Apache OpenOffice 4.0 Released With Major New Features 238
An anonymous reader writes "Still the most popular open source office suite, Apache OpenOffice 4 has been released, with many new enhancements and a new sidebar, based on IBM Symphony's implementation but with many improvements. The code still has comments in German but as long as real new features keep coming and can be shared with other office suites no one is complaining." The sidebar mentioned brings frequently used controls down and beside the actual area of a word-processing doc, say, which makes some sense given how wide many displays have become. This release comes with some major improvements to graphics handling, too; anti-aliasing makes for smoother bitmaps. In conjunction with this release, SourceForge (also under the Slashdot Media umbrella) has announced the launch of an extensions collection for OO. Extensions mean that Open Office can gain capabilities from outside contributors, rather than being wrapped up in large, all-or-nothing updates. You can download the latest version of Apache OpenOffice here.
IBM Open Source (Score:2, Insightful)
For IBM, Open Source == Out Sourcing.
Cheaper than employing programmers in faraway places is to get them to volunteer for free to maintain their code.
Not new really... They have been doing that for years.
Re:IBM Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
I can't let bullshit like that stand.
IBM specifically dedicates a group of developers to every project they open source, as far as I can tell.
For OpenOffice, this is even mentioned in the Wikipedia article [wikipedia.org]:
And yes, I checked the references. The statement is correct.
You are an asshole, for lying like that. BOOO!
Re: (Score:3)
The OP is correct and your two positions are not contradictory.
German code comments (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a Dutchman, my native language is dutch, and I use english for all comments because using my native language seems to screw with the industry-standard english terminology in programming.
Anybody here who comments his/her code in his native language? How do you deal with the jargon and what are the benefits of using your native language, apart from being able to type TL;DR-size comments with ease?
Re:German code comments (Score:5, Funny)
I'm a Dutchman, my native language is dutch, and I use english for all comments because using my native language seems to screw with the industry-standard english terminology in programming.
It also makes your programs faster. This is one of the reasons why OpenOffice is so slow - source [slashdot.org]. It's inexcusable that they haven't translated the comments yet.
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Re:German code comments (Score:5, Funny)
You have never experienced OpenOffice until you have used it in the original Klingon!
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Re:German code comments (Score:5, Insightful)
My team code (variables, class and method names) and comment in portuguese. I found that not many programmers down here really know english, so our first attempts with english commentary yielded crappy, useless, unreadable comments. Even comments in our native language sometimes can be confusing, so I think that adding a extra layer of noise wouldn't do it.
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That's fine, so long as you're writing software where the code won't be shared outside of your company. If you're writing for a US based company or likely to sell access to the code, you'll find it easier if its all on a common language.
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7 years ago, when the project started, we were focusing on Latin America community (spanish speakers can read portuguese and vice versa), so I decided to code in portuguese. Only a few people from Brasil decided to contribute to the project since then, so I guess the language choice actually helped those contributors.
Not that this choice doesn't look strange; we code in CakePHP, which is based on RoR, that specify that model names are plural, table names are singular, or whatever. We turn the pluralization
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Hmm, I will add 1 more rule- if you're posting code on a site like stackoverflow, translating to english is helpful. I don't refuse to help code in foreign languages, but I find it difficult to understand large blocks of it and will likely give up quicker. English is best there due to it being the most common language.
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Romanian here. Everyone worth their salt here writes code, comments and docs in English. I have my own pet project [sparkchess.com] where I'm basically the only one who ever needs to see the code, yet everything is in English. Considering that the programming language has English keywords (if, while, class, etc) and the text strings are in English too, it's simpler for me to keep everything consistent rather than to make any mental switch.
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I used to comment my code in my native language up to maybe early high school. I did it subsequently on a project or two that were meant to be maintained by people who mostly didn't speak English. I can't comprehend anyone commenting code in anything but English.
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Anybody here who comments his/her code in his native language?
I do. 100% variable names and comments in my native language. Unless I have concrete plans to share the code with the world, in that case I go for 100% English.
