The Sun-sponsored OpenOffice.org project based on open sourced StarOffice code has released a preview of the upcoming OpenOffice 2.0 product. This version touts better MS-Office loading and parsing, strict XML compliant output, a new database program that mimics Microsoft’s Access, and much more. The Inquirer took it for a spin.
Open office is probably the only alternative to the expensive Microsoft Office. I have always use open office and will continue to do so. To expand the share of open office we could do the following.
All educational Intuitions should only use Open Office.
All kids should stop downloading pirated copy of Microsoft Office and start using legal free copy of Open Office.
My best regards to the developers
OO.o 2.0-pre rocks
I’ve been using it for a few months now and I really don’t want to use the old 1.x series anymore.
At first it doesn’t look like much has changed, but you’ll really do notice a lot of changes when you switch between 2.0-pre and 1.x
Oh and the latest pre-release has got new and sexy file type icons.
I installed the Windows version and I like what I see. They are using native Windows widgets now I think, the toolbars look cleaner and it feels snappier.
Has anyone installed the linux version. I’ve tried out the Windows version and apart from it feeling just as slow to load as the 1.x version (didn’t they promise significantly faster startup times?), I really like it. I’d like to see how the native wigets are done in Linux, but they only have RPM downloads…
U can use rpm2targz to convert it to targz , then u can just unpack it and run from some dir, it will work that way.
*This* should be the great “Access”-Killer ? Absolutely RIDICULOUS. Not even the most basic things work properly – this is not prereleas/alpha/beta or whatever – it’s a disaster.
I recall the porting of OO to Aqua was waiting for version 2.0 to arrive since the GUI was going to be changed and it allowed for easier native support.
since it is in Pre release, does this mean that OO will have a more active OS X porting project going on?
Finally! An OO.o relase for Windows that doesn’t look like its running on Windows 3.11! I didn’t try OO.o Base because I’ve never used Access in my life, but the rest of it feels faster and looks better than 1.1.x.
The roadmap said they intended to have a Mozilla plugin, doesn’t seem to be there yet. Would be nice to have it, as then I’d have my browser, office suite, media player and mail client all open source and all working together.
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/
they need help porting to aqua.
deb http://people.debian.org/~halls/openoffice/test/ooo1.9-java/ ./
According to what I see, modules and macros are missing! Modules are very helpful in grouping code that does similar things together or grouping related code together. They could even be employed to group code according to the coder’s criteria.
Macros on the other hand, save a programmer the task of having to write code to do repetitive tasks like printing a report or opening a file…or whatever one requires.
I must admit there are ways to do this but I feel that a system implemented one is batter. What does OO.o have to offer for the above items?
Is it possible to somehow download only writer and the spreadsheet application? I really don’t need the other stuff…
Nice to see that you forgot about word perfect which MS copied from. oops!
Before this release OpenOffice wasn’t very useful to our business due to horrible formatting issues with Word documents, but this new release changes all that. Sure, there are some minor inconsistencies, and there are still a few odd crashes here and there, but the program is now much more useful and this will allow me to consider it for replacing M$’s expensive Office. I’m very impressed with what the OO.o team has done. 😉
”
LOL, you don’t seem to have tested it. *I’ve* tested it’s practically unusuable because of constant crashes. ”
you assume your experiences are universal. he might well be using a different platform or build. besides why are you whining about problems in a beta build?. where are those bug numbers. be specific
I’ve been using it pretty heavily as I’ve got a project report to do for tomorrow. Its not crashed once, whereas Office 2003 used to crap out constantly for me.
Now Linux and claims about it not crashing is another story…. But OO.o actually *is* stable.
I was referring to OO.o on Window$ (which I will be dumping soon)… you don’t need to call me a moron when I’m only stating my experiences on that particular platform… :/
if you know what to look for you can unpack an RPM without any special tools. do it all in a terminal…
“Just try this Access-Wanna-Be-Clone called “Base”. ”
its a front end to hsql
“Please try this, just play around with it. You get crashes *constantly* – I’m using it under SuSE 9.1. ”
you do realise that it could be the well know bug regarding libstdc++ in suse 9.1 that could be causing this?. I am asking because this problem is totally not reproducible in fedora core 2 and 3 /windows
its a front end to hsql
That doesn’t change anything. It still sucks – and I just tested it under Windoze.
