Submitted by The news of OpenOffice.org’s third major release has generated quite a bit of buzz on the internet for many reasons, one of which being that it now runs natively on a Mac (sans X11). ZDnet has posted a screenshot gallery of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for those who have yet to try the hot-off-the-press application.
Photos: Open Office 3 New Features
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Adam Scheinberg
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openoffice is pretty ugly software.
It is, but at least it’s free. Maybe SUN decided to give it away because few people wanted it. I’m sad OO.o 3.0 cannot save into .docx… Some of us now start receiving documents in .docx from collaborators, so it’s nice to be able to view them, but it would be even nicer to save them as well!
Their argument is that they didn’t include exporting because it would make end users dependent on OOXML when they (developers/Sun/etc) are trying to move people to ODF.
Btw, why don’t you ask these ‘collaborators’ to install the ODF plugin from the Sun website?
That would be awkward when these people are customers
But the rationale behind not saving as docx actually makes sense.
Edited 2008-10-15 20:48 UTC
Well, when I heard ‘collaborators’, I assumed they were work colleagues.
True, hopefully Office 2007 will come out which will mean out of the box ODT/ODF support.
Don’t you mean MS-ODT/MS-ODF support?
Edited 2008-10-15 23:21 UTC
That is what I said already – having problems understanding English?
You can of course get out of the box ODT/ODF support with OpenOffice right now.
I have been told that Office 2007 SP2 (which is apparently available now) also implements ODT/ODF support … although I haven’t heard any assesment of it in any report or review so far, so I cannot comment on how reliable or compliant it is.
Of course, but *I SAID* that *OFFICE 2007* WILL GET IT SOON. Do you have problems understanding basic English? Dear god, what is it with people here having problem understanding basic English?
You heard that from me, I didn’t have the time to reply back, and then forgot about it. SP2 isn’t out yet, it’ll be out in 2-3 months. I got confused with SP1, which has been out for awhile (and I never really get open office docs so it isn’t a big thing for me)
ODF 1.1 and PDF 1.5 should be fully supported. IMO PDF support is a much bigger thing then ODF, since it seems to mean they are just giving up with pushing XPS as a serious format.
At the risk of putting Kaiwai’s perception of my basic English skills in yet greater peril, it will be very interesting to see what the word “fully” will mean in this context.
MS unable to foist a new format upon desktop users? I agree. That is interesting.
Edited 2008-10-16 01:10 UTC
I haven’t seen any signs of MS dropping XPS. Microsoft just couldn’t earlier include the PDF-exporter with Office 2007, since Adobe didn’t want them to.
However, it has been a downloadable plugin since the release. XPS has been downloadable plugin, too, but probably because of antitrust reasons.
Now that PDF is standarded by ISO, Microsoft can include the PDF-support in Office without Adobe’s permission.
Really? I thought they didn’t include it cause they wanted to flog their own horse, but after all they legal drama they just decided to give up and go with the other team.
Thanks for the info
Politics, politics, darn politics…
Seeing OOS software playing this game to retain and expand their user-base is kinda sickening, but hey it works… maybe…
Edited 2008-10-16 07:42 UTC
What’s stopping you from sending back a regular .doc?
when you reformat files they often get f–ked up
You can save in .doc, and send them back… Most of them won’t even notice!
I like OOo but KOffice looks better to me. I was hoping that by now KOffice on win32 would be more stable and complete.
Edited 2008-10-15 17:14 UTC
And you’re ugly too!
It doesn’t fully support the Mac natively as we are still waiting for the PowerPC version.
Correction: It does fully support the Mac ala Cocoa. It just isn’t a Universal Binary.
If you want to be that technical, I wasn’t asking for a universal binary. I was asking for a PowerPC version, technically these are different. Seriously, would you release a Windows version without a Windows XP version? How can you say you natively support the Mac, without having a PowerPC version – even if it is Cocoa, it doesn’t run at all on the PowerPC Macs unless you have a PowerPC version. If you think that people don’t care then just label it an Intel Mac version. Unless someone bought a new Mac in the last 3 years or less, then they don’t have an Intel Mac. Does OpenOffice.org only support 3 year old versions of Windows?
I should say 3 year old processor as my Linux PC is and it can run the latest version of OpenOffice.org.
The answer to the how you ask is that there arn’t enough contributors for Mac PPC. OOo isn’t a large company that can just employ a PPC engineer just like that. If nobody is volunteering their time to Mac PPC, then there is no Mac PPC release. Simple.
I realize that and I am have no problem with that. But they shouldn’t say they have Mac support when there is no PowerPC version. Why don’t they jut say they have an Intel Mac version?
I must say… it looks HORRIBLE on Mac… The text and icons in the beginning page are so huge. The icons in OOo look so 1980s… Even the little things like the 100% on the bottom right overlapping with the stripes you click on to change the window size… And not to forget the fact that it’s all stuck into 1 window.. Even MS Office Mac managed to use separate windows.. The preferences are still horrible and confusingly put..
Put me off. I mean even NeoOffice, which is based on OOo 2.x looks slightly better. And face it, with OSX, a big part is about the looks
I guess this is the example where OOo trying to act and look like MS Office Win a little too much is biting it in the ass.
OOo, good work so far, but try and focus more on other points like those mentioned above, now that you have a good working base.
Yes. The UI Designers with OS X experience and willing to donate some time and efforts for credits would immensely improve the first impression of the application suite.
I’m ok with the Mac version. I really like the fact that it’s MDI. I really hate the way Photoshop and Flash spawn all those separate Windows.
I agree that the application could be made better on the mac but IMHO, I think its way better than NeoOffice (I had it on my mac before and hated it). It seems to have a better interface than NeoOffice (especially with graphs) despite not fully conforming to the apple standards (which I hope they will eventually do) and the new OOo 3 features are very useful to me.
Something I truly loved with Borland Quattro Pro when I was an undergraduate in Mechanical Engineering was it’s macro language to write data acquisition macros for large data sets.
We had an Axial Flow Fan @WSU [Washington State] that could never reproduce a proper turbulent flow curve [length of the tunnel needing to probably be a few hundred feet longer] but the tens of thousands of data points measuring flow rates across the thin-walled cylinder using Quattro Pro to record was a breeze.d
I haven’t seen much of this for OpenOffice and I realize with MatLab I’ve got a crapload of options, not to mention Octave 3.0, but I’d like to see some rudimentary macro work in Numerical Analysis, not to mention the ability to leverage MatLab and Octave 3.0 within OpenOffice 3.
If I’m out-of-the-loop I’d love to hear from anyone whose worked in this area.