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OpenOffice 1.1.5 Released 344

Posted by samzenpus from the free-spreadsheets dept.
Community Technology writes "New stable release of OpenOffice has been released. Download OpenOffice 1.1.5 from OpenOffice.org"
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

OpenOffice 1.1.5 Released More

OpenOffice 1.1.5 Released

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  • Sweet! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SultanCemil ( 722533 )
    Does this open MS Office files better? Specifically embedded stuff in documents? Also, go the new slashdot design!

    • Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Neil Blender ( 555885 )
      Does this open MS Office files better?

      In addition, can it open spreadsheets with more than 32,000 lines? I know Excel tops out at 64,000 which for my needs sometimes is not enough. I have searched the prefs in previous versions but can't find any way to open files with that many lines. Well, the open, but the cut off anything after the max line number. I regularly get csv files with 50-75K lines that are of different formats and would like to be able to open them in a spread sheet, especially OO. I us
      • Dude. Try a relational database.

        • Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Neil Blender ( 555885 )
          Dude. Try a relational database.

          Examining the file is the first step towards inserting the data into a database. I work in bioinformatics. I get files from customers which often share only two common characteristics - they hold some data, and they are tab or comma delimited. Other than that, they could be two columns with 50 rows, or 100 columns with 75,000 rows. Opening the file and looking at it is the first step. A spreadsheet is a handy tool for doing that. I'm not sure if you have used a text edi

          • Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Informative)

            by jadavis ( 473492 )
            Perhaps MS Access or OOo Base is right for you? They should be able to seamlessly import and view a few hundred thousand lines, without requiring you to know about the data in advance.
      • In addition, can it open spreadsheets with more than 32,000 lines?

        OOo 2

        I regularly get csv files with 50-75K lines that are of different formats and would like to be able to open them in a spread sheet, especially OO.

        If you're on *ix, use split(1). Or, better yet, use a tool that is designed to handle large numbers of rows.

        OOo2 Base might suit your needs.

      • Re:Sweet! (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ajs318 ( 655362 )
        It sounds to me like you are using your spreadsheet as though it were a database. That's a common mistake, and no doubt something that can be {rightly or wrongly} blamed on Microsoft. {Unix = a well-stocked tool box with one screwdriver for each type of screw recess: slotted, Posidriv, hex, Phillips, Torx, and those weirdy ones you get on appliances. Windows = a "magic hammer" with which you can fasten any kind of screw simply by hitting it like a nail. When raised, it uses a small camera to identify
        • A consequence of this is that telephone numbers in badly-set-up spreadsheets often lose the initial 0 from the STD code {because they were entered in a numeric field; but a telephone number is not a number on which you are going to do mathematical operations, but a text string which happens to be composed solely of numeric characters}; and on one occasion, I have even seen people adding up a column of figures using an idiot-calculator and entering the total by hand!

          And you're suggesting he use MySQL? H

      • Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Insightful)

        by CastrTroy ( 595695 )
        What I don't understand is why OO has such small limitations built into it. I understand that Excel is a very old app, with roots back in the 16 bit days. OO.o on the other hand is quite new. Why would they only allow first 32,000 and now 64,000 rows. You'd think they could make it handle at least 1,000,000 rows. Why do they build in such small limits?
      • You could try Gnumeric, it's currently got a 64K limit to match Excel, but if you compile it yourself you can up the limit by modifying a constant:

        http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=168875 [gnome.org]

  • Version 1.1.5? (Score:3, Funny)

    by mrclark13 ( 812867 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @10:48PM (#13619133)
    I thought OO.o was on version 2.0?

    • Re:Version 1.1.5? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sinewalker ( 686056 )
      me too.

      I think 1.1.5 is a back-port of some stuff? The homepage mentions OpenDocument support.

      This new slashdot layout is freakin me out... looks cool, but I have to look around to find things again. Strange parallels with OOo...