How do you deal with the jargon and what are the benefits of using your native language, apart from being able to type TL;DR-size comments with ease?
It's a big advantage that third-party libraries and my own code use different languages. It means my code and other code stands apart, without any conscious effort needed, which is valuable because what I do with it is so very different: my own code is mallable and subject to refactorings, whereas the names in third-party libraries are fixed externa
Re:German code comments (Score:5, Informative)
Because the original codebase comes from StarOffice, which was developed by a German company (StarDivision).
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Re:German code comments (Score:4, Funny)
That, is true.
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Play Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes a few years ago some who did not like OO.org structure created an alternative which some prefer, and there is an issue with Oracle buying OO.org, but now Apache has it.
So before we start modded up the MS shills who want to promote the OO.org versus Libreoffice battle, remember that OSS is about choice, and MS is about the destruction of choice.
Thanks to all the people who have put work into OO.org. It is very appreciated. I have downloaded the new version and will look at it as I need it.
Re:Play Nice (Score:5, Informative)
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the ponytailed twat
Is that a reference to Larry Ellison?
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It is fairly obvious he is talking about the last CEO of Sun Microsystems i.e. Schwartz. But he is quite clearly wrong as OpenOffice was open-sourced when Scott McNealy was CEO.
Sun did a lot of mistakes. One was not getting into x86 workstations fast enough. The other was not firing the UltraSPARC V and MAJC development teams after they failed so miserably. Instead they gave them even more resources to develop Rock. Duh. Another was pushing OpenSolaris when that boat had clearly sailed away and Linux was fi
Re:Play Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
Nonsense. Nobody ever needed Outlook. And nothing good ever came from Outlook.
Re:Play Nice (Score:5, Insightful)
It freed us from Lotus Notes.
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I like OpenOffice just as much as the next gal or guy, but it never competed with Office. You need something like Outlook before we can even start talking about competing, and then it's just the start of it.
Nonsense. I haven't used any Microsoft office products for years, and it isn't because I haven't been doing word processing, spreadsheeting and presentations. Judging by the download numbers (hundreds of millions) I guess I am not alone.
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While it is not part of either Libre or Open Office, Evolution is a fantastic Outlook stand-in and available on most Linux distributions. On Windows, there is also Thunderbird (with Lightning extension for calendar support)
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remember that 12 years ago Sun gave us a office application that competed well with MS
I'm grateful to Sun for that, I don't give a fuck about Oracle.
And I don't give a fuck about Oracle employees with mod points.
And LibreOffice is already merging improvements (Score:5, Informative)
LibreOffice 4.1 is out later this week and they already imported all the bug fixes from Apache Office. According to https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-1-new-features-and-fixes/ they picked up at least these improvements:
"A very large number of bugs have been fixed at an estimate of around 3000 bugs, of which 400 came from authors with apache.org mail addresses."
and
"Sidebar (Apache OpenOffice/IBM Symphony) with resizeable layout (LibreOffice team)"
I wonder when apache office will merge fully with LibreOffice.
Re:And LibreOffice is already merging improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
It won't. At this point the codebases have incompatible licensing. LibreOffice can continue to pull in code from OpenOffice, but OpenOffice cannot pull back in code from LibreOffice.
As such, LibreOffice will likely continue to have major releases a week after OpenOffice, where all the good stuff from OpenOffice will get pulled in, but none of the good stuff from LibreOffice will be ported to OpenOffice.
Re:And LibreOffice is already merging improvements (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, this is not quite true. There are a good number of contributors who are happy to work with both projects. They don't care about the license bullshit. They contribute equally to both projects. So there is a fair amount of code making it back into AOO from LibreOffice.
Also, some supports of free office software, like the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) which sponsored much of the OOXML improvements in LibreOffice, have put a clause in their contracts that requires the code produced to be made under the Apache License, even when the code is targeted to LibreOffice. So AOO will have access to that work as well.
