OpenOffice 3.2 Released

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."

Re:improved compatibility with open standard

[dwiget001]

OOXML, despite having "Open" in it's name and despite the rigged voting process in the ISO is *hardly* a standard for anything.

Even Microsoft, whose baby it is, doesn't support it.

Re:Nothing That New or Innovative...

[doti]

A minor (3.x) release is not meant to be innovative. That's for a major release (4.0).

Re:will it still hijack my mac

[Anonymous Coward]

You should be able to change that setting in OS X, not Open Office.

Re:Nothing That New or Innovative...

[hey!]

Once I bought my father in law a really, really nice hammer. There wasn't made of titanium or anything like that; it didn't have any kind of electronic controls or clever mechanical gizmos to help you swing it straight. It wasn't innovative. It was just a really, really well made hammer.

He was pleased with it, even though the hammer he already owned was in approximate terms very similar to the one I gave him. In precise terms it wasn't anywhere near as nice.

Just Faster??? I wish I was just Richer!!!

[viraltus]

Word processors cannot be improving in terms of features forever and, anyway, people only use a small percentage of those, so I think "just" faster is "just" right.

Re:NO shirt, NO shoes, NO tabs: no service!

[Anonymous Coward]

Another downside of its mutant GUI toolkit is that it doesn't work with gnome-globalmenu and its performance sucks. They need to rewrite the entire gui in SOME kind of semi-native platform toolkit.

Heck, even wxWidgets. Audacity works great with gnome global menu. Until they do that, I use gedit for most stuff, Abiword and Gnumeric whenever I can, and OpenOffice only when I absolutely have to.

Re:Just Faster??? I wish I was just Richer!!!

[CastrTroy]

I don't think I've used any new features for a word processor since WordPerfect 5.1. That had just about everything I needed. For 99.9999% of the population, OpenOffice is more than enough. I think that MS will have a hard time maintaining market share in the next 30 years on the desktop market. Software is just becoming too much of a commodity. Easily replaced by free alternatives. Obviously the change isn't going to happen overnight, but over the long term, there's no way that MS can keep on charging for upgrades to software when software with the same features can be had for free.

Re:Mind Boggling That The UI Widgets Suck So Much

[sarhjinian]

IBM's Lotus Symphony is based on the same code and has had that effort put into the UI. It's based on much older code, though, and suffers for it.

I would agree that OOo does tend to look a bit dated and lacking in the polish you see in MSO2003.

Re:Bibtxt

[denis-The-menace]

Maybe you should create a feature request for it and get some of you friends in Academia to vote for it.

Hint: I did a search for Bibtxt in Issues and the whole OO site and found no mention of this file format.

Re:Confession time

[CastrTroy]

Nobody is as bad as the Windows XP Search dog. Why would I want a dog helping me find files. This whole idea of little characters popping up to help me is kind of demeaning, but having a dog help me is just terrible. I think they should really try to have a more professional image. There should be no cartoon characters popping up, especially on the XP Professional version. If it was Windows XP Kids edition I could understand, but I think it just makes the product look like a joke.

Re:Unable to install

[Rockoon]

The fact that you have had this problem more than once tells me that you are a willy-nilly file deleter, and it is likely that you will have the same sort of problems with other operating systems if you continue to be a willy-nilly file deleter.

I dont know why it dropped files essential to uninstallation on your desktop, and its hard to believe that the installer was coded specifically to do that. Did you tell it to install directly to your desktop? If so, don't do that. Really.

Just say'n.

Re:Nothing That New or Innovative...

[doti]

"not meant to be" != "never"

Re:Hooray!

[TheRaven64]

Nonsense. Even with proprietary software developers can only fix bugs that they know about. If you don't report a bug, then you have no business complaining that it isn't fixed. I've fixed bugs in code that have been there for years, but not fixed because they don't impact the developers' use of the system. When someone encounters them and provides a test case, I can fix them. When I never see them, I can't. Even if the developers are paid, they're not omniscient.

Re:Nothing That New or Innovative...

[HiThere]

I think you're probably right ... about appearing to be a troll, but not actually being one. I think you're really expressing what you actually believe. I may believe you're being silly, but you obviously don't believe that.

Personally, I *prefer* Open Office to any version of MSWord I've used since MSWord 5.2a for the Mac. Now that *was* a better word processor. It allowed you to embed markup in the text and hand edit it until it did what you want. (Word Perfect also had that extremely important feature.) It was missing a lot of bells and whistles that have been added since, but I rarely use most of those bells and whistles. When I want a spreadsheet, I want a spreadsheet, when I want a word processor, I want a word processor. But these are MY preferences.

Note that you didn't tell us what your preferences were, or why you didn't like OpenOffice. This is a part of what makes your post appear a troll. Just about everything you said is a generality with no substance. Could be true, could be false. Without substance there's no way to tell.

I believe that you are serious, but that *IS* giving you the benefit of the doubt. (You did mention speed, but I don't know what you're comparing it against on what system. So it's without substance. And besides, one of the announced benefits of this upgrade is that it's faster, so that *IS* one of the things that they're working on.)

Re:Nothing That New or Innovative...

[Anonymous Coward]

Better than one from Ballmer!