    • Re:Version 1.1.5? (Score:5, Informative)

      by HUADPE ( 903765 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:31PM (#13619276) Homepage
      OpenOffice.org 2.0 is a beta. 1.1.5 is the stable release. The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.
      • Yes, but often Beta is what is being tested for the next big release. It seems that OpenOffice is going the way of kernels and other OS apps such as apache, etc... put big changes in the beta, and backport the tried-and-true as well as bugfixes. Rather than calling 2.x beta, perhaps they should it a testing version and the 1.x a release version (much like Debian does with the stable/testing/unstable/experimental branches).

        That being said, I wonder if they will continue with two lines or eventually dump th
      • The beta is not supposed to be for general consumption, it is a prototype which may have bugs and be unstable.

        In other words, it has superior stability compared to MS Word.

  • The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @10:58PM (#13619145)
    The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.

    • I might be impressed if it actually worked on Mac OS X. As it is, when I launch OpenOffice 1.1.5, it asks me to select my preferred X server, and then gives me an obscure error message when I hit Cancel because I don't understand WTF it is asking. I also tried 1.9 Beta and it gave me an even less useful error message earlier in the install process.
      • That's not a problem with the build system. That sounds like a problem with OpenOffice itself. Which, of course, is not what this particular thread is about.

      • Search for NeoOffice/J. A much better port for OS X. Of course, it's not 1.1.5, but it works great, no X server required.
        • NeoOffice/J is very very very very very slow. It looks good, but damn it is slow. It doesn't require X, but it does require the bloody Godawful JVM. Which is slow. And start reaaally slowly. Don't even try to run it on a G3.

          Did I mention it was slow? In comparison the X version is lightning fast (but ugly, for sure). Ah, and it positively gobbles up memory. On startup it REQUIRES 1GB of virtual mem on my machine.

          The only reason one should use NeoOffice/J is *not* that it looks good, but that the *only* prec

    • Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rdwald ( 831442 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:27PM (#13619260)
      The build system of OpenOffice is truly a fantastic beast to study. Indeed, when one looks deeply at it you see the sort of work that needs to be done to support the building of a massive C++ application with many different compilers on many different platforms. It's truly a feat of engineering what they accomplish in the build system alone, completely ignoring OpenOffice itself.
      I guess that's why it takes 5 hours to compile in Gentoo, then. I wish I were exaggerating.

      • Re:The build system of OpenOffice is fantastic. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by CyricZ ( 887944 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:33PM (#13619289)
        It's a massive piece of software. Of course it's going to take hours, literally, to build. It's just a matter of OpenOffice being so massive.

        It'd be like building a bridge across the English Channel. It will take longer to build such a bridge than it would to build a bridge across a 10 m wide stream.

        • Yea, yea, I was just trying to wryly demonstrate the flipside of the "truly fantastic beast" which the parent (now great-grandparent) was talking about. Though, it does seem to take longer to build than qt or x.org...surely those are complex programs as well.
          • Qt is nowhere near as large nor as complex as OpenOffice. Recall that OpenOffice includes its own GUI toolkit and app framework, in addition to the OpenOffice software itself.

            X.org is written in C, rather than C++. C often compiles, especially with GCC, far faster than C++. Even then, X.org is miniscule in comparison to OpenOffice in terms of codebase size.

        • It is, though, by far the longest single package build on many people's gentoo systems... it certainly is on mine at just over 6 hours. Nothing else on my install comes close, although I guess the fact that (e.g.) KDE is split across many different packages may be the only thing saving it from that accolade.
          --
          I'm not politically incorrect, I'm just differently articulate
      • I guess that's why it takes 5 hours to compile in Gentoo,

        Throw more hardware at it. A quad-CPU SunFire V40z w/ 8GB RAM & 10K RPM SCSI drives would make it scream. (Yes, it would have to be a a chroot, blah blah...)

    • And is also its Achilles heel. (Score:5, Informative)

      by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:52PM (#13619374) Homepage Journal

      Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] project.