Of course, these are just small improvements to an overall climate of inefficiency. And the inefficiency goes in both directions. To the extent LO does not contribute patches upstream they are creating a deferred merge expense that will increase over time, each time they try to merge features down from AOO.
Re:And LibreOffice is already merging improvements (Score:4, Insightful)
There might have been a lot of people who were willing to dual-license most of their contributions, but you turned a *lot* of them off with your toxic attitude and the juvenile bullcrap you have been spewing for the last several years on mailing lists and fora. Now, years after flaming potential collaborators enough that they were unwilling to put up with you, you point to a token few dual-licensers as a resounding success.
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I'll take your diversion to ad hominem attacks as a concession that my rebuttal of your claim is valid and you have no actual response.
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What rebuttal of what claim? Do you have me confused with someone else? I made no claims prior to what you're characterizing as an "ad hominem attack."
Ad hominem is only fallacious when it's an irrelevancy. In a discussion of community and contributions, the fact that you have turned many people away from the OpenOffice community with your behavior is acutely relevant.
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You were either attempting to argue against my claim that there were contributions from LibreOffice coming back into Apache OpenOffice, in an ad hominen attack. Or you were merely interjecting irrelevancies. I'm willing to accept that you were merely being irrelevant. In any case you never bothered to substantiate *any* of your claims so I waste no time rebutting them.
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I wonder when LIbreOffice will finally merge back with OpenOffice. Especially considering how much they are just copy/pasting features and bug fixes. I still think the OpenOffice name has a hell of a lot more recognition than LibreOffice, which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue, and is only highlighting how difficult it can be for a business to switch to open source options when questions like "what's the difference between LibreOffice and OpenOffice" can't easily be answered for the people in charge of
Sidebar! (Score:5, Insightful)
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No they don't. (Rather, 16:10 makes good sense, I'm happy with my 16:10 laptop screen, though I might not be as happy if it were 13 inch rather than 17. In either case, cutting off even more vertical space than that, though, doesn't really make sense from a usability standpoint. From a "spend less money because people have no choice but to buy it anyway" perspective it does, but screw them. That's the same reason our home internet connections all suck royal balls.)
Never thought I'd see the day (Score:3)
*Two* open source offerings competing against each other instead of against Microsoft.
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Then you haven't been paying attention.
Applixware (Score:2)
Anyone else remember Applixware? I remember buying a shrink-wrapped copy in CompUSA in their Linux section back in the day.
Sidebar the differentiator - really? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well since they laud the new sidebar so much for better use of widescreen monitors they should love the fact that LibreOffice will have it within a few days...
4.1 [documentfoundation.org] is due in a matter of days which has an improved sidebar [documentfoundation.org] that's resizeable and not just a static part of the screen.
I really question what the point of AOO is at this juncture given that LO is clearly the more active project [ohloh.net] and has two years of code clean up and development over AOO due to the way Oracle let it stagnate for so long.
If you want to try 4.1 now it is on the pre-releases page [libreoffice.org] and it's the final RC there ... ie the same that will be released as final GA in a few days.
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Too bad users use the product and don't gain direct productivity merely from looking at Ohloh stats.
But if they did, the numbers you point at show an interesting story. It shows that the average AOO contributor makes twice the number of commits as the average LO contributor. And the average AOO commit is far more significant, touching twice the number of files as the average LO commit. Net it out and the average AOO contributor is 4x as productive compared to the average LO contributor!
Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? (Score:4, Interesting)
But the stats do paint the picture of the direct benefit to the users...
See all those deleted lines? That's code clean up that is... That means less bugs and easier to maintain and also easier for new people to help with when they get an itch they need to scratch.
Way to twist the statistics...
In a way what you say is absolutely true but then that misses the mark but quite an impressive amount. It's almost to the point I feel a need to call you out on this as being literally true so no one can call you a liar but that truth being represented in such a way as to mask the real situation.
