OpenOffice.org announced the release of the 1.1.2 version which introduces the FontOOo Autopilot (downloads and installs fonts from various sources). In addition, this release provides improved support for dBase database files, additional language support, and improved XML export facilities.
Why must they STILL insist on a self-contained font-handling system? It looks like total _shit_ on Linux _and_ Windows.
I agree with you on the font issue.
But it looks really good on OS X
Is there a 1.1.2 for OSX?
That was good! ๐ Nice way to start a thread. lol
I’m gonna download it now, thank you
Well, according to the press release, OOo1.1.2 still is not available for OS X (any stripe). Still 1.0 running under X11.
Which is better than nothing, considering. But I sure wish someone would get on porting it to OS X.
The btX2 font rendering engine that is due to ship with Lycoris Desktop/LX is meant to address the font issues.
“Why must they STILL insist on a self-contained font-handling system? It looks like total _shit_ on Linux _and_ Windows.”
thats because fontconfig was not there before on linux and star office was a proprietary product with its own implementation of everything. oo 2.0 will correct all the problems regarding this. thats early 2005. not before that
The biggest thing for me that stops me from using OpenOffice is the lousy charting capability.
If you are someone who has to do a lot of charts, and update them regularly as new data becomes available, OpenOffice just doesn’t cut it.
For those that like to live in the bleeding edge, snapshots of OpenOffice 2.0 are available at the following URL:
http://download.openoffice.org/680/index.html
I’ve tried the binary installer for Linux and it works very well. It allows installation without being root, and it provides an uninstaller as well.
Since that is a very early alpha release, all the disclaimers apply. 8)
For those that decide to test the snapshots, make sure you submit the bug reports.
but, openoffice isn’t a usable product. I used it to build my resume, then opened it in Word and the formatting was completely screwed up. All I use in my resume is bold and bullet points and it looked BAD. Until I can write something in openoffice and then use it in Word I’ll have to stick with Word, because that is the standard for submitting resume’s to companies.
Why should a comment asking if openoffice is still slow and consumes a lot of memory be modded down? I think its a genuine question. Let me put it in this way…hey does anyone know how is the performance of new open office compared to the last one and if it still uses lots of memory or not?
Thanks
Pankaj
Reminds me somewhat of Office 97, with stuff missing. Almost an adventure into the world of obsolete software.
Ximian OpenOffice.org ( http://ooo.ximian.org ) uses the fontconfig system to manage its fonts. I think the version of OpenOffice.org in FC 2 also does the same thing.
Hmm… That’s funny. I built myself a new computer a few months ago and decided not to pay the MS Office tax on this machine and I’ve been using OOo exclusively – and transfering word processor and spreadsheet files to people who haven’t reported any problems whatsoever. I’m sure mileage varies depending on which OOo version you use and which MS Office version you use. For my own purposes, it has worked flawlessly. Just my $.02
Well, MS Word works best with MS Word document.
So does OpenOffice.org Writer.
btw, I think the more proper way to sending cv/resume is using pdf.
I agree, I always use PDF to send over resumes or any other document which demands proper formating, portably. Go figure that it’s the portable document format .
I use Open-Office exclusively for my papers in college, and I have not had one teacher complain about homework turned into them in the document format that I did within OOo.
Ehmm.. Sending resume as word document is not a good thing to do, as someone else mentione, the more proper way would be sending it as a PDF file.
But, yes i agree OO should be able to save to a format readable by MS office since 99% of the world uses WORD.
It is annoying as hell that it takes 15 sec to get the menu up when right clicking on a misspelled word for the first time in the specific document.
Anyone know how to fix that ?
OO 1.1.1
FC 2
“t is annoying as hell that it takes 15 sec to get the menu up when right clicking on a misspelled word for the first time in the specific document.
Anyone know how to fix that ?