      As someone who's wrangled with the OOo build system since 2001, I have to respectfully disagree. While it is good that it supports so many different operating systems, the build system is also one of the major Achilles heels of OOo. Some examples:

      • It builds its own build tools as part of its bootstrapping process. This makes it near impossible to cross-compile without completely retooling the build system (a pain for doing any type of single-machine PPC & x86 OS X builds).
      • It has its own "make" equivalent that encodes module dependencies and language localizations in a custom format. To add appropriate dependencies you need to learn yet another makefile system. Don't mention trying to figure out the module build order without actually running a compile. Try it sometime if you want to lose your mind.
      • It uses quite a few preprocessing tools for custom file formats for processing including slots files, IDL files that generate more headers, resource compilers, and more. Custom toolchains make figuring out what generated what file even more fun to discover.
      • Some of the build tools have dependencies on versions of Java that do not exist on all the platforms on which the application might be able to run, preventing it from even compiling on those platforms.

      The end result of all of this is that the entire 8 million line plus project is quite dependent on its build system in order to successfully compile. The system is so intricate that most all of the attempts to move it to a different system, such as XCode, have failed. This is a bummer. From a Mac perspective, it sucks ass to be forced to use command line tools for such a huge project. You lose access to such useful tools as the symbolic browser information (e.g. "Jump to Definition" for a symbol in an editor file) and within-project searches. Not to mention you don't gain access to other nice things in the environment like distributed compiles. Probably the worst side effect, however, is that most Mac developers aren't command-line junkies (unless they were MPW freaks like me). They've been raised on CodeWarrior and other great IDEs. It's a real turn-off to have to learn an arcane command line build system that is used for only one program and will probably not give you any useful skills for any other applications on the Mac platform. Forget about being able to examine the interface in InterfaceBuilder or ResEdit, too.

      The whole complexity of learning the build system and all of the custom formats involved has been a real turn-off for many a Mac developer who just take a look at the build instructions and vomit. The lack of standard dev tools has definitely hindered my productivity, and I'm sure I'm not alone. A fantastic build system is one that doesn't get in a developer's way and on Macs at least, that's most definitely not the case.

      ed

      • Allow me to commend you on the work you've done with NeoOffice. I absolutely love it. I use it only my personal PowerBook and my work one too. Despite the fact that some might complain it doesn't LOOK like a Mac app, it's much better than the standard OS X distro which requires X11 and work very well. Maybe someday OpenOffice (in general) will get better support for native look and feel. Isn't that what OOo 2.0's use of Java is all about? Or am I mistaken on that one?

      • I wonder if this is indirectly linked to the notorious heaviness of oo. Could it be a case of too much code?

      • But how else can you do portable? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by steve_l ( 109732 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @06:42AM (#13620288) Homepage
        As a member of the Ant team, I also have to bemoan their use of a non-standard build tool, given that there is pretty good support for C++ compiles in ant-contrib's , and with extra work C++ support could be improved.

        without something portable like Ant or SCons, you end up needing either to

        -build your own tools (this is what Microsoft's shared source version of .NET does; it builds things like NMAKE, their worst-in-class make tool, then builds the rest of the system)

        -require a common toolchain on every box (e.g. Unix make+the unix commands; cygwin on windows)

        The trouble with IDEs, is that they are either platform specific, or use their own configuration files to control the build. In Java Ant has finally become common enough (after 5 years) that it is broadly supported in IDEs, so you get the best of both worlds.

        In C++ land, most people resort to the common toolchain, because only the ambitious fools with time on their hands bother to write their own build system. Does that mean it should't be done? No, just that it would be silly if every fairly large project came up with their own build tools. Instead every few years, we really ought to revisit the build processes and tools of the OSS projects, and see how they can be improved.

  • Not really "new" news (Score:5, Funny)

    by Petrushka ( 815171 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:04PM (#13619164)

    Er ... this happened a week ago. Good news, to be sure, though.

    Note: OOo 1.1.5 can import OpenDocument files, but not export them.

    By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me.

    • I wonder if openoffice 2.0 can export them properly too. I just tried to open an odt document that I saved from openoffice 2.0 (the latest version from SUSE 9.3, it's beta, but it's good enough for Novell) and KOffice says that it isn't a valid OASIS opendocument, then refuses to open it.
    • Slashdot's original motto was --and is secretly-- "better late than never". How popular this motto remais with the people at 3D Realms is another issue altogether. Definitely a fan of the new site. Frankly all I think it needs is the /. logo replaced with SVG and then you'd have a really fancy all XML site.
    • "By the way, what's with all the people complaining about how the site looks? I'm using Lynx and it looks totally normal to me."