Well I’m guessing they share a significantly overlapping code-base so it wouldn’t save you that much space, and unless you are on dial-up or an ancient computer with a minuscle harddrive I don’t see that size being much of a problem– no bigger than your average MP3’d album.
Considering that would take extra effort on the part of the developers , few people would actually want it, and the fact you never no what you’ll actually need later…. I’m guessing that no one will bother. Though you could d/l the source and seperate it yourself. Hmm, maybe this could be a pet project for me for the holidays…
Oh, since I didn’t see it mentioned in the preview, as of October 13th 2004 the apparent release date is Spring 2005. http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/10/13/1323239
“That doesn’t change anything. It still sucks – and I just tested it under Windoze.”
its just a nightly build. if you find problems report it…
whining and being rude to others on here wont help you
Whining about bugs in a beta version of a program is just spectacularly stupid.
Whining about bugs in a beta version of a program is just spectacularly stupid.
So you’re one of the developers ? That would explain it.
Anyone actually seen any improvements in startup speed? I’ve only tried the Linux version, but it takes even LONGER to start than 1.1.x! Now, this could be down to debugging flags and the like, but as someone pointed out, faster startup was one of the major improvements promised for this version.
I really do hope they sort that out — quite often, when I’m demonstrating OOo or getting someone to try it, they’re put off by the horribly slow startup (particularly on sub-1 GHz boxes). It doesn’t give a great immediate impression of what its otherwise a fantastic suite.
Dude, how old are you? And now i am not a ooo developer.
“So you’re one of the developers ? That would explain it.”
unless you are willing to be a beta tester dont bother
“Anyone actually seen any improvements in startup speed? I’ve only tried the Linux version, but it takes even LONGER to start than 1.1.x! Now, this could be down to debugging flags and the like, but as someone pointed out, faster startup was one of the major improvements promised for this version. ”
a large amount of speed improvements if any would be offset by the amount of debugging code. gcc esp with c++ adds a good amount of cruft for debugging.
It would be impossible to “realise” any speed improvements till the final release is made. it would be better to confirm if the windows version has a similar startup time if you are curious
About the start-up “problem”:
Running it under Windoze XP SP2 this beta OO.o actually runs faster than v.1.x, at least on my PC. There’s also a “pre-loader” for the suite, but IMHO it takes too much RAM (~65 MB on this PC), so they could improve that.
@ bng: Obviously you have something against OO.o. If you’re complaining so much, why don’t you try to make a better Office suite yourself?
congratulations to the developers and helpers. this is a monumental piece of work and its looking very good. i’m certainly looking fwd to 2.0.
to those complaining of crashes, this is a test/pre-release version.
http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/pre_submission.html
http://curezone.com/forums/troll.asp
Please….for the love of GOD….make it faster…
Why would you be this rude to everyone? The database module is buggy, so the developers should go kill themselves? Submit bugs to the development team, or don’t bother using the database, but please avoid the flame wars. OSNews has become unpleasant lately. Article comments seem to always degenerate into flame wars, rather than reflecting thoughtful discussion or contructive criticism.
Hi,
I hope OpenOffice takes the Mac OS X Aqua version out of mothballs. The project leaders claimed that the 2.0 needed some kind to Gui abstraction that would come with 2.0. Well, they have 2.0 in beta, and it would seem that unless there is too much anti-Mac sentiment at Sun…
(http://www.infoworld.com/article/04/04/02/HNsunmssettle_1.html_
…there should be work being done right now on the OS X version.
Please Mac programmers, please help this project.
Please Mac users, help out too.
[MS Office for the Mac isn’t Mac Native is it?]
I have been using OpenOffice for over 2 years. There is nothing that OpenOffice can’t do that most people need for word processing and spreadsheets.
“its a front end to hsql”
That doesn’t change anything. It still sucks – and I just tested it under Windoze.
Could you elaborate on what problems you experience. “It still sucks” is kind of vague and hard to remedy.
Don’t forget to report the bugs to OpenOffice.org so that the final version can suck less or hopefully not at all.
