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OpenOffice.org 2.0 Preview
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Mar 06, 2005 05:19 PM
from the second-verse-different-than-the-first dept.
from the second-verse-different-than-the-first dept.
Reader lord_rob the only on wrote in to mention a preview of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.0 running on tectonic. From the article: "It is not too bold to say that OpenOffice.org 2.0 will usher in a new era of functionality, reliability, compatibility and ease of use. The extensive changes and enhancements which are to be included in the upcoming release are all the evidence needed to justify this assertion." As we mentioned earlier this week, the beta candidate is currently available.
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I Took it For a Spin (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It? (Score:5, Insightful)
I find your friends funny, cuz mine don't pay a cent for M$ Office. P2P, ya know...
I mean come on, honestly: apart from businesses and some high(er)-profile folks, who the hell pays for Office?
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Re:Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It? (Score:5, Insightful)
Congrats... Your friends are helping to raise the barrier to entry for smaller office suites.
Friends don't let friends pirate software. Nor do they let friends by from MSFT....
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Re:Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It? (Score:5, Insightful)
One would think the opposite is true.
Given the fact that the vast majority of users still buy their software, Office going up in price due to piracy would be a good thing for cheaper alternatives.
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Re:Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It? (Score:5, Insightful)
Then you don't understand my argument. In the software industry, if you remove the requirement that many customers decide where to spend their money, then you make it harder for other office suites to get enough market share to be self-sustaining. Furthermore, such individuals only reinforce the dependence on MS Office without providing any real incentive for competition.
Welcome to reality: Microsoft shafts their users whenever they can, and the users shaft Microsoft back whenever they can too in turn. That's the name of the game.
But the problem is that the consumers are *not* shafting Microsoft when they pirate Microsoft software. Instead they are reinforcing users' dependency on it. Furthermore they make it harder for others to enter the market profitably. If users want to shaft Microsoft, they should *stop using Microsoft software!*
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Re:Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is VBA a great language? Not really. Does everyone use it? No. But you can use it to claim that OpenOffice does not have 100% of the functionality that MS Office does.
OpenOffice has its own programming language, StarBasic. When you* get done rewriting all your MS Office-based applications in StarBasic, let me know just how "free" OpenOffice was for you.
* By "you" I mean "a large albeit short-sighted company that entrusts important business functions to macros in spreadsheet programs."
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Re:Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It? (Score:5, Insightful)
There were enough bugs and differences between versions that my code broke. Personally, I'd rather have written the app in VB and used Access via MDAC/ADO. Never again, and that goes for Excel and Word too... <shudder>
VBA is actually a pretty formiddable scripting language. Nowhere near as powerful as perl, but quick, dirty and relatively clean.
<dons asbestos underwear>
Flame on.
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Re:Yeah - So Who's Lovin' It? (Score:5, Insightful)
At this point, saying "OpenOffice Calc is just as good as Microsoft Excel" is just as dumb as saying "GIMP is just as good as Photoshop." It makes open source advocates really happy to hear, but it makes experts just roll their eyes. That makes open source advocates belittle the experts for very shallow reasons, calling the experts names like "Joe Businessman."
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Double page spread? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Double page spread? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Double page spread? (Score:5, Funny)
Thank you for requesting a new feature (which I will call "feature X") in an open source product. Please choose from the following responses for the community to give you.
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Conversion guides? (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow, this looks really good. Being a Linux user and student, I've always wished I was as productive in Linux-native word processors as I am on Windows with Word (currently 2003). However, after using Word for my whole life, AbiWord and OpenOffice (OpenOffice especially) seem unintuitive (obviously the result of Microsoft brainwashing ;)). Hopefully OpenOffice 2.0 will solve this problem for me, but in the meantime does anybody know of a good (as in you've actually used it successfully) Word-convert user's guide to AbiWord or OpenOffice? If there's another (preferably Gnome-native) word processor that you know a guide for, that's okay too.
The only question I have is (Score:5, Interesting)
OOo is great, but I discovered the other day that it doesn't work anymore on my older laptop with 96M of ram and nothing loaded but a basic KDE. It used to work there not so long ago, not fast or anything, but well enough to do presentation with Impress on the cheap. No more, which is a real pain.
So if 2.0 has grown even more monstrous, I'm not even trying it out, nosiree. My other laptop still has enough oomph to use 1.1.