      Well, that says it all, doesn't it? I mean; it looks normal in Lynx! What more proof of the highly skewed and distorted layout do you need? ;-)

  • pssshhh stable. (Score:3, Funny)

    by fbartho ( 840012 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:08PM (#13619179) Homepage
    Who uses the stable release... Beta is the way to go. Always. Real men don't do backup's, they upload their files to usenet or public ftp or bittorrent, and let the world mirror their files.

  • Just a Microsoft Office clone (Score:3, Insightful)

    by bkazez ( 851595 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:12PM (#13619196)
    It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.

    Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?

    • Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:18PM (#13619218) Homepage
      Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?

      Lots of people are ready. The users don't want to.
      • Exactly, if people were willing to sue something different if it was better, they would be using Lyx (far more productive than a word processor), Gnumeric (fast start-up, built in Monte-Carlo analysis, no bugs in the stats functions) etc. They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.

        The choice is there, users choose not to take it.
        • They could even stop using spreadsheets as databases (a pet hate of mine) given the existence of desktop databases.

          They do that because users understand spreadsheets and they don't understand databases. No, really.

          A spreadsheet is a good prototyping tool, it doesn't force structure on your data - you can play with it and throw it lots of data dumps, reformat them, reposition them, and the overall structure of the data emerges from all that dirty work. Contrast this with a database in which the first thing y

    • REPLY:Just a Microsoft Office clone (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      But the did NOT clone the outrageous price that Microsoft charges for it!!! I installed it on 25 computers in my company and stopped paying the outrageous amounts to Microsoft for Office! ;-)

      Carlos

    • You mean like (Score:4, Informative)

      by guybarr ( 447727 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @12:25AM (#13619496)
      WYSIWYM [lyx.org] ?

      • LyX (Score:2)

        by shani ( 1674 )
        Gosh, that's an ugly site. And hard to read too, with the background image, green-on-green font, and so on.

        Why would someone who cares about attractive presentation use an application put together by these people?

        Oh right, because they are producing scientific papers and have to use LaTeX. WYSIWYM is better than using notepad...

        • It doesn't look that bad. The only green on green was visited links in the menu on the left, and it was a bright green on dark green, which isn't hard to see at all. The blue on dark green was more annoying to me, but the white on greenish-background of the main content of each page was easily visible. It avoids the stuff I dislike most about ugly web pages: movement/change.

          Oh right, because they are producing scientific papers and have to use LaTeX. WYSIWYM is better than using notepad...

          Personally,

          • Re:LyX (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Spoing ( 152917 )
            I have to agree with Shani -- the web site is a deal killer. I couldn't get anyone I know to consider LyX over Word if I sent them to the web site.

    • Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @12:27AM (#13619507) Homepage Journal

      Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] project.

      Yes, there are some folks rethinking the standard interfaces...such as Apple (with Keynote [apple.com] and Pages [apple.com]) and even Microsoft with Office 12 [zdnet.com] and earlier some of the UI design of Office:mac. On some platforms, it would even be possible to play around with alternative OOo interfaces by using OfficeBean (although I don't know of any off of the top of my head).

      For office suites, however, I think the general interface paradigms are so commonplace now that any radical departure will be greeting by a nice resounding "WTF is this" from users. Case in point: OpenDoc [wikipedia.org]. It was, in my opinion, a valiant attempt at shifting the focus for productivity suites off of individual applications and onto a free-form content-centric view. The idea never caught on with users, and ones I always saw trying to use it were just confused by the idea and were still asking questions like "what do I open to create a spreadsheet?".

      Not to mention I can't get that stupid "I just did the Excel..." lady from the Video Professor commercial out of my head. With millions of users like that, I doubt things will really be able to change that much :)

      ed

    • Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone (Score:5, Insightful)

      by linguae ( 763922 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @12:34AM (#13619530)
      Anyone want to have a go at rethinking word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation software?

