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Update to OpenOffice 2 Released 265

Posted by Zonk from the better-word-processing dept.
VincenzoRomano writes "The very first update to OpenOffice 2, namely v2.0.1, has been released. Despite its version numbering, along with minor bug fixes there are a number of new features. From the update page: 'For example, it is now possible to disable and hide particular application settings, which comes in handy for central administration in networks. Plus, a new keyboard shortcut permits the user to return to a saved cursor position. The bullets and numbering feature has been expanded, and a new mail merge feature is available.' Downloads are ready in both binary formats and source code for an ever increasing number of localised languages. Go grab your version!"
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Update to OpenOffice 2 Released More

Update to OpenOffice 2 Released

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  • Why don't they release a patch? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by n0dna ( 939092 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:44AM (#14317816)
    Doesn't ~75mb seem a bit stupid every time there is an update?

  • Thanks for the info (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bullfish ( 858648 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:44AM (#14317819)
    I appreciate the info about the update, but it's not really worthy of a story posting. I am sure a bunch of games and other software had additions today too.

    This is useful info though. Perhaps Slashdot could make a software update page for things like this rather than posting them on the main page. It would also avoid the inevitable dumbass comments that spring up when these things happen.
    • I appreciate the info about the update, but it's not really worthy of a story posting. I am sure a bunch of games and other software had additions today too.

      How can you say that? This isn't just any old update, this is the very first one!

      </breathless fanboyisms>

    • Yeah, here's an idea. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:09AM (#14318111)
      This is useful info though. Perhaps Slashdot could make a software update page for things like this rather than posting them on the main page.

      Or they could make a dedicated site with a fitting name. Freshmeat, for example.

      And then they could make a slashbox for it. How cool would that be?

      It would also avoid the inevitable dumbass comments that spring up when these things happen.

      At your service .

    • Agreed in part (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Solr_Flare ( 844465 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:33AM (#14318380)
      While I do agree that having a software update section would be preferable, it is important to keep in mind that, next to operating systems, office software is the most commonly installed and used software on any non-server computer. As such, updates to office software carry a bit more weight, especially since you have much larger deployment issues to deal with in a business setting.

  • New features ? Why ? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dom1234 ( 695331 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:44AM (#14317822) Journal
    I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office. Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?
    • Taking your points in reverse order:

      From my recent experiences in converting a small business to OOo - No, most of the current incompatibilities involve fairly esoteric corners of the suite that the average office drone, creating/accessing simple documents, is unlikely to meet.

      Remember that current MSOffice formats are closed proprietary formats - compatibility has to be achieved by laboriously reverse engineering Microsoft's "secret sauce". That OOo have reached the current degree of compatibility is an

    • Re:New features ? Why ? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hswerdfe ( 569925 ) <slashdot@org.howard@swerdfeger@com> on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:06AM (#14318072) Homepage Journal
      1. Pivot Tables in Excel are easier to use then OO.org data Pilot.
      2. Excel has a Text to Column Feature, I have never found in OO.org
      4. OO.org is dog slow Linux, faster on windows. but still slower then Excel.

      note 90% of the time I need a Spread sheet I'm in Linux and use OO.org any way.
      but still, it would be nice to have these features

      • OO.org is dog slow Linux, faster on windows. but still slower then Excel.

        note 90% of the time I need a Spread sheet I'm in Linux and use OO.org any way.

        OO.o on my Linux is faster than MS Office on my Windows on the same machine.

        Gnumeric [gnome.org] is even better (more featureful & those features WORK) than OO.o Calc & is faster still, so that is what I use. The win32 port has come a very long way. It isn't as good as the Linux version, but I find I use it at least as often as MS Excel. You might give Gnumer

    • I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office. Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?

      No. And I wish people would put this red herring to rest. OOo's MS-Office compatibility is very good, and it's even better with the 2.0.x releases. The compatibility doesn't have to perfect. Heck, speaking of perfect, when MS Office took over, it did so by including imperfect compatibility for the two major reigning apps of the day: WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-
      • Actually, compatibility does have to be 100% perfect. I really want to switch users over to Open Office from Microsoft Office, but it's very difficult to make a case when they open documents and they don't look right.

        Version 2 is a lot better, but it's still not good enough. On all new machines, I install Open Office, but I'm inevitably asked later to install Microsoft Office because some document they try to open doesn't work right.
    • > I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office.

      You'd have to pinpoint specific points of incompatibility. At this point, I would have said that support for the Word and Excel formats was good enough, and that instead effort should be put into features, or into support for other popular formats (MS Works, AppleWorks, Word Perfect, MS Publisher, ...)

      > Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice?

      In a word, no.

      I know of three major reasons why people

    • I would rather put 99% of efforts to improve compatibility with MS Office.

      I'd rather 99% of the effort went into anything but MS compatibility. It's a battle they can't win; OOo will never be a better MS Office than MS Office (unless Microsoft actually goes backwards in a future version, of course, which isn't beyond the bounds of possibility).

      What I want isn't a clone of MS Office, it's a good quality word processor that does some things better than Word, or a good quality spreadsheet that helps me d

    • Isn't it the only reason why 99% of people don't switch to OpenOffice ?

      At this point I'd argue marketing has the most to do with it. Many many businesses buy what their local vendor is selling or what they've heard about. The local vendors haven't had OOo pushed down their throats weekly like they have MS-Office so many don't know it exists. Also many of them can't figure out how to make $$$ selling OOo so why would they want customers to use it much less even mention that it's an option?

      Many many p

    • Maybe because OpenOffice's main goal isn't to replace MS Office but to be the best office product available? It's open source software. There's no worries about going out of business or posting profits or anything of that nature. They don't have to compete with MS. They just have to compete with themselves. If the people who are working on this project don't feel like spending every waking moment tracking every little nuance of the MS Office file formats, I can't blame them.

      Open source isn't about some

  • How is OOo doing in the IT world? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by HishamMuhammad ( 553916 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:45AM (#14317832) Homepage Journal
    I guess the fact that OpenOffice gets coverage in the Olive-XP-colored "IT" section can only be a good thing.

    As an OOo user living mostly in the academic world, I have a question for those in the "corporate, IT world": how do you perceive the inroads OpenOffice has been making? How does upper management reacts when OOo is pointed as an alternative? Is it working satisfactory as a Microsoft Office alternative?
    • Although this study [techtarget.com] is over a year old, it estimates 14% of the large enterprise market as having adopted OpenOffice. Just as Gartner studies are said to be Microsoft-biased, perhaps this study might be biased in the opposite direction. But it's a favorable indicator nevertheless to even view the number of Openoffice downloads that are recorded. It's making progress...
    • OO is a great alternative for simple documents and spreadsheets that most corporate users do. Start getting into bigger more advanced docs and the compatibilty rears its ugly head... I prefer delivering my documents in .pdf form. My last job we used .pdf documents because we had to archive all our stuff and do peer reviews with "signatures" and the digital signatures in Adobe were great... Getting Adobe's .pdf writer to work is something I haven't looked into but might help the cause!
      • OO can already output pdf's natively..
        As for bigger more advanced files, you won't have compatibility problems if others in your company are also using OO.. And any correspondence outside of your company should be going as pdf, html etc.. Less risk of metadata or other crap too
    • Some of my clients are extremely pleased with the transition to OOo. Others use software such as law firm management and accounting software that interfaces with office through the MS Office API. These people are, unfortunately, stuck with MS Office for the moment.

  • What's happened to open source numbering? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Spril ( 524430 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:45AM (#14317833) Homepage
    We complain that the marketing people took over the numbering at Microsoft and other companies--like Oracle "10g" when there was no a, b, c, d, e, or f.

    Now open source is pulling the same stunts--Firefox went from 1.0 to 1.5, and OpenOffice squeezes new features into a 2.0.1 release.

    Whatever happened to the standard that major feature releases increment the first number, minor feature releases increment the second number, and tweaks and bug fixes increment the third number? What is the point of numbering releases "2.0.1" if you're not going to follow the standard?

    And who are the marketing people who have taken over these projects who think that version numbers are a marketing tool, and not a way to convey useful information about the extent of the changes?
    • We complain that the marketing people took over the numbering at Microsoft and other companies--like Oracle "10g" when there was no a, b, c, d, e, or f.

      I can't speak for other pieces of software, but the "g" in Oracle 10g actually stands for something. It's not just from a series of letters.


    • Whatever happened to the standard that major feature releases increment the first number, minor feature releases increment the second number, and tweaks and bug fixes increment the third number? What is the point of numbering releases "2.0.1" if you're not going to follow the standard?

      Well, because it's not a standard, really. The kernel x.y.z scheme used the odd/even y for stable/unstable; now the x.y.z.w scheme (with a pretty peculiar usage of -rc) is different still. While a number of projects use the sc

    • Re:What's happened to open source numbering? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Agreed.

      major.minor.bugfix

      It should be called 2.1.0 if they add features.
      • I'd number them based on how significant the code changes are. For example, if the majority of the code for the new features was already present and merely was turned on in the new version, or perhaps it was waiting on a bug fix before being turned on, then that's a pretty minor release, hence the 2.0.-->1--

        Doing a minor version increment every time you add a new feature that doesn't significantly alter anything in the way the software is used is just plain silly.