Re:The only question I have is (Score:5, Insightful)
Well quite, but what I meant was that 96M of RAM should be more than enough to run something like Impress under KDE. Heck, Windows and Powerpoint run just fine on that laptop.
OOo has grown ridiculously big and slow. So has KDE and many other programs. So much for Linux users going all giggly when they mention Microsoft bloatware: OSS software has gone worse these days...
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Re:The only question I have is (Score:5, Funny)
Drop the car, dude, it's not worth it. Try using a true lightweight tyre, like Pirelli or Michelin.
My Michelin SX-LE4 tyre feels much more lightweight than any Honda Civic I've ever seen. It makes me much more productive.
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Test it! (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, please test it! OpenOffice.org's success in the long run is determined by the visionaries like us who give good feedback so that it can eventually make it to the mainstream smoothly.
a few things (Score:5, Informative)
Where's the innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the fact that it is free the only innovation?
Re:Where's the innovation? (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally I do most of my writing in an innovative editor that lets me control all editing functions on standard keys while touch typing, never having to take hands off home base, let alone remove them from the keyboard to use a mouse.
But some people find this uncomfortable. They're used to MS Office. For them there is OOo. That's what it's for. If you wish to find innovation, look elsewhere, but then don't complain that it's different.
KFG
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Logic? (Score:5, Insightful)
"This beta is not for the faint of heart, and should not be considered as reliable
So on the basis of trying out some unreliable software, we conclude that the final version will be reliable?
While it may turn out to be true, the logic is lacking here.
What I really want in OO (Score:5, Interesting)
In OO 2 its supposed to load faster, but to be honest, Hell Works 2.0 has done basically everything I've needed since 1988. Office 2000 added some useful features, but then I switched to Macintosh anyway. I wish they would optimize the code and take out the bloat. I would be impressed if just once someone came up with an application that version 2.0 ran on older hardware instead needing newer stuff because of code optimatzation.
I have Office V.x for my Mac primarily for one program: PowerPoint. I've just purchased iWork and damned impressed with Pages and Keynote 2. Still not as many design templates as Powerpoint for Mac, but I am sure that will change with time.
OpenOffice 2.0 vs MS Office 2003 (Score:5, Informative)
It hasn't quite caught up with MS Office 2003 in terms of functionality - but who cares? OpenOffice 2.0 is more that good enough for your average office worker. The suite is comparible to older versions of MS Office, which are functioning fine on millions of desktops around the world. The only things that I really disliked was the increased reliance on proprietary software (Java JRE) and the interoperability issues I experienced cutting and pasting tables between calc, write and impress. The Beta is currently a bit slow - however that should improve once it is released and any debugging code is removed. The user interface feels significantly nicer than the previous version; however, the dialog boxes are still not perfect. The suite uses Oasis file format - which may become the holy grail of document formats. HTML editing in write is far superior to MS Word and I recommend OpenOffice as a filter for word documents that require conversion to HTML or Oasis. Write includes a long awaited WordPerfect import filter. Overall I was extremely impressed with the new MS Office interoperability and the application's overall functionality.
* Very good new functionality
* Oasis file format - may be the new killer feature
* Meets the needs of your average text oriented office worker
* Excellent MS Office Integration
* Annoying Java JRE reliance. Either open source java or remove the dependancy.
* Dialog boxes occasionally still feel clunky
* Crashes and table copy and paste issues need to be cleaned up before gold release
* Free and open source
7.7 out of 10
Is it multi-user yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
My biggest gripe with OO.o (as of 1.1) is that it's still stuck in the MS single-user system world. I hope that 2.0 will break this, and make it a true multi-user application.
I've tried 1.1, and the "multi-user" install is nothing of the sort - in addition to being painful, you still have to "install" it for each user, after you've "installed" it - quite a pain on a multi-user system (try doing it for 20 users - I can only imagine what it must be like for systems with a few hundred users).
Just like every other Unix app, I should be able to install it once, and every user on the system should have access to it - I shouldn't have to do anything for each user.
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Re:Is it multi-user yet? Yes, it is... FINALLY! (Score:5, Informative)
Believe it or not, I've had a 4 month old build of OOo 2.0 (1.9.49, I think) running on our Terminal Server for the students. Not even a glitch. Far better this than the absolute hell I went through installing it in the labs.
Yes, thank God, they've finally fixed the install! And thanks for asking - a lot of fellow admins out there were totally turned off because of this glaring omission. They should be aware that OOo 2.0 installs like Office does.
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