OO 1.1.1
FC 2”
For some reason, OOo 1.1.1 on FC 2 does not have the fr_BE spelling files (French-Belgium) installed. Some users reported that OOo would simply consume all memory or take too long to show the menu.
Go to “/usr/lib/ooo-1.1/share/dict/ooo” and edit dictionary.lst. You can remove dictionaries and hyphenation files you are not interested in.
Well, I figured I’d throw in my $.02 on these issues. Keep in mind I’ve not used 1.1.2 as of yet. (Anyone know if there’s a gentoo ebuild for it?)
Performance: I haven’t had a performance issue since 1.0; 1.1.1 has been much more usable than even 1.1; I run OOo on a 233 with 64 megs of ram. It plays nice with 98, and with any version of linux I run. I just set up a word Processing station for my sister, running OOo 1.1.1, and a 166 with 64 megs ram on RH 7.2, and it loads in about 25 seconds, and all the menues and everything come up nice and fast. The only annoying thing I’ve found in 1.1.1 is that the test sometimes gets a little messed up on the screen, and will stay that way until I scoll past the funky part, and scroll back. But as far as performance goes, I’d bet $$ 1.1.2 is even better than 1.1.1 was.
Compatabilty: Never, EVER have I had a compatabiloity problem. I’m a writer by hobby, and I have a USB drive I use to keep all of my stories on. I only use OOo on my computers, so as you might be able to guess, all my documents are OOo native. However, since I travel a decent amount, and I use other people’s computers I keep a .doc versi0on updated everytime I finish more than 2 pages. Keep in mind I’m doing alot of documents very often, and I do outlines, and I like to do a decent amount of formatting with my “ideas” documents… and the worst thing I’ve seen happen is that it looses the font I used… with happens 1 in every 30 times. (since by defualt I’ve installed XP’s fonts in linux, and I try to stick to windows native fonts.) Also I use Calc alot for my school work (graphs, etc.) and my roomate/labpartner uses excell, never once has he complained about my data’s formatting. So, I’m not sure why bold text, and bullest wouldn’t come out… are you using a newish version? I’d double check.
“but, openoffice isn’t a usable product.”
I used OOo for my CV and found its export to be fine. It also made a really nice pdf to prevent certain agencies from “changing” the details just to make a move on a client.
So I guess it IS a usable product: I had a use for it, OOo did it. Sounds usable.
YMMV. I would love to use OO.org to get away from MS, however, somehow its not flawless when it comes to my resume in word/doc format. Yes, I do have a lot of special MS formatting features.
As for PDF files? Most places that I see require resumes to be in doc format, not PDF. I would love to be able to use PDF’s to submit resumes but sadly this is not the case.
It took me a long damn time to get Jimmac’s Gorilla theme for GNOME working on SuSE, and I didn’t spend all those extra hours and my company’s money just to have it not work on OpenOffice.
When, if ever, is OpenOffice going to work with native widget sets?
I would especially recommend Gorilla to anyone in the market for a new GNOME theme. Its khaki-black-yellow color scheme has a comfortable, lived-in feeling to it, and it’s based in SVG, the web’s most “wired” technology. For those reasons and more it is universally beloved as “America’s SVG Gnome theme.”
I would like the OpenOffice team to get with the program and allow this great little patriotic theme to have a chance. Native widgets would be the least they could do.
“but, openoffice isn’t a usable product.”
For all interested, OO.org is definately a usable product and there are not but’ s about it. All issues stem from a proprietary file format. OO Writer is an excellent program, it gets the job done. If it wasnt for the doc fomat, I would use OO as my main office suite.
I just tried the linux binary, and it seems great, especially the fonts. It did suck up about 40% more memory than the Staroffice install I have, both have stripped binaries, but there are still extras in there because it’s a snapshot, etc… All in all if the word filters and the memory usage are comparable to Staroffice when they release 2.0 I’m going to be a happy camper. I only have Staroffice because as a student, it’s free!
Cheers!
How did you get star office? I’m a student as well and I have not received such an offer. I also didn’t find anything about it on their site. Is this your school only?