      I would love to have a new, innovative, word processing software, spreadsheet software, and presentation software (although I use LaTeX and text editors for the former, so I'm not much of a word processor user anymore). However, OpenOffice's goal was never to become an innovative office suite (in the sense of revolutionizing word processors like Apple's Pages [apple.com] (or even LyX for that matter), revolutionizing spreadsheets like Lotus Improv [wikipedia.org], and presentations like Apple Keynote [apple.com]); it's goal was to provide 90% of MS Office's features and interface at a much lower price: free (as in beer and as in speech). And it does a decent job of doing that if you just can't afford MS Office (and, in some instances, a Windows or Mac OS license). I use OpenOffice on my computer. Even though I don't use it too often (I have been indoctrinated^Wintroduced to LaTeX, and don't have a need for spreadsheets and presentations [LaTeX can handle presentations, too]), I keep OpenOffice on my machine just in case I must work with MS Office documents.

      OpenOffice is a very nice, pragmatic software project used for a free alternative to MS Office. OpenOffice isn't perfect and I actually prefer MS Office to OpenOffice for a few reasons (faster loading is the main key), but it is the no-cost solution to dealing with the MS world out there. OpenOffice didn't set out to become a revolutionary, innovative project. OpenOffice is an example of a program that tries to do a job that a $300+ program does, except offered for free.

    • YOu can't win that way. Everybody will complain about re-training time. Hell the moz people had to duplicate the exact same keyboard shortcuts as IE in order to get people to use it.

      Innovation is a damned if you do damned if you don't thing.

    • Yes, it is a clone of Microsoft Office (even if it is a little better in my opinion), but since we just established that it has the same functionality as MSOffice and it's free, why isn't everybody using it?

      Anyway, it seems that someone is actually rethinking the UI design of an office application, and strangely enough it's Microsoft! [anandtech.com] (I have no idea if it's going to be any better though..)

      • Because it's much slower, uglier and lacks polish in many areas. It is also, in my experience, buggier than recent versions of Office.

        Don't get me wrong - I use OO.org on my Linux systems: it's amazing given the price and has some many good features. I've lost my fair share of work to MS Word pre-2000 as well. But I certainly would not recommend 1.1.x to any Windows/Mac user as an alternative to Office yet.
    • Did it ever occured to you that the current state of MS Office had been though about hard? Mod me down, but MS Office is rather near perfection. So it's a good idea for openoffice.org to copy good ideas in MS Office. I know it's fashionable to say the contrary on slashdot, nevertheless MS make real good products, sometimes.
      • Mod me down, but MS Office is rather near perfection.

        While there are some aspects of MS-Office that are really refined, the UI for Word strikes me as being more broken the perfected. I was much happier with the UI on the old versions of Word for DOS - it was much nicer to use "keyboard only" than Word for Windoze.

        Another big irritation with both MS-Word and OOo Writer is their treatment of everything on the document as being some kind of paragraph - where I find thinking in terms of frames (containers)

    • Re:Just a Microsoft Office clone (Score:4, Interesting)

      by c.r.o.c.o ( 123083 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @01:29AM (#13619663)
      The MS Office interface is very well established, and most (if not all) people are used to it. For people to migrate easily to OOo, it has to feel like a clone of MS Office. When its userbase will be significant enough, it will afford deviating from the norm. I am sure that MS Office implemented a similar interface to its precursors (WordPerfect et al) when it was introduced, and added new features gradually. And by the way, OOo did have a very different interface when it was still called StarOffice 5. It had a desktop manager, file browser, etc, but unfortunately, it felt cumbersome, and the suite ran slowly even on systems with reasonable specs. Moving to the current interface improved things significantly.