        Then again, so is arguing over version n
    • I imagine these were just features that were slated to go in 2.0 but didn't quite make the cut for testing reasons, and are just getting squeezed out now.
    • Whatever happened to the standard that major feature releases increment the first number, minor feature releases increment the second number, and tweaks and bug fixes increment the third number?
      There is no such standard. Some developers do follow what you outlined but certainly not all.
    • We complain that the marketing people took over the numbering at Microsoft and other companies--like Oracle "10g" when there was no a, b, c, d, e, or f.

      The "10g" in the Oracle versioning scheme means "Version 10, Grid enabled"

    • Don't forget Solaris: 2.4, 2.5, 6, 7, 8. Interesting counting there too. (Not to mention that uname still calls Solaris 8 'SunOS 2.8')

  • Open Office (Score:2, Interesting)

    by moberry ( 756963 )
    My room mate the other day had a power point presention for a report due. He was going to go to the library at 5am to type this thing up. I was like.. Why? He said it was because he didnt have powerpoint. I gave him a crack Office 2003 CD and told him power point was there. He said he would never use software he didnt pay for, and gave it back. So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite. He asked me what that was, I took him to my desktop, and showed it to him. 20 minutes later he w

    • Re:Open Office (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:56AM (#14317949)
      That was the most boring story I've ever heard in all my life. and I'm not usually given to superlatives.

    • Re:Open Office (Score:5, Funny)

      by AeroIllini ( 726211 ) <aeroilliniNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:00AM (#14317999)
      I gave him a crack Office 2003 CD and told him power point was there. He said he would never use software he didnt pay for, and gave it back. So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite.

      You offered him an illegal copy of Microsoft trash before you pointed him to openoffice.org?

      What are you, new?

    • But what did the Impress-created slide show look like when he opened in PowerPoint?

      I use OOo all the time, but only Writer, Calc and Draw, and these are great for my own work, but they still mis-render many documents sent to me. Anything important I usually end up having to get a Windows user to print out for me, as OOo just doesn't cut it. Some things are even worse than in the days of Star Office 4 (pre-Sun takeover) and MS Office 97.

      This really sucks, as I'm quite a rabid Free software advocate and h

      • I use Impress for all of my presentations and at the meeting they inevitably are displayed on some other computer running MS PowerPoint. I've never noticed any problems... they look great.

    • Re:Open Office (Score:5, Funny)

      by meringuoid ( 568297 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:05AM (#14318059)
      So I told him to goto openoffice.org, and get the free office suite. He asked me what that was, I took him to my desktop, and showed it to him. 20 minutes later he was making a power point in open office.

      Now, come on. Your story was plausible up to then, but you blew it. 20 minutes isn't even enough to open OpenOffice, never mind download and install it...

      • It took me just under 6 minutes for 2.0 from first link click to download.
        The download took under 30 seconds so I suspect Time Warner had a local copy cached.

        75mb is nothing on a cable modem these days.

        STILL- it would be nice if the stopped doing this crap and had a 1.2mb patch.
    • Ah PowerPoint is one of those nasties that isn't 100% compatible. I got caught out when my daughter needed to animate some slides and PP doesn't understand Impress animations at all well (at least under 2.0.0). The PC connected to the projector (in the Uni lecture theatre) only had MS Office so I (having an O2K license) had to redo the animations on the slides. Static slides seem to be fine though.
    • Then he tried to load it onto his professor's laptop for his presentation, and it barely worked. His professor didn't understand why it looked so crappy, even though he tried to explain, and the professor knocked down his grade a bit for poor presentation quality.
    • Office applications aren't an essential component on our analysis machines at work & we choose to run OO.o on all of them for the rare time someone needs to use them. We recently had a meeting with the company that writes our analysis software & wanted to show both live demos and presentations on one box. Because all of the people from that company & many of our own people were running MS Office on their own machines, I thought temporarily installing the gratis MS PowerPoint Viewer would be a

  • New features in minor updates (Score:5, Insightful)

    by tronicum ( 617382 ) * on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:47AM (#14317850)
    Even if this are minor new features I would like them to implement new stuff only with major updates. This updates changes the GUI, imagine you deploy a Open Office version within a company network and minor updates (that might be required due to a bug) change important dialogs.