You’re hardly alone. I have the same problem. The application Impress is one of the worst products on the market. It’s just not usable for any larger production of charts… it seriously makes Powerpoint (which is sort of lousy as well) look brilliant..
How did you get star office? I’m a student as well and I have not received such an offer. I also didn’t find anything about it on their site. Is this your school only?
Answer: eDonkey
Cb..
“How did you get star office? I’m a student as well and I have not received such an offer. I also didn’t find anything about it on their site. Is this your school only?”
Did you visit Sun’s website?
…”If you are a student, researcher, staff, or faculty member you can download StarOffice for free from Sun’s Software Download Center. Login into the Sun Software Download Center by using your user name and password. If you do not have a user name or password for the Sun Software Download Center please register.”
http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/edu/solutions/staroffice.ht…
This worked fine for me! Just register and download. Simple!
<snip> openoffice isn’t a usable product. I used it to build my resume, then opened it in Word and the formatting was completely screwed up. All I use in my resume is bold and bullet points and it looked BAD. Until I can write something in openoffice and then use it in Word I’ll have to stick with Word, because that is the standard for submitting resume’s to companies.<snip>
You can very easily export to PDF this means that the formating will not get screwed up when the receiver has any of the different versions of word. You can also put on your resume that they can get OpenOffice for free.
<snip> openoffice isn’t a usable product. I used it to build my resume, then opened it in Word and the formatting was completely screwed up. All I use in my resume is bold and bullet points and it looked BAD.<snip>
Wouldn’t that make MS Word the unusable application?
The reason I use Word for my resume is because most companies I’ve applied to require resumes to be in Word format. I originally wrote my resume in html because it would be more portable but, every company I’ve applied to requires Word docs (don’t ask me why). BTW, I meant OO is an unusable product for me, I don’t do spreadsheets but, from time to time I do need to submit Word documents. The problem I have is that a resume I created using office xp didn’t show up correctly in OO, when I change my resume in OO it doesn’t show up correctly in Office XP. That’s just my experience so far.
I believe that if you rename your HTML files to *.doc, Word will open them as if they were Word documents and most users wont tell the difference.
My girlfriend, who has years of experience with MS Office as a student and management assistance, has the following to say about Open Office after she used my laptop a couple of weeks for a project:
“About that linux thing, I only needed your help on finding the folder of the floppy and usb-stick, I could live with writer but I still prefer word. I haven’t used calc but did use impress, and that is an application I like a lot, a lot more than powerpoint. I could open documents that where send to me, and for sending the texts that I wrote, I used the export to pdf.”
I, myself prefer LaTeX, och well, each his own tool…
I have been using OOo in my business for a little over a year now, before that we had been using MS Office 2000 which worked well for us but after growing I was not going to folk out even more cash for the new systems to run Office 2000 so we started to using OOo which has filled in need nicely. Everynow and then we run into problems with the formating when exporting out to .doc but it is rear and if need be we had exported the document as a pdf which we find is great for quoting on a job. All in all for the price the product is excellent and I am looking forward to the release of version 2.
Not around here it is not. PDF files are much more accepted than Word files thank God. OO produces CV fine therefore. Also Kile Latex front-end, produces nice formatted CV with photo….
Well, it is to be expected OO.o doesn’t open Word files correctly, since it isn’t a standard. At least, it reads it own format correctly. This I cannot say for Word.
At work, I have had more bad experiences with different versions of Word not opening a .doc file the same way (even crashing the application)! So there is not even full compatibility if you go the Microsoft way. That is not something I wish to pay for.
Just wondering, I have some friends with kids off at school
and wanted to setup one of the suites for them. what are the advantages/disavantages of staroffice 7 as compared to OpenOffice 1.1.2?
esp compared to having to work with wordxp for their documents while at school?