The recent libreoffice blog post [documentfoundation.org] covers the the growth of committers and includes a brief discussion of "the long tail" with a large number of people in the community submitting small fixes here and there because they can and to scratch a small itch... this is not happening on the AOO code base.
To me that shows a healthier development community of in the LO camp.
Put it this way if a project has 100 people each committing to 2 files over a code base and another project which had 2 people committing to 100 files over another fork which would you say was "more productive" and would you equate that with project healthiness?
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> In a way what you say is absolutely true but then that misses the mark but quite an impressive amount. It's almost to the point I feel a need to call you out on this as being literally true so no one can call you a liar but that truth being represented in such a way as to mask the real situation.
Yeah, that was some "interesting" statistics. But it is really easy to refute. In the last 12 months there were 52 developers on the Apache side (note they include people "hacking on the website" and 351 develo
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To me that shows a healthier development community of in the LO camp.
Maybe so, but let's not draw focus away from the biggest problem with LO.
When are they going to give the project a less retarded name?
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It's almost to the point I feel a need to call you out on this as being literally true so no one can call you a liar but that truth being represented in such a way as to mask the real situation.
There are three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics
Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? (Score:4, Informative)
This is nonsense... The sidebar stuff wasn't written by anyone in Apache - it was IBM code from the symphony project/fork donated to Apache that was then merged into AOO and merged (with small improvements like resizing) into LO as well...
As for the not visible bit have a look through the new features and fixes in 4.0 [libreoffice.org] and 4.1 [libreoffice.org].
There's a lot of nice new content with visible useful features such as chart import and export as both ODC and images in calc, presentation mode in Impress, visio import in Draw (that was LO 3.5), huge reduction of java dependencies, refactor how calc views cells internally for much faster performance on large spreadsheets, MS Publisher import, and the list goes on ....
As for letting the code speak for itself ... yes please do and it's obvious which project is currently healthier and better overall.
Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not quite true to say this was just a merge from Symphony. Actually, your statement is entirely false. The core Sidebar was reimplemented in AOO 4.0, by developers at Apache. One of the core goals was to make it a framework that could be used by Extension authors as well.
You can read more details on this in this blog post:
https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/the_sidebar_new_and_improved [apache.org]
And as I've said before, it is regrettable that LibreOffice supporters find it so difficult to graciously accept good code from a good project. No one, absolutely no one, is complaining about you using it. It is under the Apache License, free for LibreOffice or anyone else to use it, now and forever. Although the license says nothing about polite manners, and I never expect to hear even the smallest statement of thanks, I think the larger open source community does find it disturbing that LibreOffice supporters are so eager to take code from AOO while continually insulting it at the same time. Remember, using code from other open source projects does not make you smaller. We all "stand on the shoulders of giants", so try not to piss on them, or upstream in general.
Re:Sidebar the differentiator - really? (Score:5, Insightful)
"No one, absolutely no one, is complaining about you using [AOO source]."
And yet here you are, trolling on Slashdot, badmouthing LO and its supporters at every turn.
LO gives credit where credit is due, on their site and in their documentation, and I have yet to see any LO contributor or TDF member badmouth AOO in any public forum.
And AOO is not "upstream" of LO. LO is an independent project and makes its own decisions regarding the incorporation of contributions from other projects. It is a true fork of the original source code, and does not simply repackage whatever AOO ships.
You did good work with the OOXML standardization coverage a few years ago, but these LO/AOO diatribes are doing a disservice to your reputation.
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I hope you know that you did not address my argument at all but merely attacked me personally.