    Many people will call IT support to get information for such minimal changes that have big impacts.

    I like to have such improvements, but only within "real" version increments.

  • Oooh, markers... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by jonadab ( 583620 )
    > Plus, a new keyboard shortcut permits the user to return to
    > a saved cursor position.

    Sounds like markers in Emacs, especially the way I have them set up (wherein, hitting the key that I have bound to switch to the last saved position takes note of the current position so that it can be used next time, so that I can easily switch back and forth between two positions; it is, or course, still possible to set as many additional markers as desired).

    Now, if OpenOffice will just get grouping-symbol matchin

  • A Decent Draft Mode (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Schlemphfer ( 556732 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:51AM (#14317896) Homepage
    There's one thing OpenOffice.org lacks that both Word and WordPerfect have: a draft mode where you don't have to see page breaks and unnecessary layout visuals. To me, this seems like such a basic and important feature. My needs for formatting and fancy features are practically nonexistent--I just want to concentrate on my writing.

    OpenOffice Writer does offer a "web layout", but it's just not the same.

    I use OpenOffice all the time to dash out letters and so forth, but when I need to concentrate on my writing I always fire up WordPerfect. Lack of a good draft mode is all that's keeping me from using OpenOffice Writer exclusively. I'm sure tons of other writers feel the same way. And I can't imagine implementing this feature would be difficult.

    • You mean like View -> Web Layout?
    • notepad
      gedit
      emacs
      pico

      all of the above will allow you to view your document without useless formating...:D
      • I want styles too. It's useful for me when composing to see chapter and section headings. Word, WordPerfect, and OpenOffice all handle these quite nicely with their Style features. They'll get stripped out when I typeset but it's nice to see these things when composing and when printing out drafts.

        I've used my share of text editors in the past, but I prefer writing books in a WYSIWYG environment. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this threat, the showing of page breaks really gets in the way if you're w

    • Probably best in an environment like LyX. Any other semantic-only system where you don't have to care about layout will do (LaTeX, HTML, DocBook, etc.). I always recommend these for anything longer than a letter.
    • I absolutely agree, and have had an open bug report at OOo for a couple years now. It's issue 4914 if you'd like to add votes.
      To respond to a child post: yes, there's WebLayout view, but it doesn't really do the job; doesn't display page breaks, for example.
      One of the features I really like in MsoftWord (bet you didn't know this one existed :-) ) is the ability to display the Style for every paragraph in a column to the left of the text area. This is only available in NormalView, and you have to set a va

  • To make OpenOffice faster (Score:5, Informative)

    by shreevatsa ( 845645 ) <shreevatsa DOT slashdot AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:53AM (#14317915)
    I just read this somewhere; thought everyone might find it useful --
    Go to Tools->Options->OpenOffice.org->Java and uncheck the "Use a Java Runtime Environment". (AFAIK, it doesn't break anything I use.)

    • It breaks the database and a whole lot of stuff (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:37AM (#14318417)
      Java gets used quite a bit in OpenOffice.org. In OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 Java was used for the following:

      1. The Report Autopilot

      2. JDBC driver support for Java-based databases

      3. XSLT filters

      4. BeanShell, the Netbeans scripting language, and the Java UNO bridge

      5. Export filters to the Aportis.doc (.pdb) format for the Palm or Pocket Word (.psw) format for the Pocket PC

      In OpenOffice.org 2.0 Java is additionally used in

      1. Many parts of Base, the new Access-like database application; in particular the file-format which is a HSQLDB database

      2. The media player, which adds movie and sound clips to documents

      3. Mail merges to e-mail, which also require Java Mail

      4. All document wizards in Writer
    • Thanks for the tip! I don't use the extra features that require Java and I can easily turn it on if needed.

  • Is the update worth it?? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Rac3r5 ( 804639 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:57AM (#14317964)
    I went back from Open Office 2.0 to 1.1.4 because 2.0 was a memory hog. Does 2.0.1 fix these issues?

  • NOOO! (Score:5, Funny)

    by COMON$ ( 806135 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @10:58AM (#14317973) Journal
    MS's automatic Bulleted lists are a damn annoying feature. #1 reason I prefer notepad as my text editor. Dont bring it to Ooffice. Dont know about you guys but I actually was taught proper formatting growing up. Which wasnt too long ago.

    • Re:NOOO! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dont know about you guys but I actually was taught proper formatting growing up. Which wasnt too long ago.

      That's great! Unfortunately, you missed the lessons on apostrophe usage and sentence structure.

