OpenOffice.org 3.0 is 167 days away, but who's counting? Maybe the software developers are counting because they have a whopping 2,278 issues targeted for this release. Even though OpenOffice.org 2.4 is not yet out the door, let's see how far they've come with OpenOffice.org 3.0.
The redesigned splash screen and about dialog:
Please keep in mind this article is based off an alpha release, so many things will change before the final release.
Start center
When OpenOffice.org 3 starts without a document and without a module (such as Writer), it presents the new Start Center.
View multiple pages in Writer
One of the most ever voted issues is viewing multiple pages in writer. Notice the two new controls in the statusbar (bottom-right-hand corner) of the first screenshot: the "View Layout" mode selection and the zoom slider. The "View Layout" control switches between a single page, several pages side by side, and book layout.
Pretty notes in the margin
The much anticipated improvement called Notes2 is nearly ready. It will refresh the look, introduce rich formatting and spell checking, aid accessibility, and boost usability while displaying notes in the margin.
The current DEV300_m3 alpha release only supports marking a single point with a note; a later version will allow marking a selection of text with a note. However, 3.0 will not track changes in the margin.
Microsoft Office 2007 file format support
Microsoft Office 2007 (also called Office Open XML) file formats include .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx. Despite the similarity in names, these formats are significantly different than the Microsoft Office formats used since 1997. OpenOffice.org 3 offers native import.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 DEV300_m3 converted this reference .docx document with mediocre quality. The notable problems were tracked changes, a comment, columns, an image, and an embedded Excel document. For comparison, the same document is shown rendered in Word 2007 and in OpenOffice.org 3.0 DEV300_m3.
Surely the quality of conversion will improve before September's final release.
Tip: To access .docx, .xlsx, and .pptx files in OpenOffice.org 2.4, see previous Office 2007 file format articles and odf-converter-integrator.
Solver in Calc
It's the perfect solution for your linear optimization needs. The feature announcement explains:
Calc now has a linear optimization solver. It finds a set of input values that maximize or minimize an objective function, while satisfying a set of constraints.
A linear programming model is defined by formulas in spreadsheet cells, the objective and constraints are specified in a dialog. Input variables can be defined to be integer or binary (mixed integer linear programming).
Need a solver now? See Kohei's solver.
New theme in Calc
Calc 3.0 paints selections with translucence and renders column and row headers with a glass effect. Version 2.4 is shown first for comparison.
Native tables in Impress
Impress 3.0 has native tables. The new Table Design panel (shown on the right) makes it easy to apply colors.
Error bars in charts
Don't make any mistakes about it: OpenOffice.org is serious about improving charts for scientific uses. OpenOffice.org 3.0 has error bars in charts.
OpenOffice.org 2.4 also made progress in charts:
More columns in Calc
Calc 3.0 extends the maximum columns from 256 to 1024.
More
Wait, that's not all! Download now and you'll also get:
- Official support for Mac—using the pretty Aqua interface
- Performance improvements
- Simultaneous editing of spreadsheets by multiple users
- Cross-references to headings
- Updates to embedded fields in mail merges from Calc
- Displaying PostScript OpenType fonts on Linux and Solaris
- Titles for secondary axes in charts
- OpenDocument Format 1.2
- ...and much more! Issue Tracker: Issues marked fixed for 3.0 (number of issues will increase as September approaches)
What's missing
With months left to go, there's several pieces still missing.
- Importing standard PDF files
- Hybrid PDFs: fully editable PDFs with embedded OpenDocument files (issue 65397)
- Presenter view in Impres
- Dictionaries as extensions (to replace DicOOo)
- Macros in Base documents
- Bug testing
A year ago in OOoCon 2007's keynote address, Louis Suárez-Potts, Community Manager of OpenOffice.org, touched on many ideas for OpenOffice.org 3.0. Many are already fulfilled ahead of schedule in 2.4 or earlier: rectangular selection, wiki export, new chart module, and the Pentaho report engine.
However, one feature you may not see this year is an Outlook replacement. For years, there have been talks of including Mozilla's Thunderbird and Lightning (calendar) application with OpenOffice.org. However, not much as come of it yet. Perhaps with the financial resources of the new Mozilla Messaging Corporation, the Mozilla Calendar will get the boost it needs.
