OpenOffice 3.2 Released 260
harmonise writes "Version 3.2 of the OpenOffice.org office suite is now available. This marks the tenth anniversary year of the office suite, with over three hundred million downloads recorded in total. The new features include faster start up times; improved compatibility with open standard (ODF) and proprietary file formats; improvements to all components, particularly the Calc spreadsheet, with over a dozen new or enhanced features; and the Chart module (usable throughout OpenOffice.org) has had a usability makeover as well as offering new chart types."
Nothing That New or Innovative... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Hooray! (Score:2, Informative)
Have you filed bug reports regarding these problems, including example documents when possible?
"over three hundred million downloads" (Score:4, Informative)
Not a very useful metric, considering how on the most popular desktop OS OpenOffice requires downloading of installation package to upgrade. Yes, OSes with package management and OOo included, together with using the same download for installations and/or upgrades on several machines, swing the usage upwards; but I doubt it's anywhere enough to compensate.
Re:will it still hijack my mac (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nothing That New or Innovative... (Score:3, Informative)
"Just faster"? It isn't just faster. It's so much faster that it's like a whole new program. Great job, guys. I wish we'd see this more often: The same program, just a lot better.
Re:bigger tables anyone? (Score:5, Informative)
Still only 256 columns per sheet? I frequently need a lot more than that.
1024, actually, since version 3.0.
Re:improved compatibility with open standard (Score:1, Informative)
There is no other open standard in the same category as ODF. Mentioning it by name still helps those who only know the proprietary DOC format.
Re:Hooray! (Score:3, Informative)
It did two disagreeable things to me - firstly, attempting to stretch or move an image would make it distort the image so you couldn't see what it was doing, and secondly, it was unable to save documents correctly.
I was using it to make a 4-page document for a CD booklet with the lyrics etc in a bunch of frames. When the document was reloaded, it had reduced to 3 pages and splattered the frames everywhere, seemingly at random.
The primary solution to these problems at the moment seems to be uninstalling the broken Canonical version and installing the official OOo binaries instead.
Re:Hooray! (Score:5, Informative)
We've been using OO for about 5 years, I've never had a single person in our office ever have a problem with anything I could call a bug.
Re:Nothing That New or Innovative... (Score:5, Informative)
Right on the heels of MS 2010 beta. Doesn't appear to be much new things, it's just faster. Still. Openoffice is the best office suite out there in my opinion.
Native OpenType Postcript fonts alone makes it finally worth exploring Writer.
bibtex (Score:3, Informative)
think he means bibtex (a LaTeX bibliography tool/format)
Fixes my "calc" bug from 3.1.1 (Score:5, Informative)
Works fine with 3.2.0 -- the bug is gone.
FIXED:External references (Score:5, Informative)
Did not work for me in any of the 3.1.1's (Mandriva or direct download, 32- or 64-bit). Had to revert to Mandriva's 3.0.1.
Just checked, and works for me in 32-bit direct download of 3.2.0.
Re:Bibtxt (Score:3, Informative)
Have you looked at Zotero [zotero.org]? It may do what you want -- I think it does import and export Bibtex, but if what you want to do is manage citations and bibliographies, it may do what you need without any importing or exporting. You can insert citations into your doc and then change your mind about the formatting en masse. Ditto the bibliography.
This requires both the Zotero Firefox plugin and the Zotero OpenOffice plugin. Dunno if it is compatible with 3.2.
Re:Is it worth it? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Nothing That New or Innovative... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Just Faster??? I wish I was just Richer!!! (Score:4, Informative)
In my vanilla install of OpenOffice 3.1, if I select several columns and then right click on one of the selected headers, "Insert Columns" (with an 's') is one of the options on the context menu.
This is the *first* thing I tried after I decided to see if you were missing something obvious.
Re:Unable to install (Score:4, Informative)
It's the default location; specifically "C:\Users\\Desktop\OpenOffice.org 3.2 (en-US) Installation Files\" (Win 7) - though I've never had any problems upgrading after deleting the install files because Windows should cache any required MSI files in C:\Windows\Installer\.
Though I still don't understand why MSI-installed apps need the original MSI to uninstall or change them - I thought Microsoft had abandoned that stupid behaviour when they stopped requiring you to have the Office install CD to uninstall Office 97. I've seen a few machines where a deleted or corrupt .NET MSI cache has made it impossible to upgrade, repair or remove said framework(s).
Go-oo (Score:2, Informative)
OO's startup times in Windows XP used to bug the crap out of me. Doubleclick on a spreadsheet, and it might be a minute or so, sometimes more, before you were off to the races. This was on a decent Athlon64 2 GHz with 1GB RAM, not exactly a slouch of a machine.
Then I tried it on my old Athlon 1.3Ghz with 384MB RAM in Linux Mint, and it started in about 10 seconds.
On my new beast (Athlon II 3.0GHz, 4GB RAM, Linux Mint) OpenOffice starts in just a few seconds.
I was utterly astonished at the speed difference of OO between Windows and Linux, and it makes perfect sense to me why Windows users don't like it as much - it's a dog. I hope they've improved its Windows performance in 3.2, for the sake of those using it on Windows.
That's because many Linux distros use the much speedier Go-OO fork. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo [wikipedia.org]
"The OpenOffice.org included with many popular Linux distributions such as Debian, Mandriva, openSUSE, Gentoo[5] and Ubuntu[6] uses some of Go-oo patches."