OpenOffice.org 1.1 is released and it brings a lot of new features.
OpenOffice.org 1.1 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
OpenOffice.org 1.1 is released and it brings a lot of new features.
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Anyone know of any redhat rpms?
You can as easily download their binary for Linux and install it via its installer. You don’t need RPMs in this case, OOo comes with its own installer.
Assuming the features work as advertised, that is definitely a nod in OO.o’s favor. AFAIK, MS Office can do neither of these (maybe Office 2003?) Also, I think it’s cool that it has its own installer. Assuming that it loads a little faster than 1.03 did, Linux could definitely use more apps like this
When are we getting the Ximianized version of this?
-Erwos
Hey, I’m all for new stuff for Linux, but this looks like a killer windows app as well…Office 11 (2003) sprawls across 5 discs, and costs a bloody fortune, to get the same sort of integration that OOo is doing for Free.
Just an opinion (without trying version 1.1 yet) but it looks like the only things stoping openoffice from really blow everything away are the startup speed and the looks.
If they could change these, I think the interest around the app would increase tenfold.
Gein
5 discs? Office XP Pro is 2 discs.
I read about some ui changes for version 2.0 that look like they’ll really rock.
I have been reading about this for months, and wondering why don’t they just put a bloody example flash movie up of a presentation explaining why openoffice is nice that was created in open office!
Serious, I think this is great work, but open source software needs to do a better job of advertising itself… Mozilla.org has been doing a somewhat nice job lately (for instance http://www.mozilla.org/products/firebird/why/ is VERY nice for new people who are wondering why they should even consider firebird as opposed to IE). For hard-core geeks like me a screenshot is nice and can get across a lot of the information about a product, but for the average person, they need glitz…
Looking forward to getting this later this week after OO.o’s site has cooled down…
Jesse
Does anybody know where I can get debs of it? Or are some debs going to be in the main contrib repository soon?
but it’s huge and loads slow.
gnumeric & abiword loading fine here on a 200mhz pentium mmx.
1.1 was released long ago if I remeber correctly. I know I have had it for some time now….
No, 1.1 was released today. You remember the RCs.
>Does anybody know where I can get debs of it?
Can’t you read above? OOo has its own GUI installer.
Not office xp pro: office 11, the next generation. I’ve got the beta/2004 version. 5 discs (actually 2 of the discs have <100mb-Visio and Frontpage). My pricing comments were based upon current XP Pro costs (retail) and the intial pricing rumours for this version.
features (nice version) http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/1.1/index.html
features (complete version) http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/1.1/features-text.html
screen shots http://www.openoffice.org/screenshots
and there is no Ximian version yet, so no link to that.
Good point… But there is a flash intro for it though, see
http://www.digitaldistribution.com/samples/openofficeintro11en.swf
Everyone wining about speed is not using version 1.1 and should be modded down. Yea, 1.0 was slow. But 1.1 is 1000x faster. Please download and try it before you judge it.
Wow, that is nice… that is the sort of thing that I think regular end users would like… I think they should have put in it something like “this slide show was created using Impress and telling it to export to Flash!”
Thanks,
ja
When using Red Carpet, you will be able to download the latest 1.1rc “Ximianized” version. Runs perfectly here, on my machine
As I mentioned in another post, you can easily change the looks (icons) of OpenOffice 1.1, at least on Linux.
Go to http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7131 .This is an easy install script to change the toolbar icons; you can use for example noia or nuvola icons!
Eugenia, who cares if it has it’s own installer. The installer doesn’t properly upgrade OO in Redhat and Ximian. Some people want to have it intergrate into their system a little better. What’s wrong with that??
Why do you have to jump down peoples throats??
BTW, Ximian has offered the rc with Red Carpet, I don’t know if they have 1.1 up yet.
Link???
Agreed, RPMs and debs are a valid question. OpenOffice’s default install lacks many Linux intergation enhancments.
I don’t think she jumped down someones throat. She just mentioned that the person doesn’t have to have an RPM for redhat.
I read that as a helpful nice comment, not a “why the !@$# would you want to do that…” comment
in text mood is hard to discern…
(this also is not meant to be a rude comment… so please don’t take it as such)
Well if the version I have is a RC in the about it doest say so. I have had it for a couple months i think. It has a 1.1 with not release date / no RC number… it just says 1.1, I see no release date on the webpage? I just looked in the NEW readme for the 1.1 on the page it says the last revision of the readme was 2003 August 11, so I assume it was released 2003 August 11.
