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."

External references

[Enderandrew]

First off, congrats on getting the release out the door. I do appreciate the project.

That being said, in 3.0, supposedly there was support in Calc to external references (to values in other documents). In 3.1, it was supposedly fixed. It still didn't work.

I'm curious to see if it finally works in 3.2. And for those who don't know, you should check out Novell's fork/non-standard builds over at go-oo.org. Many Linux distros use these builds automatically, but if you're on Windows, that is the version I'd grab. They have several nice improvements over the upstream version.

Re:Self Update Broken

[baka_toroi]

Maybe they only pushed the update to the main website, not the self-update servers.

Bibtxt

[Anonymous Coward]

Bibtxt is the biggest item to get OpenOffice working.

If I can import and export Bibtxt files Bibliography files and use Templates for writing styles.

That is I can write in APA then tell OpenOffice to reformat for IEEE. Though it can be done with Tex this is the killer feature people would like in Academia. With enough people using it for this feature then many people would ask for it in their business.
 

Re:improved compatibility with open standard

[denis-The-menace]

So the question is: Does OpenOffice support
  -the bought and approved ISO standard OOXML
Or
  -The OOXML that MS' own Office programs create?

My guess is the latter since nothing supports the first.

Confession time

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Although I hated Clippy with a great passion, I liked the professor office helper. If Microsoft had chosen the professor, I don't think they would have gotten the vitriol they did. Clippy was a smug jackass. Not a helpful, humble character like the professor. He looked like Einstein, so he seemed to be smart, but he was also old which made him seem like a kind grandparent. I'm slightly ashamed to admit that he did teach me some things about word, I didn't already know.

Re:ok?

[natehoy]

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.

Re:Unable to install

[jridley]

Did you still have the installation files on your hard drive that the 3.0.0 install dropped on your desktop? I removed mine.
I actually went out and found a copy of 3.0.0 on a shareware site, and put the files there. 3.0.0 still refuses to uninstall. 3.2.0 says 3.0.0 has to be uninstalled first. The 3.0.0 installer refuses to uninstall 3.0.0 - it says 3.0.0 is not installed, even though I can go to the start menu and start up OO apps, and they are version 3.0.0.

I think there are some holes in their installation process. I usually don't have trouble either, but when I do, they're usually a huge pain in the butt to fix. That's a pretty typical statement for Windows, actually.

PHP support?

[Alworx]

Mmm... no... not this time... :-(

Am I the only one who is waiting for some kind of DOM to create docs via PHP? Possibly with updated fresh modules?

Re:Hooray!

[Toonol]

I've written several 100+ page, extensively formatted documents, and only found one bug. It's minor, and I can work around it, but it's easily replicable.

If I create a paragraph style with a border, and change the line spacing from default, the bottom border is often rendered THROUGH the last line of text when the paragraph crosses between two pages (or two columns). If I make an edit in the paragraph, it will fix itself... but be incorrect again the next time it's loaded.

I suppose I should file a bug report, eh?

I moved to Open Office from Word because the document became an unmaintainable mess in word. Styles broke, page numbers broke... I simply couldn't have done it properly.

Standard compliance

[clemenstimpler]

The decisive advantage of open formats should be that you can work around any limitations posed by an application. Moreover, every OO-user can send you a pdf preserving all essential properties of the document. I'm curious why none of these options seems to help you. And, by the way, what is an "epub-company"? A company publishing ebooks in epub format, or rather a company pursuing electronic publishing?