Thanks
“It took me a long damn time to get Jimmac’s Gorilla theme for GNOME working on SuSE, and I didn’t spend all those extra hours and my company’s money just to have it not work on OpenOffice.
When, if ever, is OpenOffice going to work with native widget sets? ”
Try with Ximian Openoffice
http://www.novell.com/products/desktop/download.html
two months ago, i hear oo2.0 will support gtk2 and kde native
widget.but how to build openoffice2.0 snapshout with gtk2 native widget?
http://ooo.ximian.com/ooo-build.html
why not convert the document to a pdf before emailing it to someone? that’s what i do…
I am using OO Ximian edition made by Diffie (look on http://www.dropline.net/forums). It looks and works great. I am doing all my job in OO without any problems.
… my $0.02 …
but, openoffice isn’t a usable product. I used it to build my resume, then opened it in Word and the formatting was completely screwed up. All I use in my resume is bold and bullet points and it looked BAD. Until I can write something in openoffice and then use it in Word I’ll have to stick with Word, because that is the standard for submitting resume’s to companies.
Let me guess, you wrote it on OpenOffice.org for Linux, then opened up on Windows using Word; what part of “font substitution” don’t you understand? make life easier on all concerned, install the fonts from your Windows machine on your *NIX/*BSD machine, and use only those fonts.
Several posters have complained about Open Office not being able to create a resume that will display correctly in a version of Microsoft Word. They then lay the blame for that on Open Office. Wrong!
Microsoft could include a .sxw filter in its products as a patch or simply include it out of the box as a normal part of their products. They don’t and I have yet to hear them announce any intentions to do so. If the resumes you create in Open Office format don’t open in Microsoft Office don’t open or look right, blame Microsoft.
Open Office tries to include the ability to open and create Microsoft Office files by including .doc and .xls filters. Unfortunately Microsoft does not share the needed information to make that work flawlessly so the Open Office team has to do it themselves as best they can. Even so they are doing pretty well even without Microsoft’s help and should be applauded not critizised. Rather than blaming the Open Office team you should be asking Microsoft why they don’t release the specs for these file formats to other companies and products. If they refuse you should be asking your local government officials to intervene against Microsoft and order them to release the specs. Microsoft is to blame for your formatting problems, not Open Office.
Who else here would like to see a calendar template? If Ooo had that, then I would have no further need for Word. But here I am, still having to open Word and go to New->Other->Calendar Wizard once a month.
But still, OOo is slow, a resource hog, and isn’t very portable. Sure it runs on Linux and Windows, but what about the rest?
Luckily there’s LaTeX, which produces much better looking documents anyway. And it runs flawlessly on my sparcstation 5! Try that with OOo…
There’s a tool called pscal (it’s just a a shellscript really), that produces very nice looking calendars, in PostScript. But they can easily be converted to PDF if you want.
http://www.panix.com/~mbh/projects.html
(about halfway down on that page)
1) native widgets are part of the 2.0 release, and are active in the 2.0 Milestone 41 build that came out a week or so ago. They are also present in the gnome.org common infrastructure ooo-build stuff that Debian, Red Hat, Ximian, and SUSE all use for OOo builds. Therefore, its present in Rawhide for Red Hat, shipping as part of SUSE’s 9.2(?) release with KDE widgets, available using WinXP native widgets in 2.0 M41, etc.
2) I was getting bug reports left and right because people wanted dictionaries in the Fedora Core OOo. However, most users were lazy and checked the “Spell check in all languages” option in OOo’s preferences since they did not want to active _just_ the dictionaries they used. Therefore, if FC1/2 had shipped with 50 dictionaries to cover everybody, people would think it was broken becasue they were lazy and couldn’t find it within themselves to only check what they needed. This generally means there’s a problem with the UI or the spellcheck code, and yes the UI for this sucks.
So what I did was package as many freely available dictionaries as I could, and remove the option to be able to spellcheck in all languages, so now users must activate the dictionaries they need first. But, if you had checked this option _before_ installing FC2, its possible that you may still have it active and therefore OOo has to go find all 30 dictionaries which may account for your slowness.