When is the OS X version coming? There where no RC’s for OS X and I thought well they’ll probably release the OS X version when it hits final. Now the final is here but no OS X support 🙁
I’m currently writing a large document for school in OOo 1.0.3 and could really use 1.1’s speed boost I keep hearing about.
Does anybody know more about this?
I don’t know of any RPMS. Until they become availible, you can download their binary for Linux and install it via its installer.
Well.. its build in the new one is 1.1.0 so it is at least a different version very weird.
>OpenOffice’s default install lacks many Linux intergation enhancments.
I just ran its installer on windows and it asked me if I want to upgrade 1.0.2 or install anew. I said “upgrade”, and all worked fine and daddy.
> I just ran its installer on windows and it asked me if I want to upgrade 1.0.2 or install anew. I said “upgrade”, and all worked fine and daddy.
These comments were about the linux installer, not the windows installer.
Thats sort of true – the non-final versions call themselves 1.1 and by default install in a 1.1 directory andteh final calls itself 1.1.0. There ended up being two more release candidates than planned, hence the confusion. You can’t have a release candidate where you just rename the files without having teh tarballs contain the final names
I think it’s a common misconception that to install anything on a Linux distribution, you need an rpm. I felt that way for a long time, until I ran across slack…thats a different story though.
I wouldn’t hold my breath for Redhat RPM’s to be created. Seriously though, just try out the installer, it works quite well. Just uninstall the old rpms and run the installer. All redhat did was change the default font. Just search fonts on OO.o’s site to find out how to make ur fonts look better. It’s really easy. You just have to replace the display font with one you like better in the preferences.
It can do the same under linux and solaris – and really any OS – too. The functionality of upgarding a previous installation is not limited to windows.
You’ve missed the point, as mentioned before it’s all about the ease of updating an existing OOo installation. Besides the last time I tried the linux installer it sucked : first it installed itself on the system and then (part of) it had to be installed again by each user that wanted to use it.
I just installed it on XP pro. WOW. Its much snappier than the previous versions. Very usable now. Can’t believe this suite has come this far. Downloading the linux build…
Basically, your run a setup script, not very tough to do. It copies shortcuts to where it thinks they belong (Not always 100% right that I know of) and sets up the default folders it needs to function. It’s not like it asks to perform the complete installation for each user.
Well, it’s true. It is a lot more responsive and faster on my system than it was before (haven’t tryed it on linux yet though).
Gein
OpenOffice.org Draw looks really cool. If anything is going to get me to use OO again, this is going to be the main point. I use a lot of diagrams when I’m doing brainstorms and diagrams to summarise classes I’m studying in.
Beavis > if its “1000x”
faster, I’m definately trying it; I’m going to download it later.
Can’t wait for 2.0 to be released; I think it was said it might be out in 2004-2005 and its basically a re-write of a lot of code.
I suppose it’ll be in the unstable repository in a couple of days’ time. Or you could try http://www.apt-get.org to find out if any unofficial repository has it.
Anybody tried it on Linux yet? Is there an improvement in startup time?
I am used to install everything in my RedHat box using rpms (and almost always using apt). However, and after reading these posts, I am almost convinced to try the installer, but for one concern. I use OO for writing mostly in Spanish, so I would like to know before I try if the Linux tarball includes the languages modules or not (I haven’t found nothing yet on this topic). If not, I would like to know what progress has been made to make the modules installation process less painful. My previous experience installing the Spanish language module (on OO 1.0.1) was quite frustrating. Thanks in advance for any help and excuse my English 🙂
I was upgrading Gaim and just checked the unstable repository. Presently it has a “debian mixture” of 1.0.99+1.1rc3; I suppose that will be updated pretty soon.
To those who wondered if 1.1 is faster than 1.0.3 on linux, it will blow your hat off. It is so much faster you wouldn’t believe it. I was amazed how much faster it was.