There was a false assertion that the Sidebar was not done at Apache. I rebutted that. I then remarked that LibreOffice *supporters* seem to have difficulty graciously accepting the fact that the most notable feature of LO 4.1 is coming from Apache. You responded by saying that you have never seem a TDF member saying anything bad about AOO. That is irrelevant, since that was not my claim. And it is also untrue
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I don't think it is juvenile at all to point out that comparisons of committer counts is meaningless where the contents of the commits, in terms of how many files are changed, varies by a factor of 4 between the projects. The difference in VCS used as well as what kinds of contributions are measured by Ohloh (and are not measured) makes any naive comparison hugely problematic. In fact I'd say it is intellectual dishonest to perpetuate these kinds of apples to oranges comparisons. On the other hand, if yo
Re:LAWL @ "Letting the code speak for them" (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not a Libreoffice developer, just a reader of these fora and a former OpenOffice user who is sick and tired of reading your bull. (I originally left OO because your license purge removed features I needed; so much for your silly attempt in another post to try to take the "pragmatic high ground" by characterizing LO's position as "that license bullshit.")
I'm not interested in hearing your eternal rationalizations about why your statistics are so much better than LO's. I've been hearing this crap for years now. You start frothing at the mouth any time somebody says something positive about LO, you don't release anything notable for 2 1/2 years, and you call this "letting the code speak for you."
Meanwhile LO may
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Aargh, mistakenly submitted when I brushed off something that'd fallen on my keyboard.
Anyway, meanwhile LO may commit the oh-so-very-grievous sin of putting out some PR once in a while trying to promote their project, but they don't waste their breath continually trying to tear AOO down. Instead they've busily been putting out a stream of releases with features I needed. That's who's letting the code talk for them.
Reveal Codes? (Score:3)
Does it have a WordPerfect-like Reveal Codes feature?
No?
No dice.
Here we go again (Score:4, Funny)
Here we go again with all the ranting about the mexican wrestler version. *sigh*
NSA's backdoor (Score:2)
Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open (Score:5, Informative)
Because they use different licenses. OpenOffice uses the Apache license, LibreOffice mostly GPL. Merging them is not feasible since either of them would have to give up something they don't want to in return.
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Features? Smeachers!
The news here is compatibility improvement for file formats and import/export.
Way rockin' good. I can try jettisoning Office 2011, soon. Libre on Ubuntu was close enough, two years ago - but still enough different for me to run Crossover.
Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open (Score:5, Interesting)
They are merging! LibreOffice imports all useful bits. They even keep a running commentary on any commits that are still going into apache office saying which are useful, which are not useful or which libreoffice commits fix something in a more elegant way: http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/trunk&showmsg=1
Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open (Score:4, Interesting)
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The problem with getting IBM on board is that they most likely want to have some way of charging a bundle for their own version of the software much like they do with Eclipse vs Rational Application Developer. They can still earn money doing support and whatnot but they usually prefer to have their own branded product. LibreOffice is GPLv3 so they can't do that.
Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open (Score:4, Interesting)
If Libreoffice does end up dominating (Openoffice still has the most old and new users because of inertia and name recognition) then it will be convincing evidence of the evolutionary superiority of copyleft.
At this point I'm betting on Libreoffice + LGPL. Hope I don't get any "libertarian license" jihadis steamed about that, but this just seems like reality.
Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open (Score:5, Insightful)
Is that the same way Linux and FreeBSD are "merging"?
And yet Linux doesn't yet have a modern file system...
ZFS works great on FreeBSD. HAMMER from DragonFly BSD is damn good as well. BTRFS still sucks, YEARS after it SHOULD HAVE been stable.
Having a license that supposedly allows you to suck the marrow out of the upstream project doesn't really solve your problems for you, and you can certainly still fall behind.
If the LibreOffice guys were smart, they'd be contributing as many of their changes as possible to the upstream project, so they won't have to do extra maintenance, and more people would benefit from them. Of course, if those LO guys were smart, they would have picked a slightly less horrific and painful NAME for their project...
Re:Merge Already! Libre/Open (Score:4, Insightful)
Can we please get past calling AOO the upstream project of LO? This is like calling gorillas the upstream project of humans...
Yes they share a common ancestry but that is it at this point... sure some stuff can be transplanted from one to the other but there is no upstream/downstream relationship that one would usually understand that term as in the FOSS world (eg Fedora -> RHEL).