Dan
Many have mentioned that resumes are usually required in Word doc format. What noone has mentioned is that they are usually required to be Word 97 format, no later. Any formatting that was added to Word after that will be rejected and your layout will get messed up. Keep in mind that it is almost as difficult for recent versions of MS Word to generate Word 97 compatible documents as it is for OpenOffice to do so.
The only way to know for sure that your layout will work if you don’t have that specific version of Word is to install the Word Viewer, a free download from Microsoft. Viewer is a small, read-only version of Word 97. Since it doesn’t run macros it won’t propagate any worms, so it’s safe to install.
Of course the best way to distribute your resume would be PDF, but don’t count on being allowed to do so.
Staroffice 7 has caused no issues using .doc as the standard document for my room-mate (A soc. major at McGill University, Canada), I hardly use it except for proof reading her essays.
Word 2000 under wine is installed on my computer, the last piece of software I paid for. It’s there as a backup and I used it quite a bit back when the only other option was OOo and it’s word filters didn’t work on all the documents I needed it to. Now it’s used very rarely to verify documents before sending that are required to work just right the first time, ie: resume.
OOo is what my room-mate used before I found out that Sun was giving Staroffice 7 for free to students that sign up (super easy sign up was a plus for Sun). The word filters just didn’t work often enough, and we kept on firing up word under wine…
If OOo2 gets release with native gtk2 (I’m a gnome user and my room-mate Sara is as well), and it’s word filters are up to par with Staroffice 7 (no problems yet), then for sure we’ll be switching. It’s all about the word filters, everything else is icing on the cake.
Both Staroffice and OOo are fine in most respects compared to windows for general usage. I would note that they are planning on doing some serious updates to the calc/excel program, but I haven’t had any needs that weren’t already fulfilled in that aspect.
Hope that helps, if you can take the opinion of some random poster on osnews!
Oh, and as for memory footprint, I personally don’t care that much. I have 1/2GiG of ram, but with Galeon and 10-60 tabs open (I can’t help myself), I rely on swapping. It’s really not that bad. Sara my room-mate has a P2 350 w/ ~320MiB of ram and she hardly ever swaps out with Galeon, Staroffice, Evolution, Gaim, and Rhythmbox open all the time. She never has more than 15 tabs open in galeon, one or two documents open in Staroffice and a small playlist in rhythmbox.
They both take up about twice as much memory as word 2000 does under wine at the moment. When OOo2 is using gtk2 shared with 90% of my other desktop apps, my overall memory use should go down a bit.
Bottom line, everybody knows the benefits of having more ram, and there is no escaping the weight of popular applications in Linux/BSD/Windows. There are simply more people that want features.
There are a lot of projects that work towards very small utilities, and there are other comercial applications comparable to word for linux, but personally I would prefer to invest in more ram than software with a smaller footprint, as the extra ram will help all my applications!
Oh the joys of create logic, use what works for you.
I use OOo to edit large Word documents with all sorts of formatting. I have edited a friend’s PhD thesis (created in Word), using the OOo change-tracking capabilities, and it worked well. I’ve just started on editing another friend’s PhD thesis (also created in Word), also using the OOo change-tracking, and OOo is fine. I feel that I have really tested out the change-tracking functionality of OOo and believe that it’s really solid. Both friends can see my edits, and can accept or reject them without any difficulty. Why are you having so much trouble with such a simple document as a resume?
i know a lot of people @work who have to work with ms office. i have to “help” them nearly every day with the same issues: “word does this wrong and that to small/big/whatsoever” or “how can i make a diagram like this XY?” and so on.
so i show them how to use OOo and mostly, they like the results. regarding the BASIC tasks, OOo does better than word/ms office – write a (structured -> stylist!) text, create diagrams (i made all the diagrams for a not so small sociological magazine with OOo some time ago!), etc. i don’T HATE MS office – if you need it’s extended features than go and buy it. but i have to laugh at aunt tillie who just wants to write a letter to her son with word 2003.