Just one question, though – what is with the “java” stuff that openoffice.org installation wants to know? What “features” will I miss out if I don’t have a java installation, or I choose not to use a java installation? I’ve never figured that out. On the other hand, I never did a whole lot of research on the subject either …
My startup time for OpenOffice.org Writer on Linux is now 6 seconds
not as fast as I’d like it (2-3 seconds is ideal) but for what it is loading, hey, it’s great. Even word takes that long if not longer in W2K on the same machine (This is a PIII 800 with 256MB laptop)
> My startup time for OpenOffice.org Writer on Linux is now 6 seconds
Well, my startup time the first time I start it may be that long, too, but after that it loads almost instantly – doesn’t it do that on your PC, too?
yup, it’s way faster than any prior version. however, something that still makes me laugh is that MS Office 2000 premium still loads faster..and that’s using wine!
anyhow…I just wish they could implement a pdf IMPORT as well. Then you’d really have a knockout app.
Yes, that is the cold boot startup time for openoffice. Restarts are much quicker… and on my Remote X server, when one user has it going already, additional users take around a second to bring it up.
Has anyone gotten the script that replaces the icons to work on the 1.1 final version ? I tried it and afterwards OOo just crashes on startup 🙁
anyhow…I just wish they could implement a pdf IMPORT as well. Then you’d really have a knockout app.
That really depends on how the PDF was created. Editing text in a PDF that wasn’t saved for re-editing can be worse than just recreating it. Words end up getting broken up when the PDF is being created. This is so when viewed, it appears the same as it did on the creator’s screen. PDF is usually for print, not editing. And don’t even get me started on pages with more than one column! Those are the worst!
great new, Ooo Is a truly excellent suite but its’ hampered by some really fundamental things:
1 – it look terrible, yeah I can live with it, but it’s not an attractive bit of software – and I know it should just about how it performs, but sadly so many people see a application as useful based on how nice it looks!
2 – Templates. This was just a nightmare in v1.x so I’m really hoping it was improved, creating and managing templates just seemed needless complex and obscure.
3 – word count on a selection. Something as simple as that is vital for any journalist or professional writer and not having it lost it a lot of marks (there was a macro that did this IIRC, but because of the complexity of templates I always found this hard to get installed – and of course, now it’s damned hard to actually find the macro on the web!!)
4 – a bit too M$ office like.
Don’t get me wrong, Ooo has to be like M$ office to compete, but the single most annoying thing about m$ word was that it did things it “thought” you wanted, and didn’t make it easy to find out what was going in the background to correct it – ooo suffers similarly, some of the real neat and clever things it does aren’t always needed by the user, but it’s hard to see what’s really going on (wordperfect got round this brilliantly with their “show codes” option which any WP user will tell you was a godsend so often)
I love Ooo, it deserves all the attention it can get, afterall, anything that offers real competition to m$ products is great. But there is still a ways to go yet to make ooo the truly best office application out there (but it’s getting there!)
Installed the linux version and it produces pdf’s which look good on screen but won’t print out. Does anyone else have this problem. On a good point, the file size is much smaller than you get from running ps2pdf on an exported postscript file.
Just an opinion (without trying version 1.1 yet) but it looks like the only things stoping openoffice from really blow everything away are the startup speed and the looks.
OpenOffice.org 1.1 now starts in 5 secs in my box, which is much faster than what 1.0 did. It looks a bit better, menu organization is improved but I kept hoping until the last RC that they did something to the ugly dark grey background color … in vain. Toolbar icons are also very modest and remind me of Windows 3.11.
I used the script myself.. no problem whatsoever. I myself am using mandrake 9.2-rc2, and I have installed the nuvola iconpack under KDE. I did a ‘tclsh quickInstall.tcl’ and next time I booted OO.o (rc3) I had the nuvola-icons in openoffice. I don’t know why yours is crashing, but I think the uninstall is easy as well (just delete some config dir, check the readme).
Why do I have to register every time I open it? When I say not ever it offers to send a bug report. Will have to test on another install.
Thanks for the tip.
I actually found what the trouble was : I’m running gnome-only and the script fails (without a clear errormessage) if it doesn’t find ~/.qt/qtrc ! Just added a dummy and presto !
So if any gnomies out there run into trouble, this is the cure.
Look is crap and it shouldn’t be the most difficult part to improve. It would make the whole experience better for switchers, remember “look and FEEL”. Anyway, Gnumeric and Aviword work better for me.
I have unistalled the OO that comes with RH9 (1.0.2) as long as I have seen how much speedier is this new release.
Now I think no one can say that Open Office is slow.
BTW, never tried Office XP on a low spec PC ?
Anyway this 1.1 works for me.
The reason I requested rpms was that the installer for openoffice 1.1 beta which I tried wasn’t straightforward. Should I run it as root or as a plain user. Why does it want to install 100MB under my home directory? Do I have to create links into my bin directory myself?