Conclusion
OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be an excellent release. To make it better, please see Top 12 reasons to test the OpenOffice.org 2.4 release candidate for a guide to testing any version of OpenOffice.org.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 downloads (marked DEV300 or BEA300, not OOH) are available from:
- Developer snapshots
- OpenOffice.org mirrors in the developer/DEV300_* subdirectory
- Pavel Janik's site
- Mac OS X port download page with Intel and PowerPC
64-bit Linux versions are not yet available. Caution: this is an alpha build and is not intended for everyday use. It may cause problems, so use it only for testing purposes.
Related articles
- OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta?
- Galaxy icon set in OpenOffice.org 3.0
- Desktop start icon in OpenOffice.org 3.0
- Interactive picture crop in Draw and Impress in OpenOffice.org 3.0
- PDF import and hybrid PDFs as a new extension for OpenOffice.org 3.0
- New features in OpenOffice.org 2.4
212 comments:
I like all the features, and the UI!
There are only a few things keeping me in the M$ software suite:
1. Compatibility -- you must have 99.9% compatibility in a business setting. Nobody likes not being able to see the columns on a formatted word document. Alas, word is still the de facto standard. If a true open format emerges (.ods?) I would switch in a heartbeat.
2. A few features -- e.g. datapilot (pivot tables) is simply not as good as Word's.
3. Speed - OOwriter startup speed is abysmal, even with prefetching on Linux. This must be improved.
I really look forward to the next release! Keep going, Sun!
I haven't had any problems with 'features' since 2.0, but for goodness sake spend some time updating the Word 97 style icons!
x error bars?
Start up speed in OpenOffice is fine for most modern computers.
It's not so great on slower machines with not a whole lot of RAM, if you wanted to speed it up you can follow these instructions:
http://tuxtraining.com/2008/03/04/speed-up-start-time-for-openofficeorg/
1st poster - 'Keep going, Sun!' Ermm...... OpenOffice dude, yep based on StarOffice but don't go giving Sun all the praise.
As far as compatibility is concerned who says de facto is Microsoft? They wouldn't know de facto if it grew pricks and they sat on it! They change the standards with every release (especially now with this docx crap). Ask any IT support guy how many times he's advised someone to resend the attachment as a .doc or a .rtf as the receiver can't read it.
Why keep up with MS standards - make THEM keep up with OPEN standards - if OpenOffice contributors didn't have to spend so much time assuring MS compatibility to try and get their product in the mainstream then it would be one hell of a lot better than it is now.
Nuff said - I'll get my coat.
@anonymous: Try using some of the other icon sets like industrial or tango, it's the windows OO.o icon set that sucks.
What drives me nuts when using OOo is the lack of a "Normal" view that MSWord has. That view basically lops the top and bottom margins off the page so that there isn't a big jump at page breaks. The "Web view" is not an acceptable substitusion as it reformats the paragraphs in the view.
Guys, keep up the good work. We need a decent free Office Suite on the Mac platform.
Cheers,
http://www.unofficialmac.com
http://www.pspport.com
I would love to see improvements in converting MSACCESS databases to Open Office Base Projects. I would also like the ability to print directly from the Base query results grid listing.
Still no proper support for envelope addressing?
In word, you connect directly to an address book and pull full addresses out in one go.
In Open Office, you get some incomprehensible, field by field access to a data base you are supposed to design and then link to.
OK I have office 2007 on my work PC... Could with OOO? Well lets see:
Word = Writer
Xcel = Calc
Power Point = Presenter
Access = Base
Outlook = Not available
Visio = Not available
Project = Not available
OneNote = Not available
Infopath = Not available
Groove = Not available
Picture Manager = Not available
Frontpage ... ok I'm not counting that one...
OOO is not even half of a suite! It seems to me that the development is very slow. There are basically no new features sing half a decade! MS is running circles around you. An then there is the performance of OOO. Lets not even go there; Microsoft's has 10x the features and stil opertes and starts faster.
The reason many people use outlook is not because it just provides email functionality, but because there's a rich interface for 3rd party apps to integrate into outlook on the client side as well as for the outlook server on the server side. While some of these features have caused basic users issues with viruses that used these features, but for many enterprises, these 3rd party apps are irreplaceable.