      I have used OOo exclusively for the past two years, mostly for school work. Between taking notes in class, typing assignments, etc, I spent many hours using it. While I also have MS Office 97, 2k and XT, I stuck with OOo because of a few default behaviours and features. First, it does not bullet, tab, etc by default. You have to actvely format the text. When taking notes in class this is crucial, because I really do not have time to fuss around with how the text looks like. MS Office was driving me crazy with its auto-everything behaviour, which cannot be turned off (it can be undone on a case-by-case basis, but that is not good enough for me). Second, it can export the file as PDF. When sharing files, this is amazing. Not to mention that most people cannot edit your work if you chose not to let them. And upon completing a course I can just archive the material as PDF, without having to worry about installing OOo or MS Office in order to read it. MS Office however, does not (or at least did not) have this feature.
      • At one time almost everyone used WordPerfect and were used to its user interface. Then in a very short space of time, the majority of people moved to MS Word which had a completely different user interface. So, just because almost everyone is using a particular product and user interface does not mean another product cannot take over, sometimes very quickly, the dominant and standard position.
        • No. At the time you speak of, word processing was not the ubiquitous task it is now. The people who used WordPerfect were generally professional typists, or did not have typists to whom they could delegate the task.

          That is why you could still find WordPerfect for DOS being used in offices up to a few years ago, maybe even still now. The people who learnt it - professional typists - were used to it, knew all the keystrokes, and could use it very efficiently.

          With the arrival of GUI word processing, it became

    • It's a pity that OpenOffice is just a visually unattractive clone of Microsoft Office, user interface flaws and all. The first time I downloaded it I hoped to find not just a free productivity suite but one that was better than Microsoft Office for the user -- simple, straightforward, and to the point. Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.

      I like your opinion.

      I like it because it is the exact opposite of what I think is a good

    • Instead, OpenOffice copies virtually every feature from Microsoft Office with very little innovation of its own.

      Remember that "innovation" and "invention" are not synonyms.

      OOo has a few rather interesting features that MS Office doesn't. Word-prediction, XML file formats (that is, "really small files you can actually open and muck around in if you want to"), and a better mix of "help" and "let you do it." Not to mention more than a few I'm just thinking of at 8:30 am.

      Anyone want to have a go at rethinking

  • Back to OOo 1.1.5 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by vanka ( 875029 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:14PM (#13619201)
    Does it have the new OOo 2.0 GUI? No? I'm not interested then, I'll wait for 2.0 to come out. From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use.

    By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.
    • By the way, what's up with Slashdot? While the new look is kinda cool, why does it take several page reloads to display correctly in Firefox. I mean, you would think that they would made sure that the new design worked with Firefox.

      You're not using 1.5b1 are you? I noticed enough rendering problems with 1.5b1 that I went back to 1.0.x. It seems to look fine to me...

    • From what I have seen, OOo 2.0 finally catches up to MS Office in terms of ease of use. ...just now that MS Office has totally updated its interface [slashdot.org] and made it greatly simplified and easier (I've seen the videos, and it does). I'm not MS fan, but I recognize when they do a good job in usability. This time they got it right.

      It's a shame that OOo will have to start the catch-up game again, and it's a shame because FOSS should be the one leading in discovering new ways of interaction (fortunately, there are a [mit.edu]

  • 2.0 Beta For MS Files (Score:5, Informative)

    by kg4gyt ( 799019 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:22PM (#13619236)
    I've found that 2.0 Beta has very few bugs, from what I've seen, almost the same beta that gmail is still beta. But anyways, OOo 2.0 Beta seems to handle the microsoft documents extremly well. Well worth the download.
    • Really? I find it pretty darn buggy. It crashes frequently; the change-tracking feature is intolerably slow; it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.

      I guess it's all in the features you use. I still use it because the price is right. And "pretty darn buggy" is still "only about as buggy as Microsoft Office."
      • it often mis-numbers autonumbering; it botches not-terribly-complicated page layouts.

        These two are not bugs, they are features. You see, they are trying to emulate MS Word.
      • It can botch complex layouts when loading microsoft`s formats, due to the proprietary nature of the formats.. If you create complex layouts in openoffice and save them in the native format there are no such problems..
        Also, when loading word files openoffice seems to emulate word 2000, when loading files from 2003 it seems to exhibit the same problems that word 2000 does loading the same files.
    • I have yet to lose any work or have an unrecoverable error as a result of using 2.0 beta. Myself, I avoid producing hugely formatted badly designed documents (coming from an engineering background). I frequently need to read bloatware from people who confuse Word with a DTP system and think that putting a short article into hugely complicated PowerPoint helps get the message across, and I have never failed to get out the information I actually needed even if occasionally there were minor issues like misloca

  • 64? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BrainInAJar ( 584756 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:29PM (#13619268)
    Still not 64-bit clean. Why exactly is it so hard to make a 64 bit version? Don't get me wrong, i think OO.o is a great app, i'm just curious as to why there's no AMD64 port

    • Ever store a pointer in a long? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by soullessbastard ( 596494 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:59PM (#13619404) Homepage Journal

      Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] project.