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If one is pulling code from the other, but not the other way around, there is definitely an upstream. In this case it's dictated by license instead of a nice clear project ancestry, but it still clearly operates like an upstream/downstream set of projects.
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Oracle / IBM aren't interested in their direction. Contributing changes back would be a lot of work. My guess is they want to grab the improvements for the period of time while the projects are close enough, and if it becomes too much work to maintain the code ports they just stop and let the projects fork further apart.
No Worries, LibreOffice got you covered (Score:3, Informative)
Don't worry, LibreOffice already has all the improvements imported from Apache, see https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4-1-new-features-and-fixes/
Re:PC is not a tablet (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that it's damn near impossible to find a 4:3 monitor larger than 17" and very hard to find even 16:10, it makes more sense to put in sidebars to use the abundant horizontal space rather than the vertical. Of course, once you get to around 24" monitors, it starts to become much more commonplace to have two apps side-by-side, in which case the argument goes back to having toolbars on the top and bottom.
Or we could, you know, have both as options.
Re:PC is not a tablet (Score:5, Funny)
Or we could, you know, have both as options.
That's crazy talk.
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/sarcasm: Exactly! Who are you mere mortal to dare question the infinite wisdom of the UX designers!! *cough*
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No it does not make sense to do this. It makes sense make menus moveable, up the side if that is where you like them, across the top or simply detached.
Just because my monitor is wider does not mean I want my applications that way. I might you know what to be able to have things side by side for comparison. Multiple displays is one solution but isn't so good on the go with a notebook.
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Did you read more than just the first sentence I wrote? I pointed out that multiple visible windows is becoming common, especially with larger displays. And then I concluded that it would be best to make it an option so people can set it how they want.
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You do have some flexibility in AOO. The Sidebars detach and you can make the into floating palettes and put them where you want, even onto a 2nd monitor if you want. Or collapse them and have the same UI layout you had in 3.4.1. Having the Sidebar UI available does not force you to do anything. It just permits you to do some new things.
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Correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Office 97 or something have floating tool-windows that could be docked on the toolbar, or the sides (any side) of the document window?
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Up until Office 2003 (iirc), you could float most of the toolbars. However, I don't recall if you could dock them anywhere other than the top. That option went away with the ribbon, unless they've buried it somewhere in there.
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But what I find is worse is the stupid ribbon interface for office, it's like poorly organized game of find the hidden object.
I'm really not sure how its inherently any worse than the old menu structure plus toolbars. Its more consistent and easier to manage than a bunch of disconnected toolbars, and a deep menu hierarchy.
I think its only real disadvantage is that its "different" and people tend to reject change unless there is an overwhelming and obvious immediate benefit to it.
Took me a while to get used
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Strange how no-one "rejected change" in any other office version. Except for the one with Clippy.
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Strange how no-one "rejected change" in any other office version.
What change? Seriously, what was the big UI change between Office 95, 98, 2000, and 2003 that people would have objected to?
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Of course they did. The shift from DOS to Windows is what caused the shift from Lotus-1-2-3, WordPerfect and Harvard Graphics to Excel, Word and PowerPoint.
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> Took me a while to get used to, but I don't dislike it now. And would not prefer to go back.
Nice example.
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The ribbon takes up more space, requires more clicks, and is less customizable.
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The ribbon takes up more space
Does it now?
Office 95, 800x600
http://softpick2.com/uploads/posts/2011-08/1314566684_word-2010-screenshot-1.jpg [softpick2.com]
Office 2010, 800x600
http://kkcdn-static.kaskus.co.id/images/2013/03/04/5230853_20130304074203.png [kaskus.co.id]
Yes, ok, it looks like the ribbon is only ever so slightly larger. I imagine you were expecting something more. But its not 1995 and 800x600 is a distant memory. I'm running 1980x1200 now. And the ribbon takes up a smaller fraction of my screen than the toolbars+menu did in
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It is inherently worse, in my opinion, because it takes up a great chunk of screen real estate
Very nearly the same actually.
