -)
This morning I was printing a Powerpoint slide in A3 for a friend (long story) and the default screen asked me if I wanted it 16 1/4 inches by 7 1/2 furlongs or something. Millimetres please, I can't think in inches, I am 43 and I got taught mm and cm and metres at school from when I was 5 back in 1971.... (UK). Nobody my age or younger has been taught to measure in Imperial measures in UK schools. A lot of us know how to use them informally because that helps us deal with old folks, but it's not what we were formally taught.
Re:Word processing programs all have wrong UI desi (Score:2, Insightful)
Screens are not very tall, but quite wide these days, on average.
Says the guy who puts line breaks into his post every 80 characters.
Is OOBase finally useful? (Score:4, Insightful)
- import/export data to CSV files?
- The ability to query remote DBs and write the data into a local table?
- Done away with the compressed zip format that makes working with a few dozen/hundred MB of data impossible?
(I swear that nobody in the Open Office project truly understands Microsoft Access' strong points and why it is so hard to replace. MSAccess is a great glue program, allowing you to easily move data sets around, deal with ad-hoc databases, quickly look at a table, copy/paste to/from a spreadsheet.)
Re:Word processing programs all have wrong UI desi (Score:1, Insightful)
Wide screens allow two tall applications side-by-side. Alternatively, they allow two letter-sized pages side-by-side (an option in OpenOffice).
Re:Faster... (Score:2, Insightful)
I have about 20 computers at my job. Every single one of them has OpenOffice installed. It has cost the company nothing to get it. I don't have to keep records about which computer has which license (I do that for Windows, AutoCad etc.). When I change the hardware, I simply reinstall OpenOffice. I don't have to look for S/N and activation keys and so. When a new version comes I simply install it. No conferences to decide if we should pay the money to upgrade. We use the savings in money for other needs (hardware) and the savings in time to do real work.
We use open office to write technical documents. The equations do not translate well to Word, but If we want to send a document to someone else, we save it as pdf. Or we send a copy of OpenOffice along with the document (the usual response is surprise that it works).
But, please, continue using MS-Office. It surely makes us more competitive.
Re:Faster... (Score:3, Insightful)
You should always send your reumes as pdf files unless they specifically ask for it in another format. Then you can be sure it will look the same on their screen as on yours and it looks more professional anyway.
Re:Word processing programs all have wrong UI desi (Score:4, Insightful)
Probably due to having a computer background. The ideal in typography is around 70, but I believe computer terminals standardized on 80 characters per line to account for shell prompts and such, so its common for us computer guys to use 80 characters instead of the sightly more legible 70.
Ever had to read a piece of text with 150+ characters per line? "painful" doesn't even begin to describe it. That's one of the biggest reasons I push for LaTeX over MSOffice or OpenOffice: it may not do as well as a professional typesetter, but it's considerably better than what 99% of people do 99% of the time using a modern office suite.
Re:MS Office isn't very compatible, either (Score:3, Insightful)
Whoa, it is really sad that it's now accepted behavior for a word processing document to look vastly different (note my example: wrapping text around a table, page breaks, etc.) depending on the printer Windows was using.
It was _always_ expected behaviour, dating back to (at least) the days of Wordperfect. Indeed, it was even more prevalent back then when things like laser printers with essentially 100% printable area were high-end luxuries, rather than consumer commodities.
I might understand if the text were rendered a little different due to fonts (installed on the printer) being slightly different from the fonts Windows is using. But I do not accept that text flowing around a table should be any different on one computer+printer vs another computer+printer. If that's really how Windows works, I'm even less of a fan.
How else do you deal with different printable areas, margins and page sizes ?
Word processors are not typesetting tools. If you want something to look identical on one computer as it does on another, then pick a tool that is designed to do so. Word Processors are not - they are designed to turn text on the screen to text on paper.
And yet, Microsoft makes a big deal that if you run Microsoft Office, you will be able to share your documents with others running Office.
And you can. Sharing documents in no way implies identical output on dissimilar systems.
And yet, if you cannot guarantee that your document on a Mac (in my example, at least one person printed their copy of the doc on a Mac) will look the same as on Windows, how is that seamless???
Because the alternatives (cropping bits of the document, disproportionately rescaling, running text off the side of the page) are dramatically *less* seamless.
I think the Unix method makes more sense.
The UNIX method is making poor assumptions and will produce worse (if not outright broken) results, without printers that have identical (or very similar) capabilities.
Once again, a Word Processor is not a tool for making a document look identical on different computers with different output capabilities. If you are trying to do that, you are using the wrong tool for the job.