      Ever write code that just stores a pointer in a long and assume void * is the same size? Ever written Win32/Mac code where you dump a pointer in a window reference constant and then just cast it out? This happens quite a bit in the OpenOffice.org code. Of course, since such assignments require casting, they're still valid even if the size of void * is no longer the sizeof long. gcc4 may spit out a warning at you, but it'll still be valid C.

      I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...I almost can fathom spreadsheets, but really the unsigned int row index will bite you in the ass *waaay* before a 2GB per process memory limit :)

      ed

      • Well, if the only issue is that gcc spits out some warnings, why are the gentoo amd64 docs so adament that i not compile OO?

      • If you know what WPARAM and LPARAM then you know that any Windows programmer does this sort of thing as a matter of course.

        But back to spread-sheets... the limitation that always gets me is the 256 column limit! Der!

        Back to OOo... the thing that REALLY annoys me is that the default formatting for number truncates to two decimal places (visually, not numerically thank Gordo) , and if you want any more decimal places you have to enter a custom format.

        That's why I always end up going back to Excel. As a

      • Of course, when you port the application to a 64bit environment you have to start worrying about data type sizes and the way the application reads and writes the files stored on disk.

        There's always the problem of having to do type conversions so as to make sure that the data types in the files are the same size as the other architectures produce. Admittedly, it helps that GCC on x86 and x86_64 both use the same sizes for native integer types (short, int, long) but this isn't always the case. (DEC Alpha OSF/
      • It`s not about being 64bit per se, it`s about running it on pure 64bit systems without the need to keep a load of 32bit backwards compatibility libs sitting around..
        Also to load it on a pure 64bit architecture such as IA64 or Alpha which has no 32bit backwards compatibility mode it`s necessary to be 64bit clean.
        The usage of 64bit machines is only going to increase..
        Also, there was a version of openoffice (1.1.3) which was ported to alpha, but i`m not sure if the changes got rolled back in.

      • I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory, but I'll leave that for another time...

        As someone else pointed out, I think it's more about cleanly compiling on 64-bit systems than about accessing more memory. That aside, though, what about the following?

        • Very large spreadsheets. It wouldn't be common, but there could certainly be times when someone wants to store large grids of numbers in big spreadsheets.
        • Th
      • I could go off on how a word processor/presentation program really should have no underlying need to address more than 2GB of memory

        I thought 640KB should be enough for anybody.

        Seriously, I knew from the beginning that the Z-80's 64KB was a joke; I was one of the first who noticed that 640KB wasn't going to cut it; THE first who realized 16MB was a straitjacket; now let me be the one to clue people in that 2GB (or 4GB if you will) is not going to be a shining mansion that lasts forever. Actually, it's star
      • I'm pretty sure that storing void * pointers in (unsigned) longs is OK according to the spec (Kernel code does it all the time). Doing arithmetic on them is portable *if you're careful*.

        Things get thornier if you do pointer arithmetic with a void * directly (on gcc, AFAIK it'll *probably* do what you meant and treat it like a char *). If you're storing void *'s in an int that's also a problem: it'll work on 32-bit x86 but not on other platforms which have ints narrower than pointers.

    • Re:64? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by MROD ( 101561 )
      Unless you want to have a document which uses more than about 3GB of memory, what's the point of building it 64bit?

      Firstly a 64bit program will be bigger and probably slower (dispite what the zealots tell you) because of having to drag double sized data across the memory bottleneck.

      Seeing as the Opteron/Athlon64/Turion64 run 32bit applications fast natively there's no actual point (other than religious) to build and run an office product (or, indeed, most other applications) in 64bit mode.