The rpms that redhat includes with their redhat 9 os was straightforward to use and everything was installed automatically and in the correct locations.
I downloaded OpenOffice today and ran md5sum on it. It turns out that it is exactly the same as the last release candidate (RC5). Checked for both the Windows and Linux versions.
Cheers!
Thats true – the final tarballs are exactly the same as rc5, the files were just in-place renamed. it helps make sure there were no snafus with repacking tarballs or anything. In other words – only way you can cheat Murphy’s law.
It took me about 24 hours. While other office suites (ie. Koffice) take less long to compile.</cry>
Apart from that, it’s an okay program, though i’m not gonna use it, because i dont need it.
Especially importation/exportation of Microsoft office documents is currently imported, because that’s the standard.
Openoffice 1.1 is faster but nowhere near as fast as any Office-2000 and up on startup.
4 seconds they say. Yes 4 seconds on a machine that can execute 1 billion intructions per second. Word starts up in 0.2 seconds (if I could count that). And no, it’s not 1000x faster than 1.0. It’s sluggish all over, try resizing, moving, minimizing and that sort of stuff. Or move the style window about a little. See what I mean ? I don’t care about the cause, I don’t care if it’s not OO fault, I do care about getting work done. I don’t want to have to smoke grass to get levelled with the speed of OO.
Exchanging documents between MS-Office people and me works kinda okayish, but not quit. Styles get messed up, pictures get messed up, tables get messed up and I don’t want to export that to PDF either Flash. Besides that, the actual PDF’s look like rubbish. I don’t care about the cause here either.
If you have a PDF printer on windows, PDF-export is not really a USP. Flash, just as PDF needs a viewer, most people just want the doc. XML as a format doesn’t matter because 100 years from now MS-Office still be there, in one way or the other. The progress they have made in 3 whole years is not so much, that I’m truely impressed. I’ve been using Staroffice from 5.1, Openoffice from 1.0, now I’m back to MS-Office, because that’s the most compatible with MS-Office anyway. Why go through the hassle ?
OK, it’s free. I just pay the money for a real good product like MS-Windows because it’s worth it. If I get OO for free first, then loose hours and hours hassling with it, what’s free about it anyway ? I really tried, but it just doesn’t cut it and it will take some years before they are on par with the competition.
C’t magazine always depicts OO as ‘the better alternative’ but now I wonder whether that just patriottism or for real…
DarrenFolks = Troll
I’m glad your comment didn’t take in MS Office as well cause if anything it is not a “really good product”. Being the front end for corporate printing and document generation we have to deal with MS Office all the time and it is the most inconsistant and infuriating piece of S#%@ software I have had the pleasure of wasting my time on.
Word, Power Point and Publisher are software monstrosities which are unable to maintain formatting and fonts between versions and computers. Most anoying is that many idiots we deal with think Power Point is a program for print output. It just sucks in this case but this is the users problem not MS’s
its not that bad _really_ is it? surely not? i spend more time coding than anything else, but OO.o was ok for writing reports for University.
Maybe you use an office program s**t loads so you know better, but i can’t help but think your version of events is just a little bit _too_ harsh? Feel free to tell me i’m wrong.
/me struggles to avoid bigotry
did i manage it?
I’ve been playing with 1.1 since it got released (no in depth stuff though…) and there are still a few problems compared to office.
1 – start up times. I’t faster than before, but still 2 to 4 times slower than ms office on first start up.
2 – User Interface. Not so much the way it’s organized, although that could also use some improvement, but mostly the looks. It’s too mid 90’s software.
3 – Resizing and moving windows. Again, comparing to ms office, I see some tearing and other artifacts while resizing the main window or moving it. The speed is good, it’s just those those little quirks that annoy.
Anyway, I still think it’s a very goog release, and I’ll try to use it as my main office package for now on.
Gein
Sorry for the bad english.
“Does anybody know where I can get debs of it? Or are some debs going to be in the main contrib repository soon?”
It’s in Sid!
mario
…and one of the biggest issues for me was the loading speed (primarily used on Windows) and that really wasn’t a big issue at all.
The 1.1 RCs showed a bit of an improvement in first load speed for me and amazingly between 1.1RC3 and 1.1 there is a noticeable improvement in first load time.