What I notice with open source advocates is that they start implementing features without considering all reasons why people use what seems as bad software.
Base<>Access
Base lacks the support of VB code running behind access.
This really puts a clamp down on how creative you can be in base - this needs to be addressed.
And not to be nit picky, but hire a decent graphic artist to update the Windows 3.1 icons.... =\
It seems that several things have been left out of OOo 3.0 that would make people switch in an instant, such as:
1. Book layout features in Writer, including better kerning, paragraph-level letter spacing and hyphenation, microtypography, and automatic ligatures. I know that a lot of open-source people will say, "Use TeX." But why is this still necessary in 2008? TeX isn't particularly easy to install, doesn't support system (TrueType/OpenType) fonts without special packages like Xetex, and isn't WYSIWYG. With the growth of on-demand book publishing, there has to be an easier way to produce high-quality layouts.
2. Better native integration with content management systems and blogs (including support for Blogger, WordPress, ATOM, and MetaWeblog APIs). Writer requires the $10 Sun Weblog Publisher extension. Word 2007 has a built-in direct-to-blog publishing capability, so why not Writer?
3. Support for synchronized audio in Impress.
4. Built-in Adobe Presenter-like Flash export for Impress (self running presentations, hopefully with the option of continuous talking-head presenter videos, which both Adobe Presenter and Articulate Presenter currently lack).
Hi!,
thanks all for a great piece of software!
I only would like to point a couple of things it would be great for you to improve/include:
Preview option: I've been using Draw a LOT and it would be really useful to include a Preview button on the dialog screens so you can see how the changes reflect in the actual drawing (also applies to Impress).
Calc's Better Feel: Is still difficult to drag and drop cells and selections on Calc, it could be greatly improved.
thanks again for the great software, I've been caimpaigning to get it used among all my coworkers and friends (and getting themto switch to linux while they're at it :P)
Wow, I'm still shocked to see that the Calc limit of rows has not been fixed. Even office 2007 fixed this artificial limitation.
Grrr...
What is really missing is modernizing the UI for both aesthetics AND usability as discussed last summer on ux-list. Also the UI is very spammy on gold-plating information and the style formating system is plain CCCP.
That's mostly worthy of giving it 1.0a instead of 3.0.
How hard is it to implement the most requested feature of
Style templates and autogen of tables
Just put in
Style templates and autogen of tables
and I'll use it.
The only thing that keeps me on Word is
Style templates and autogen of tables
and the only thing that makes my boss insist on Word is
Style templates and autogen of tables
and the only thing that keeps my colleagues on Word is
Style templates and autogen of tables
and there number one complaint is that Openoffice doesn't have
Style templates and autogen of tables
How hard is it to get this right people? Come on. For the love of God... do I need to code it myself?
I am very disappointed that OOo writer will STILL not have an outlining feature. It has been "in the works" for years. As a professional writer, I use it frequently in Word, and is the biggest reason I continue to use Word.
We so need better data manipulation in calc. Text to columns is an absolute requirement.
Also smaller items like remembering the last setting to sort with the first row being column labels.
Please, PLEASE: A good outliner.
What about R1C1 (row-column) notation in Calc?
Matrix notation is notably more readable when one has to inspect complex formulas.
The option to choose preferred notation for cells is a must - the reason why I some wouldn't switch from Excel.
I would really love to see the possibility to use all draw features in writer, especially the connectors.
The previous comments' complaints about OOo not including Outlook are just silly. Yes, OOo does not include an email browser, nor a web browser. It also "fails" to include a genealogy program. If you want a web browser - or a genealogy program - go get one. I use OOo along with Thunderbird (email browser) and Firefox (web browser) - they work fantastically well together. I would much prefer that OOo work hard on being good at what it does, and then use other programs that are good at what they do.
well i was really interested in this....until i saw that they still have 90% of the shit i was complaining about a few years ago...so looks like im stuck with microshaft...
And still no outline mode...
By the way, the lack of an outline mode is issue #3959 and we will soon celebrate its sixth birthday ! Apparently no ones writes complex documents using Openoffice.