      • Re:64? (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Wiz ( 6870 )
        As a general comment, "64bit program will be bigger and probably slower" is generally true. Things that benefit from 64-bit (databases, encryption) will speed up but everything else will slow down. Of course, when you speak x86-64 that isn't true at all. You get several advanatages in the design (more reigsters, flat memory, assume high level processor (no compat building for a Pentium 1)) which do speed it up.

        In EDA tools, I've seen SPARC 64-bit binaries go slower and the x86-64 ones go quicker. That isn't

        • Re:64? (Score:3, Insightful)

          by MROD ( 101561 )
          Myself, I've not seen a great number of x86_64 binaries go quicker at all. This is both under Linux with GCC and Portland C compilers with all the optimisations I can throw at it switched on and under Solaris x86 with GCC and Studio 10 compilers.

          For purely integer code on our v40z's, v20z's and W2100z machines there seems to be a 50% drop in speed, for floating point scientific code generally a bit less. This is the same for FORTRAN as well. These are all Opteron with dual channel memory.

          I've tried similar

  • OpenOffice in government contracts... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Wednesday September 21, 2005 @11:58PM (#13619399) Homepage
    I need help.

    I have a good chance to include the OpenOffice format (specifically, a reference to the Oasis Open Document specification), as part of a specification for a US Federal Government system. The current specification includes MS Office formats as acceptable document formats for reports, etc...and OpenDocument would be inserted along with MS Office as an acceptable report format. This specification will be the basis for a few more related specifications.

    What I need are references to other US federal (preferred), US state/local, or non-US government use of OpenOffice (the app) or OpenDocument (the Oasis document standard). The higher profile the better.

    So far, I've scraped up a couple references but not enough to make a simple and direct case for the inclusion of OpenDocument. (The practical and technical benifits are not always a good argument to make...who's using what seems to be more effective.)

  • Witty comments with submission (Score:3, Funny)

    by gringer ( 252588 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @12:04AM (#13619428)
    What happened to the in-depth analysis from the poster. "X has been released, download it here" seems a bit empty to me.

    I was expecting something like the following:

    Although version 1.1.5 is a bit less of a jump than the upcoming 2.0, there have been a few impressive improvements. None of which I'm sure of, but not knowing those guys who work on the product, I'm sure it'll be great. I'm thinking of downloading this update in a couple of weeks, so what suggestions do you have for software to support this massive leap into the unknown?

  • Sweet: just installed Beta 2 on Ubuntu Linux (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MarkWatson ( 189759 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @01:27AM (#13619659) Homepage
    It was a small hassle: installed the zillion RPMs with "alien -s *.rpm" and then changed the ownership of /opt/openoffice.org1.9.125 to my user account and I had to set some execute permissions in /opt/openoffice.org1.9.125/programs. Not sure why everything was root with no permisions; maybe I missed an option on running alien. Nice though, runs well, and looks great.

    I hope that the Ubuntu team packages the latest beta of OOo with the next Ubuntu release.

    I have been running beta 1 when I need to run Windows for a long time.

    * Healthier hacking: http://cjskitchen.com/ [cjskitchen.com]
  • I'm in the process of introducing OOo in my company and have been allowed to start a trial half a year ago. We mostly write technical documentation and OOo has held up quite well. Some of the guys even refuse to move back to other tools.

    But now, I can show management that OOo is already FORWARD compatible with a file format that they did not even release (except the beta). No FORCED upgrades, this might be the best argument I'll have. Upgrading a large company that uses Solaris, Linux and Windows is not a c

  • MacOS X Version (Score:3, Informative)

    by tranquillity ( 137776 ) on Thursday September 22, 2005 @03:14AM (#13619893)
    For those who cannot find a 1.1.5 version for MacOS X (that also works on tiger) on www.openoffice.org try this link: http://ooofr.org/telechargement/macosx/1.1.5/ [ooofr.org]

    There ist also a 2.0 beta version available: http://ooofr.org/telechargement/macosx/2.0/ [ooofr.org]

    Of course you'll still need X11 to run those applications, but 1.1.5 works fine and stable for me (havn't tried 2.0 yet) on tiger with Apple's X11.

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