Review in few words: Microsoft sucks, OO now starts under 10 seconds on a relatively fast computer, OO components got new names, download is 80 MB but still less in size than MS Office from Microsoft, it is beta with bugs but we won’t tell you what bugs we have found because OpenSource does not have bugs, and did we mention: Microsoft sucks.
After 5 years it is getting boring.
Get a life. Where does ot specifically say OpenSource does not have bugs???? The two things that makes OO more attractive on a desktop are
1. It uses open standards on file formats and (drum roll)
2. It works on more than one OS platform
If you have a problem with that then guess what…. You can choose to use something else. I know it’s a really hard concept to come to terms with but you can. Also for those of us who want a decent product without being charged regularly for GUI upgrades. Personally I’m looking forward to version 2 of OO and this is just a beta but it gives people who ARE INTERESTED an idea of what’s going on and a time frame for release.
No run along and join bng for a tea party.
That was Now not No.
Oh BTW IMO Open Source ain’t the be-all end all for me it is adhering to Open Standards, Cross Platform Capability, and small code footprints. Spose that’s why I like Opera so much.
“*This* should be the great “Access”-Killer ? Absolutely RIDICULOUS. Not even the most basic things work properly – this is not prereleas/alpha/beta or whatever – it’s a disaster. ”
I agree. I have always found even the most basic of features in MSAccess to not work. One of the least useable programs I have had the misfortune to work woth.
“Nice to see that you forgot about word perfect which MS copied from. oops!”
And Wordperfect copied from Wordstar. Anyhow, what’s the point?
Can’t waint until it is released, don’t like beta, want a full version…
A shame about patents in europe, so this might not be possible to get when it is finished… (dont know who owns what)..
I’m running it on my linux boxes since build 30something. It looks much nicer, works faster, and opens document more accuratelly than 1.x series. However, it is still almost unusably slow, especially when opening largeish xls documents. We were installing 1.1 on our clients computers, and in very short time I had two of our customers asking for MS Office after just week or so working with OOo. The reason was they both had a few pretty big (5 Mb) excel tables, nothing spectacular, just big yearly sales plans. They had new PC’s (2.8 Ghz, .5 Gig of ram) so I thought perfs they were reporting (one minute for opening that .xsl table) had something to do with wrong setup. So I tried on my machine, 3.2 Ghz, 1 Gig ram, top notch machine. Well, OOo really takes one minute for 5 Mb xsl table. Tried saving in native xml format, well, it takes even more. Then I thought, well, damn MS and their format, OOo guys have so much trouble to filter it. But then I remembered EIoffice instalation I had somewhere when I was evaluating it (nice chinese clone of MS Office, written completely in Java). The result blowed my mind. It is a full Java app, it should be slower. However, it started faster (2 secs for EIOffice, 4 for OOo), and it opened bloddy 5 Mb xls file UNDER 4 seconds! More than 10X faster than OOo 2.0. It is a Java app, and opened document looked ugly (no AA fonts), and worked slower than OOo, and was using a little bit more of memory, but, they too have to filter xls format, and how in the hell did they managed to do it 15 times faster using Java , than OOo guys using C ++? I don’t know, I never looked at OOo filters codebase, but it just feels that guys are doing something totally wrong. It just a real shame that a free software with such a great functionality is failing short on simple stupid thing, extremely long time for opening of files (btw. if any of developers is reading this, OOo consumes all of processor, and actually freezes all of opened OOo windows while opening a file, really baaad UI decision and programming). And native xml format, is even slower. It is great to have a free and open format, but it is a pain in the ass to explain to customers that one minute load times are a price that has to be paid for that openess. Don’t zip it, give a choice not to zip it, make a binary snapshots, do something, one minute per document when recalculated to work hours and productivity, consumes that “free vs MS’s 200$” argument really fast.
“And Wordperfect copied from Wordstar. Anyhow, what’s the point? ”
not really but the point was that it was stupid to say that OSS copies from MS and MS only innovates
I just downloaded this beta version. Works blazingly fast than 1.1.3 on my P3 933 Mhz box (both on linux and windows). I have used OOo for long time now for preparing assignments and term papers. This beta seems to be good. I am desperately waiting for final 2.0 release.
Cheers for OOo developers.