however – my colleagues still not use it. it’s too much for them, to learn that you have to click on “OOo” instead of “W”. i’ll jump out of the window…
Agreed, it is so much better than Word useability wise for those who haven’t had to use word extensively. But in that lies the problem most people have (I’ve found), is that it’s too different. What would be crazy cool (but probably not going to happen), would be to have the upcomming version of OOo2 to use Glade, ship with one OOo interface, as well as a more Word’ish version of the interface done as best as possible given the nature of some of the objects, and tools. This would also enable others to use OOo customized to minimize the interface options to more specific tasks. I know there is a lot of customizing that can be done with OOo and Word, but not to the extent that you could with Glade. I like lots of options, but I don’t want to spend my time finding them and playing with them, changing the gui how I want it. If you get a chance check out Kazehakase http://kazehakase.sourceforge.jp/ they have a UI level option that lets you select from 3 levels.
BTW: Kazehakase is a web browser that uses moz and gtk2, like galeon, epiphany, etc… It’s still young and shows when it spontaniously dies, but I think it has some good potential, at least for people who browse like me, and use a gtk2 environment (not required, just nicer)
I went through the bug fixes they have done for 1.1.2 looks good, Sure it will be more stable than before.
In my company we are using OpenOfice for year or so and more than 35 users are using it on Windows and Linux. I’d say it is stablising and Making good progress. Naturally if someone tries to open documents created in MS Office, things get messed up a bit if you have Diagrams else on plan doc things are better. If you use OO’s own format to save files it handels it well. We are very happy with OO since what ever OO is offering is more than enough. Integraing Diagrams,Tables,Coloring the Text, prining, Mail merging what else one needs? I bet out of 100 feature you wont even use 25% features supported by MS Word! Then why use a suite that is overy loaded and over engeneered when you dont need it? And at what cost?
Choose MS or OO what suites your needs. Ofcourse buying MSOffice for 35 people will be the worst option in my organisation. We have saved hell lot of money by using OO, one cannot imagine.
I agree PDF is the best format for CVs. The problem is that many companies/recruiters standardize in ONE format (so that they can automate some procedures), and they normally receive 100s to 1000s of CVs. So just imagine what they’ll do if they receive anything that gives them ANY extra work… Somebody commented about telling them that they can download OpenOffice for free. Yes, I just can imagine the recruiter stopping screening CVs to install OO in order to see yours.
It could be different if you are applying for a CEO position, of course… ๐
Anyway, I think that Word compatibility should be considered a MAJOR issue if we really want OO to be an alternative. If you need Word for corner cases why to keep OO at all… ?
Daniel
recently i installed OOo 1.1.2 in my WinXP computer, and the icons in the toolbar are all bluish and fuzzy.. but when i installed the same OOo in another WinXP computer, it looks very good, and normal. what did i miss? some XP settings?
I have to agree with volvoguy… I have not experienced any issues. I have used it for rather complex documents as well. At work, we use Word for all of our documentation.. On occassion, we can work from home, and I have been able to work on documents from the office on OOo just fine.
My only complaints with OOo is startup time and document templates. After its loaded, I have found that it is faster than Word. As far as templates go, Word has its issues as well, and they both are far frome asy to use, in my experience.
One other note… In my case, I was using OOo 1.1 and Office 2000 Professional
I switched from MS Word to OpenOffice.Org a couple of years ago. I haven’t missed MS Word at all and since then I also switched to Mozilla then Firefox/Thunderbird and Linux. My wife also made the switch in a similar fashion.
It’s amazing that wandering around in the software department of any store is now a complete waste of time (and savings of $$$).
My friend gave me the open office link to download it. He said it has a grammar checker in it and will correct your mistakes is this true? I am really looking for some kind of program that does that.