We get PDF editing facilities in 3.0.
I think that is a way cool feature.
Stephan, what are you talking about? Open office does not seek to replicate every Microsoft desktop application, just core office tools.
Instead of Visio, try Dia.
Instead of Outlook, try Thunderbird.
Instead of Project, try Open Workbench.
Picture Manager, there are hundreds but Picasa is worth a try.
Frontpage has a better competitor in NVU - unless you want messy HTML that caters only to IE.
I love Open Office and prefer it to MS Office (especially since 2007). Keep up the great work!
I don't care if anything is new if they would just fix all the format problems. I have yet to make a document truly functional in different programs.Open a doc in word from open office and you are lucky if it's close. It definitely won't be acceptable at school or work. Fix that and I'll use it every time. Right now I always have to check my Open Office docs in Word before I submit anything anywhwere.
How about an OSX version for PPC? Not everyone can afford a newer MacTel machine.
Anonymous:
PPC Aqua 3.0 here
http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/DEV300_m2/
We need a good easy to use outliner like Word has. Many folks want to use OO Writer but the OO Writer outliner forces us to use Word instead.
Here's another vote for OUTLINING. Last time I checked, it wasn't even in the plans.
This is sooooo important to so many people, I can't understand why the developers work so hard on hundreds of other features, and ignore outlining.
It's like building the most beautiful house in the world, with every imaginable feature, except, by the way, there's no bathrooms.
Does it have split screen of the same document yet?
I work translating documents and this is about the only thing that keeps me tied to microsoft office.
UI looks the same?
i thought they were targetting Office 2007
not Office 2003... :(
when will the interface look more modern?
Basic oowriter feature I'm waiting for: The ability to select a paragraph, cut it, go somewhere else and past it, without screwing up the formatting of surrounding paragraphs. Even MacWrite could do this for crying out loud.
about compatibility: MS Office isn't compatible with MS Office as soon as you change printers. Enough said.
Pivot tables: you use them in Word? Sicko!
Speed: startup is being improved.
Appearance: I really like Tango. Also, using themes in Windows or KDE or GNOME or Aqua vastly improves things.
Writer: 'normal view', can be closely matched with 'optimal' zoom setting. As far as formatting goes, NV in Word had me scratching my head a few times.
Envelope addressing: What do you mean by that? You can create any paper format you want (prerecorded envelope size for direct envelope printing), or use the wizard for positioned address block generation (a few clicks) or use the dedicated stickers template for stickers generation.
Visio: see Draw (actually, with its3D modeling capabilities, Draw kicks Visio's butt); Infopath: Writer supports Xforms natively...; OneNote: eugh! Others: it's a productivity suite, not a kitchen... Outlook: use Evolution or Thunderbird+Sunbird (integration with OOo on the way)
Style templates: go to File > Document models > Manage... and add your custom style templates (styles cover every and all aspects of a document; create your own, set as default, done!)
Table autogen: what's that? An auto incremented key in Base, or simply getting cut'n'paste abilities of tables? NEwsflash, you copy your external table in Calc, then copy and paste the result in Writer: here, you got a table.
Content generation: OOo already does mediaWiki and XHTML. You want more, write the output plugin.
Document outlining, though, that's true...
chrishillman,
I want OSS to succeed. But.
Thunderbird is NOT an Outlook replacement for lots of reasons; it does not talk to exchange, and it does not have a calendar, just to mention 2 items... you should know better. I never mentioned a web browser... DIA is a joke compared to Visio. What I did do is show an example of what many office workers do have today, and how OOO compares to it in features. Given that, try to convince them to use OOO. What you need is a compelling reason to switch (so innovate, make it actually better, faster, and more feature rich). Feature wise, OOO is really competing with MS Works. I would like to see that change. Perhaps that is why I am a bit frustrated at the SLOOOOWW development in OOO. Also, as for selling a move to OOO to the corporations; money is not everything, or everyone would take the bus or drive a Yugo. Companies will pay money for something they feel gives them value for the money... so few have selected OOO since, even though it is free, MS still offers more value (delta in features). Few consumers use it since Sun does not pay Dell, HP, etc. for installing it on their consumer products. The result: few people use it. I would like to see that change;because it is in everyones long term best interest; so I hope that the features get added such that perhaps more businesses are open to the idea of switching.