Office 95, 800x600
http://softpick2.com/uploads/posts/2011-08/1314566684_word-2010-screenshot-1.jpg [softpick2.com]
Office 2010, 800x600
http://kkcdn-static.kaskus.co.id/images/2013/03/04/5230853_20130304074203.png [kaskus.co.id]
And screens have gotten a lot bigger since then. And you can minimize it when you just want to type...
It also makes it harder when you're trying to do phone support for a relative novice.
Fair
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Re:They seem to be doing a fine job. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is garbage. 5% of contributions to LO 4.1 came from apache.
Claiming everything came from apache is an IBM marketing lie and they've been called out on it.
Re:They seem to be doing a fine job. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm sure you can make the huge contribution of the AOO Sidebar look numerically 5% if you do two things:
1) Count the entire Sidebar UI as a single commit, which Ohloh does because the work was done on a branch, not the trunk. (Ohloh counts only the AOO trunk)
2) Bloat your own commit counts with insignificant "behind the scenes cleanup" like translating German comments, or other stuff that no user will ever benefit from.
But if you look at features of actual significance, what the users actually want and will benefit from, the code from Apache is actually quite significant in LibreOffice.
I wish LibreOffice supporters would stop acting like it makes them small to acknowledge some gratitude to other open source projects which they are dependent on.
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Rob why do you go by the nick Palestrina here rather than the usual rcweir you use elsewhere?
Interesting blog post [italovignoli.org] I came across just now - care to comment?
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Re:They seem to be doing a fine job. (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment? Yes. Of the various approaches to argument, the strongest one is to take your opponent's most valid point, the key of their argument, and then to logically rebut it. On the other hand, one of the weakest arguments is the ad hominem attack, declining to engage logic entirely and instead trying to win by bravado and superficial slight of hand. I dismantled your argument, by showing the flaws in how you calculated and interpreted your "5%" claim. You responded (no not responded, but dodged entirely) with an ad hominem attack. I assume if you had a stronger argument to make you would have done so.
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Rob I think you have lost track of who your are replying to and why ...
There was no ad hominem attack on my side just a curiosity as to why you choose a nick that is so far different from your usual (reddit, lwn, etc) given this is another social network and if you had balance to bring that blog post which paints a rather negative light...
I never made that 5% claim - that was an anonymous coward and I stay logged in here... Incidentally I disagree with your position that no one ever benefits from the sm
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You should really look up what "ad hominem" means. It does not mean a personal attack. It means that instead of attacking the logic of the argument you change the subject to the person, which is exactly what you did. Twice.
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*blink* ...
Seriously Rob - go back up and check the comment thread ... you have wandered off track here - I'm not entirely surprised given how many threads you are responding to but seriously... re-read the trail...
I will reiterate I am not the anonymous coward who made the 5% comment - I was never part of that argument or discussion ... we had a brief foray into discussing ohloh statistics and how much meaning it's possible to derive from them elsewhere with some incredible twisting of the stats that y
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Again, you introduced yourself into a specific subthread and make an ad hominen attack rather than address the argument. *Who* you are is immaterial. *Where* you are in the thread is material. Start a new subthread for a new topic. Or maybe skip irrelevancies altogether?
Re:I give up on WISYWIG (Score:4, Insightful)
As an added benefit you can store your documents in a source control system such that you can actually keep track of changes. (The change tracking I have seen build into some office suites was fundamentally flawed. They could only compare with one previous version and not show in which order changes were made. And they were relying on all the software used by the various parties to accurately record what was changed. Not really useful as anything other than a toy.)
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Amen.
I write in DocBook. Content and structure, nothing else.
Then it's just a matter of running the right XSLT on it to get whatever end-user format and styling I want.
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Sun Microsystems got bankrupt and then was bought by Oracle. Oracle did diddly squat after the acquisition but IBM had a lot of work from Lotus Symphony which they wanted to merge back. So Oracle decided to push the code to the Apache foundation and IBM is working on it there now. AFAICT.