I also noticed it loads slower than 1.1 here, but I also noticed that the whole “GUI” is very very slow, so I suppose it could be a bug in the part of the suite which draws thing.
OOo 1.x was certainly too slow (like mozilla 1.0), but it was certainly “easy” (read as: lots of “low hanging fruits) to make it faster so I really doubt the final version will be even slower
Startup time is atleast 1/2 of OOo 1.1.3 and save/opening of documents has also improved a lot.
Also, OOo 2.0 blends in very well with the GTK+ theme.
FC3 http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v64/super_science_monkey/OOo2.png
would apple have any intrest in helping with the native port?
I’m suprised Apple hasn’t jump on the bandwagon.
Microsoft has already said it would end Mac Office pretty soon…
Microsoft has already said it would end Mac Office pretty soon…
Microsoft hasn’t said anything like that. As a matter of fact, at MacWorld San Francisco last year, the projet manager for Microsoft Office 2004 got up and gave a demostration and went so far as to say that they had addition features planned in the next version of Mac Office. In an interview later, Microsoft admitted that the Mac division makes an ample profit every year. No reason for them to close it. I’d even say this is why we haven’t seen an AppleWorks replacement from Apple.
Also, OOo 2.0 blends in very well with the GTK+ theme
Does that mean OOo 2 Linux native is compatible with GTK Themes?
Does that mean OOo 2 Linux native is compatible with GTK Themes?
—-
openoffice 1.3.1 and above is
Office may be the best, but OO 2.0 will be “enought” for comanies and governments so they’ll use it.
It’s just like Windows, but reversed. People don’t change to linux because Windows is “good enought”. Office is great buf Openoffice does what 99% of people wants – write a damned document – and its free. How can it not be succesful? Office will bite the dust….
OO doesn’t use the GTK theme engine, but implements their own theme engine that emulates the colour scheme + look & feel.
I find this incredible; why reinvent the wheel yet again! OO, very much like Mozilla, has its own object system, its own windowing toolkit, its own kitchen sink, etc.
Seems like most of the effort of these large projects goes into designing and implementing entire platforms. If only these efforts could be pooled…
“OO doesn’t use the GTK theme engine, but implements their own theme engine that emulates the colour scheme + look & feel.
”
explain to me then how changing my gnome theme changes the oo theme too?
> explain to me then how changing my gnome theme changes the oo theme too?
because it theme engine monitors .gtkrc
Very nice work, OO.o team, looking very good!
My major concern is also with OO.o’s startup time– MS Office 2000 starts in about 6 seconds on Win 95, P-233, 32 MB RAM. Less on subsequent startups. I believe it achieves this simply by making good use of shared Windows components that are all ready “in memory”. It doesn’t require pre-loading of itself to be blisteringly fast. Price and stability and features aside, it would sure be nice if OO.o could even come close to MS Office’s incredible speed, especially on old hardware. No doubt 2.0 will be noticeably faster in the final released version.
I just downloaded it. Looking forward to try the database program.
I have clients that use databases created in Access 97 and wonder how well migrating them over will work.
OO doesn’t use the GTK theme engine, but implements their own theme engine that emulates the colour scheme + look & feel.
That must be half true, because no matter what GTK theme I use,OOo Uses it, so must read the GTK team file.
And that’s really nice, cause I use GNOME.
I’ve been using the developer builds for a couple of months. So far it’s absolutely stable, except for Base, which i know is a WIP. Other than that, It’s fantasic. Can’t wait for the full release.
“I believe it achieves this simply by making good use of shared Windows components that are all ready “in memory”. It doesn’t require pre-loading of itself to be blisteringly fast.”
You just contradicted yourself — the components in memory of which you speak have been “pre-loaded”. It also pre-loads parts of itself at bootup (without you knowing it, though you can turn it off somewhere) and after you run an office app the first time that whole app stays loaded in memory making every new window open faster. Microsoft uses a similar method to make Internet Explorer open so fast. Even then it doesn’t open that much faster for me. OpenOfice.org is more up-front about pre=loading and since it needs to be cross-platform, it can’t depend on all those preloaded libraries on Windows.