OK I have office 2007 on my work PC... Could with OOO? Well lets see:
Word = Writer
Xcel = Calc
Power Point = Presenter
Access = Base
Outlook = Ximian/Evolution Thunderbird
Visio = DIA
Project = Workbench
OneNote = Tomboy
Infopath =OpenMRS
Groove = ok... i don't have one..
Picture Manager = Draw; GIMP
Frontpage ... Quanta Plus, Bluefish, NVU,
OOO is not even half of a suite!
There are other products and applications that do the same job. Do they have to be by the same company? Nope.
Well, does that include
It seems to me that the development is very slow.
A new release comes out every 6 months. Office 2003 to Office 12 (2007). That is 4 years. Hmmm. Ok...
There are basically no new features sing half a decade!
You obviously haven't used OO.o. How about exporting PDF's? Soon; the ability to edit PDF's? I could go on; but you get my point. Also; the document formats are open; any program that supports an open format can be used to access the data. You aren't locked into one vendor. Can you say that about MS products? No... I consider that innovative. Sun is confident in their products. Is MS as confident in their products to use
1) An Openformat
2) Make it default
Vendor lock-in says they aren't confident in their products.
MS is running circles around you.
With malware; viruses. But really; how about the office suites... Lets talk. MS hasn't had a decent idea since day one. Almost all of their products have been via acquisition.
MS Word = Xenix systems
IE = Spyglass
Groove = Groove Networks
Shall I go on?
MS outspends companies by acquiring companies. That doesn't mean that are running circles around anyone (out spending, yes). The products speak for themselves. Something like 50-100 million OO.o users. The users are speaking and have spoken.
An then there is the performance of OOO. Lets not even go there; Microsoft's has 10x the features and stil opertes and starts faster.
Well, you obvious haven't see the performance gains that OO.o has made. I have a 1 second start up with OO.o and about a 1 second start up with MS Office. Now here is a performance test MS fails on that OO.o beats hands down. Open a document with tons of images. Every time you scroll up and down Word has to reload the images; not so in Writer. When the document is loaded; it works; that isn't the case with Word. I guess that would be a feature of Word. ;-)
10x the features and 10x the bloat. I guess you haven't heard of the 90/10 rule. Also; how much does your version of Office cost: $399 (retail).
$0 != $399
Issue all your pseudo-complaints you wish; people use OO.o and the number of users is growing. As the user base grows so does: support, features and the (greater) adoption by business. Like it or not; OO.o is hear to stay.
It would seem to me a lot of people are missing the point of this type of software.
People are making the crazy comparison between this and office 2007 and one person lists all that this has to offer.. but fails to mention that this package costs £500, OpenOffice costs £0.
And someone mentions that people use outlook because of its intergration into Exchange... failing to mention that exchange costs $600 - $3000, so not only have you paid for Outlook, someone else has paid for you to be able to use those features if not your self.
I only ever need to write a document or a spreadsheet everyonce in a while. If someone wants to create a tool as vast as this and let me have it for free then great. If I ever need something like Office, ill use Office.
Stephan,
You're kidding right?
1. MS Works has sucked frn=om day 1 and should only be compared to that word processor that ran on the GEOS OS on a C64.
2. Visio rocks, then again Microsoft didn't build it, they bought it (and yes continued to develop it.) Then again you really need Visio Pro for it to rock, the standard edition is only average.
3. Thunderbird has calendaring via a plugin and recently it really started to work well, but Zimbra is where you need to be going if your talking about the Outlook/Exchange killer. Why do you think MS is trying to buy Yahoo? I guarantee a large part is to squash Zimbra. Having administered both Exchange and Zimbra i'll tell ya Exchange is a piece of shit, and zimbra makes exchange look like it was developed by a bunch of retarded monkeys.
3. You can't compare OO to your entire list as MS Office doesn't include all that you list.
4. Companies very often pay for perceived value, not actual value. Most companies leverage about 10% of the features of the products they have. Most of the "features" you speak of in MS products go unused by the majority of peple because they just arent necessary of are too hard to find when you need it.