  • Longest to compile from source? (Score:3, Informative)

    by amightywind ( 691887 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:03AM (#14318034) Journal

    I compiled that beast on my Gentoo machine two weeks ago. It took 5 hours on an Athlon XP 2800+ with 1GB of memory. Surely it is the longest compilation for a single package in the free software world. Don't get me wrong, the OO folks do an amazing job and it is impressively multi OS. But even the gnome-base only takes a fraction of the time to compile. Is there another source package out there that takes longer to compile?

  • Does it work with Terminal Services Yet? (Score:3, Informative)

    by NtroP ( 649992 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:07AM (#14318080)
    We'd REALLY like to ditch MS Office on our Win2K3 Terminal servers, but the last time we tried to use OOo, it failed miserably - only one person at a time could use it, unless each user had their own entire copy of the App in their own home directory - which is really stupid.

    Has anyone been successful in getting OOo to run well in a Windows terminal server environment?

  • Feature Bloat? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Andyham ( 633438 )
    First off, it is a nice application when it works right, and when you have the time to download such a huge beast.

    I really wish they'd fix the bugs it has rather than introduce new features. I find it's "feature" or automagically changing fonts particularly maddening. Here I am typing away in Helvetica and halfway through the sentence it suddenly changes to Times New Roman. That really pisses me off.

    It seems I have not been able to find a decent free word processor among the more popular ones available

    • Re:Feature Bloat? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Kimos ( 859729 )
      First off, it is a nice application when it works right, and when you have the time to download such a huge beast.

      ~100M isn't much for an entire office suite, considering what you get. Is MS office still on one CD?

      I guess if all you use is the word processor, might be nice to be able to download just parts of it rather than the entire package, but IMHO they have more important things to develop.
      • ~100M isn't much for an entire office suite, considering what you get.

        Perhaps, but it's my entire broadband download quota for the day, and I'm not willing to spend that on a .0.1 upgrade when I've already got the .0.0.

        • I'm not familiar with download quotas, but could you start downloading around 11:30pm, so the entire download spans two days?

          But I do agree with the gist of your post - 100MB is a lot for a .01 upgrade.

          • My ISP package includes 3GB of downloads a month, or around 100MB a day on average. I can use more if I want to, but they charge a higher price for a higher threshold, and since I don't need it 99.99% of the time, I don't want to upgrade. It's a money thing, not a time thing.

  • Great stuff (Score:4, Interesting)

    by codepunk ( 167897 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @11:50AM (#14318531)
    OO is the greatest thing since sliced bread.... We now use php to generate odt formatted documents straight from the web servers and OO in headless mode to auto generate three formats odt, pdf and doc...

    Keep it up team we love OO...
    • Would you be willing to publish the code that does the php to odt generation out there?
    • Of course but it is childs play anybody can do it...

      Create a document in open office and put some tags in where you would
      like your form fields to be displayed. Now unzip the resulting document
      and use this for a template. When a form is submitted do a directory copy of the document contents to a temp location then using replace input the field elements into content.xml . Next have the php script zip the temporary directory back up with a odt extension.

      You can at this point you have a odt file which can be re

  • Saved cursor positions? Amazing! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Stormbringer ( 3643 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @01:01PM (#14319358)
    Plus, a new keyboard shortcut permits the user to return to a saved cursor position.

    Not that I'm not very glad that OOo is here and getting better, but...

    this catches them up to WordStar 2.6 on CP/M, circa, what, 1978? (^K1..9 to set one of the markers, ^Q1..9 to go there, ^Qv to get back to where you were before a file operation). Yay team!

  • Good News... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by tolendante ( 865207 ) on Thursday December 22, 2005 @01:20PM (#14319592)
    I've been using OpenOffice.org for my primary work office suite for over three years now and I'm very, very happy with it. I have students that turn things in in the most obscure, dated formats imaginable and I've only had, maybe, six or seven times out of say 1000 assignments that I wasn't able to open the file and work with it. Of course, if students just understood how to do a "Save as.." command, I wouldn't have to worry about it.
  • And STOP spending so much effort lending credibility to ms orifice. Lotus SmartSuite and a user interface that is quite enjoyable to me.

    For example, I'd a few years ago written to you and asked you to LOOK at and USE SmartSuite to enhance what you keep claiming as document insertion/linking.

    In Lotus WordPro, when I create a master document that has material OWNED by others (or, by myself) and which should NOT be bastardized by a master file format/style, I simply go to the menu and select Create/Insert docu

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