Maybe, but that preloading thingy you mention MS does doesn’t explain how MS Office starts up several times faster than OOo when run on Linux in Crossover office. And it doesn’t explain how pure Java EIOffice starts twice as fast (every Java program must bring up virtual machine, dynamically bind and compile thousends of classes, and bring up whole Swing GUI too). Not to mention that the same EIOffice has a quickstarter that starts app INSTANTLY. OOo quickstarter takes huge amount of RAM, and you still have to wait second or two or three for it to open up the app. I’m mentioning that Java office suite only to show that much more can and must be done to speed up OOo startup and files opening performance (EIoffice is an order of magnitude faster with its xsl filters), OOo is too good and too important free suite to fell short on such trivia and tricks like startup.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head… how is that possible that office run under Linux via crossover starts quicker than Openoffice?
I am really getting sick of these “defences at all costs” of opensource software, really… it just takes honesty.
Firefox is fantastic, IE isn’t. Simple.
OpenOffice is terribly slow under Linux, and Office, while being pricey, is darn fast on Windows. Simple.
Probably OO will go all the way Firefox did, evolving to a extremely capable and quick platform, but for now, it is very much like the 1.0 (or earlier…) versions of mozilla: a hell of a lot better than nothing, but not comparable to it’s direct adversary.
*Then*, it will be great to move; *now*, moving means accepting limitations and frustrations.
Where’s the difficoulty?
Lorenzo
P.S.
By the way, the *best* office suite I have *ever* used was ApplixWare 4.x under Linux… that was tremendously fast, and entirely programmable (was completely written in ELF, a interpreted language written just for the purpose of writing the suite); at the time, OO hadn’t come to this world, and, on my machine of the time (P166 w64M), StarOffice 3.1 took 58seconds to load, ApplixWare less than 5; *both* of them were multiplatform (Win/Os2/*nixes).
What makes me sick is that some 20x improvement in my machine’s speed (but probably more… I own a 1.3Ghz Centrino with 768Mb) haven’t succeded in making OO start up as fast as Applix did; at 12 secs+, we’re still at +/-10times faster on a 20+faster hardware than Soffice 3.1.
well, while it would be nice if OO.o’s startup time would be reduced, i really don’t care too much.
ms office costs around 500$/400€ (the standard edition excluding access). OpenOffice.org costs nothing. there’s not much of a decision for me. every time i wait for OO.o to start, i am reminded of the huge saving i made and the nice things that i was able to buy because i did not need to buy an overprized office suite…
but hell, yeah. make it faster. or whatever.
christian
“*This* should be the great “Access”-Killer ? Absolutely RIDICULOUS. Not even the most basic things work properly – this is not prereleas/alpha/beta or whatever – it’s a disaster.”
Already reviewed? Apparently there is anti-open source moderator judging these comments.
Actually, startup is not such a big problem. Yeah it is annoying, but it can be avoided with starting the app just once and leaving it in background (quickstarter or whatever). My main concern is a extremely poor performance when working with large excel files. One minute for opening an few Mb excel file (xsl or OOo native one) is unaceptable. I (or you) maybe can value openess and we probably don’t do too much work with it on daily basis, so we can live with that, but my customers are having a really bad time with it, considering their daily routine of opening and editing and saving hundreds of files. And then they fallback to MS office offerings, which I REALLY hate. Please, please, make xls filters MUCH faster. Aside from that, really a brilliant piece of software.
that making office productivity software isn’t easy walk in the park, so kudos to Sun and it’s development (not matter what Sun has said, it has done lot of things for open source, so personally I don’t wholeheartly agree with heatred against them), also OpenOffice.org contributors which contains Novell, Redhat etc. everyone who has done everything to make it the best.
About OpenOffice.org – in fact, it is very usable, so I just need improvements in speed, memory footprint and maybe MS Office filters. Personally I love stability of OpenOffice, it’s extra features which you can’t find in any other productivity software bundle…
Personally I would like to see GNOME default theme icons included in default install, even on Windows, because they look cool, yet very functional and nice and don’t make OpenOffice look out of date.
So now I apt-getting it so I will check it out how it perform under up-to-date Debian
p.s. and remember, Mozilla was underdog for very long time, and now it rises with Firefox. So I guess sunny times for OpenOffice is still ahead.