Beyond that it seems to be by and large a bug fix, feature polish and some niceties (the PDF/SWF exports for example) over the 1.0 release.
There are some glaring omissions/feature holes (the page numbering fiasco being the worst IMO) and hopefully they will be fixed as top priority and we can have a *fully* competing product with MS Office.
I am wondering if anyone has used the Database Access. Is this like the MS Access?
Thanks in advance.
> Agreed, RPMs and debs are a valid question. OpenOffice’s default install lacks many Linux intergation enhancments.
Correction. Distribution integration enhancements, most distributions integrate in there own way i.e. non standard. Debian and TurboLinux are the only OS’s (or only Linux ones) that abide by (dunno which) operating system standard.
> Debian OpenOffice
What this space http://linux-debian.de/
“I suppose it’ll be in the unstable repository in a couple of days’ time. Or you could try http://www.apt-get.org to find out if any unofficial repository has it.
Anybody tried it on Linux yet? Is there an improvement in startup time?”
I updated today to Sid and got it. Just clocked it: 6 seconds
(this after increasing the memory to 32 instead of the default 9 in Tools/Options/Memory, I had Mozilla open). It defaults to a gray screen, File/New/Text Document: 2 seconds. Using a PII 266 128 MB RAM. Not bad!
> OK, it’s free. I just pay the money for a real good product. like MS-Windows because it’s worth it.
Ok, fine then. So, back to your real work and get us with OO.
People seems to don’t have any clue about why OO is slower than MSOffice. OO just don’t have a high level of libraries integration with the OS GUI (like MS office in Windows, or Koffice in KDE, for example). Sure it needs improvement, and lots of talented people are doing this. You don’t need to have a CS degree to realize this.
Please MS-Trolls: Get back to your “real good product” and get your precious “real work done”. You are supposed to be working with your fine tools, not wasting your “precious” time.
Maybe DarrenFolks can profit from this one too.
>>1 – start up times. I’t faster than before, but still 2 to 4 times slower than ms office on first start up.<<
Please take into consideration that MS Office loads important parts of itself during MS Windows boot. Notice the increased boot-up times of MS Windows after installing any Office suite after Office 97. Just like with the IE this gives it a start-up advantage. You can partly disable this feature but not completely because MS Office replaces some MS Windows DLLs which are loaded anyway. Still you will notice a longer start time. I am not sure, but i guess there are “load OO during MS Windows boot” tools, just like there are tools for a similiar ourpose under GNU/Linux.
>>2 – User Interface. Not so much the way it’s organized, although that could also use some improvement, but mostly the looks. It’s too mid 90’s software.
<<
Is it? I always thought the blue frames for selection were rather modern. Anyway, within the word processing application this is a moot point. Usually you use both hands and as many fingers as you are capable to write and everything you could possibly need should be reachable over hotkeys. Each and every move to the mouse is a waste of time and disrupts the workprocess.
>>3 – Resizing and moving windows. Again, comparing to ms office, I see some tearing and other artifacts while resizing the main window or moving it. The speed is good, it’s just those those little quirks that annoy.<<
No problems here on a GNU/Linux machine, maybe it is a MS Windows issue? But i am still using RC3 so maybe it is the release. Will try as soon as OO 1.1 is available in SID.
BTW, i installed OO 1.1 RC1 on a MS Windows 95 machine with a Pentium 200MMX and 32 MB of RAM (our Novell Netware admin client 😉 for kicks. After i patched the OS for UTF support, it runs nicely. Of course it takes very long to start but once it is there the word processor shugs along happily. Haven’t done much but writing short memos, though.
Me babbling, now quits.
Since everybody does not seem to know how to improve the appearance of OpenOffice.org 1.1, this is short instructions how to do it. It applies to SuSE 8.2 running KDE, possibly others as well.
1. First, see that you have ImageMagick installed. You get the rpms for free from e.g. SuSE.
2. Download http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7131 and follow instructions.
3. Go to KDE Control Centre and set: Appearance and Themes > Colors > Apply Colors to non-KDE Applications.
4. Start OO.o and be relieved!
I really don’t understand why people are complaining about load time. Back in the 80’s with the C64 load times were expressed in minutes and nobody was complaining.
Who cares if it takes 5 or 6 or even 10 seconds to load an application?
Anyway, if the nay-sayers have to resort into such arguments because they can’t find anything else to complain about, well, I guess OOo is ready for conquering the desktop of many companies.