Since I implemented 70% of the native themeing in OOo and wrote up the intial spec for it, I feel I have something to say about it. It doesn’t “emulate” the native system theme, it actually uses native calls to draw the elements.
So those buttons, scrollbars, checkboxes, etc that you see ARE BEING DRAWN BY GTK+. On KDE the widgets ARE BEING DRAWN BY QT. On Windows, the widgets ARE BEING DRAWN BY WINXP. OOo says “I need a button with this size”, and the Native Widget Framework sets up the native clipping, determines the characteristics of a GTK button based on what OOo wants, and then calls GTK routines to draw that button. Its not “emulation”.
What it _isn’t_ is a conversion of every UI element to a corresponding GTKButton or GTKOptionMenu or (insert widget class here) element, since that wouldn’t really work on every platform OOo supports now, would it. All calls for graphical elements go through a common sub-layer and get dispatched to each specific platform’s native theme engine.
More than 75% of the startup speed of OOo is spent in the dynamic linker. While we keep fixing things the gcc linker guys tell us with “Oh, we can’t improve anything, but you’ve got x, y, and z that makes you slow” we are now running up against the wall with that one. At some point, the linker guys will just have to sit down and optimize their symbol lookup and bind routines. OOo happens to be _the single_ largest OSS C++ app that gets built with GCC toolchain, and its bound to expose some issues that GCC people don’t want to think about.
The “symbol visibility” patches for GCC (against 3.3/3.4 and integrated in 4.0) have helped a _lot_, and its possible that the versions downloaded haven’t been built with this since the 4.0 compilers are not even in prerelease yet, and the patched 3.3/3.4 compilers aren’t stock.
Dan,
Thanks for your reply.
I have absolutly no problem with the startup time. Why should i care for 20 seconds startup of my office suite when i leave it open the rest of the day?? I finally get an excuse the get coffee?
Thanks for all your hard work its is being appriciated!
If the toolchain is the problem, does this compile with something like the Intel compiler? And how does it perform then?
And on another note, does OOo now compile properly on 64bit processors? My current debian install indicates that OOo is one of the few apps that cannot be installed in 64 bit mode, any hope of that changing?
JC
No, its not 64-bit native yet, but that work is ongoing in the “cws_src680_ooo64bit02” child workspace/branch. A couple months ago we were first able to launch the ‘svdem’ app from the svtools module, which is a simple app that at least displays widgets and offers minimal interaction. But even once you get the thing compiled, you still have to debug the runtime errors where some 64-bit pointer is getting stuffed through a 32-bit data type that wasn’t immediately clear from the code.
Its not particularly _hard_ work, its just complicated to make sure you don’t bust 32-bit ABI compatibility (for all the UNO components out there) or change something that busts other code down the line. In the end, it will be a “64-bit clean” application that runs on 64-bit, but doesn’t take advantage of all 64-bits _yet_. That will come in time as we move stuff like the file reading routines to 64-bit offsets to get > 2GB file compatibility.
ehm, why doesnt prelinking help with startup then? Or is that something completely different?
I am aware of dynamic linking problem and it is nice to hear that GCC guys are finally doing something to address it. And I think everyone here thinks that OOo is a great piece of software and appreciates enormous work and talent went into making it one of the best office suites in existence (and yet free). It is not nice to criticize something that one gets for free and doesn’t visible contribute to, but I would like to point out a subtle difference between “it is piece of shit because it is slow” and “oh God, what a marvelous piece of work, with just a few annoying unpolished edges”. I didn’t want to sound ungrateful, I’m extremely excited with what OOo can do now and will be able to do in 2.0 release. I know that developers are somewhat aware of startup (actually that’s smaller problem from my real life experience) problem, but reports about OOo being not able to work effectively with large Excel files are getting a cold shoulder and being postponed to later releases. It is actually the last little thing holding back greater OOo adoption among SMB’s here, and while it is great to have OBase wizards and HSQL backend or/and native looking widgets, it would be a real huge achievement if OOo could chew spreadsheats at a 2x or 3x slower speed than “other” suites, not 15-20 times slower (or in case of 50+Mb spreadsheats, never). It is a critique (and every critique is somewhat painfull), but it is ment to be a constructive critique (we installed roughly 100 copies to out customers, in period of 1.5-2 years, and that is the only problem we/they encountered). Constructive to the point that, knowing that manpower and resources are (always) low, we are actually willing to sponsor some work on spreadsheat filters, if that is possible (I must admit I was waiting for 2.0 releases to see if the situation will improve, but I will start looking immediately if OOo development process enables sponsoring of particular item).
On the side note, considering your l&f work, really, really great job! And one little question, OOo 2.0 build 65 doesn’t take Plastic (or any other) theme on my Suse KDE box automatically, is there something that I could do to make it happen?
err, I guess you all tweaked the memory settings in the options? makes it start a lot faster. Up the graphic cache to 30MB and cut the memory per object to 2MB.
Ups. Could it be that there is no KDE integration in OOo builds because of licensing issues?
I just installed the Windows version on one of my test machines at work (haven’t gotten to the linux version yet…that will happen when I get home, since I don’t put beta software on my ‘nix workstation here). I am not experiencing a slow start time on this machine; actually, it loads just a touch slower than Office 2003 on this machine (I am letting the quickstarter do its work since this machine has 1Gb of memory).
I don’t have a 5mb Excel spreadsheet to mess with, so I can’t comment on that load time. However, Word documents seem to open very quickly and retain their formatting much better than they do in 1.1.3; I did experience a slow load time on a PowerPoint presentation, though.
The widgets are MUCH better in this version; thank you for your work, Dan!
I wonder if all those people who keep saying OpenOffice is an alternative to M$ Word have actually used it for anything that would be relatively big and that requires a wealth of features, instead of just a few pages of simple layout.
Here’s my take: I used OOorg for a university project report, as I had no Windows box at home, and .doc was the required format. It *really* sucked. There were bugs in numbering the pages (they disappeared), bugs in weird layout behavior, and bugs in the fonts. It was a horrific experience. I really cursed those SOBs who had the nerve of putting forth a software that was, in fact, a beta quality release. That was 2 years ago.
Recently, I grabbed a CD with Ubuntu Linux that has a new version of OOorg, to try it out a bit. The software is unable to write in the Latin-1 character set: no “~” (til) or “ç” (cedil). It doesn’t recognize my keyboard layout (ABNT-2) *out-of-the-box*, and adjusting anything in the “Settings” didn’t cut it either. So, the wife is really pissed off with my Linux love and my anti-Word stance.
Don’t let them fool you: It’s fucking beta software, face it.
No, for that we use a good solution:
LaTex.
But Word is pretty pathetic as well. I’ve attempted to use it for small things and wasted insane amounts of time trying to find small formatting options like “number each page except the first page.”
Word is a bloated mess; I can never find the options I need. OOo isn’t that much better; they just have fewer useless options to get the good ones lost in.
Oh, and type in your name; it’s not that complicated.
i heard mention of spring, but that is a little vague, and checking the homepage it indicates about six more weeks of development.
is mid-february unreasonable?
Downloaded it, tried it, and it kept crashing. I will give it another shot when 2.0 is released, since I use Open Office 1.1 on all my machines; but it has a lot of bugs to work out first.
Base in its current form it’s unsuable and crap.
It should be release only with OOo 2.xx if not the 3.0 but definitly not when the “final 2.0” will be released.
I played 5min to have a feel with it, and it’s total crap in comparaison to access / VB ( C# ) + different SGBD.
For the ‘writer’, it’s seem oky for small “projects”
Anyway, OOo still requires a lot more to compete with office in a professional environement but it’s on the good way.
I might try building OO.o on different versions of GCC, that’d be interesting. But if the compiler’s so important – have you tried building it with ICC?
I stand corrected. I knew there was something different (as OO clearly doesn’t use native widgets) so I assumed that it must be an emulation of theme as well.
As for UI semantics, will the preference be for KDE, GTK or Windows?
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The reason why I use firefox is not wholly because it is free; it is also, IMHO, the “best” web browser. The reason why I use linux is that, IMHO, it has the “best” kernel. Just because something is free doesn’t mean that I should become blind to quality.
“Defence at all costs” is generally what I would associate with the “other side”.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m very grateful and would be lost without OO, but to suggest that it is “best” (free-est maybe) is just a patent lie.