Are you one of those retarded monkeys?
Go Open Office!
You're doing great work!
stop saying that OOo is free.
WE KNOW
the point is, all our companies don't care if it's free.
they'll just use the better product, regardless of price.
Even the unreleased OOo 3.0 is behind the already released Office 2007 in asthetics
no one answered the Qs about GUI.
i thought OOo were going to improve the interface. but it looks identical to me!
The GUI is the last thing the developers will work on.(Since, frankly, it's the least important thing.)The GUI will probably be updated in the later stages of development (2-3 months by my guess.)
but surely the devs won't be changing the GUI much during the .X releases.
I'd imagine major GUI changes would happen with major releases.
in 3.0/4.0 etc..
Office 2007 aesthetics? Of all the businesses i've talked to, none like the new interface, even after using it for months. They all complain how long it takes them to do stuff with the new interface.
The new interface in MS Office is stupid and a step backwards, but that's what you get with design by committee. Than and a need to have a "new" way of doing things to put them "that much further ahead" of the competition with something that doesn't really boost productivity, has probably cost the planet tens of millions (if not way more) in retraining costs and time lost.
I can understand incremental improvements, or the option to use a new interface if you wanted, but change for the sake of change when it wasn't broken before is just plain stupid.
I'm not a *professional* writer or someone live with the spreadsheet, I just need to edit a .doc or .xls sometimes, or create simple presentation. And I believe there are many people like me.
All we need and want is a free version of M$ Office - AND THAT'S WHAT OOO IS TO US. Nothing less, nothing more. I don't really see any point of having new features, JUST FIX ALL THE COMPATIBILITY ISSUES!
Wow, there are a lot of whiners here. Open Office is a great piece of oss software, and I am impressed with all the upcoming features. Open Office has all the mandatory features for me and my only gripe is speed. But for how much functionality I get from Ooo I have no room to complain, especially when you realize that Ooo is free and M$ Office is $xxx. Thank you Ooo devs! Thank you!
Needs more default "zoom" options, I am -forever- zooming in and out from normal to 400-800% for fine layout work (music notes placement, design work, etc), and it is quite tedious. Needs 200%, 400%, 800% zoom buttons.
Alas, OpenOffice users and developers will always have to catch up to Office. Who would they copy and direct all of their anymosity towards if they actually found themselves superior to Office. They would have no choice but to look within themselves for the source of angst and loathing. Not sure they would like what they found :) Mommy and daddy did not pay them enough attention when they were little :(
Anyone running office 2003 can view/edit/create office 2007 formats by simply downloading the free compatibility pack for office 2003, geeze!!! Let's stop being so melodramatic...
Thank you for the concise yet thorough writeup!
- RG>
For those who think "you can never use OO in a business environment" - I do. I share documents with "Fortune 10" level corporations all the time - back and forth with revisions in Writer and Calc, giving presentations on Powerpoint that were created in Impress (or created in Powerpoint, edited in Impress, and presented with Powerpoint). From general letters to engineering level spreadsheets - heavy demand uses. And I have been using OO since 2005 - one of the reasons I switched to 100% Linux.
Sure there are a few features I'd like to see (outlining in writer, advanced data analysis in Calc) - but OO does most of what I need to do. Those missing pieces I figure out a work-around.
Remember, when MSOffice was getting started it took years to get many of the functions that "people just gotta have".
OO will get there. It's fantastic now and will only improve with time.
Anonymous wrote:
``It seems that several things have been left out of OOo 3.0 that would make people switch in an instant, such as:
1. Book layout features in Writer, including better kerning, paragraph-level letter spacing and hyphenation, microtypography, and automatic ligatures. I know that a lot of open-source people will say, "Use TeX." But why is this still necessary in 2008? TeX isn't particularly easy to install, doesn't support system (TrueType/OpenType) fonts without special packages like Xetex, and isn't WYSIWYG. With the growth of on-demand book publishing, there has to be an easier way to produce high-quality layouts.
2. Better native integration with content management systems and blogs (including support for Blogger, WordPress, ATOM, and MetaWeblog APIs). Writer requires the $10 Sun Weblog Publisher extension. Word 2007 has a built-in direct-to-blog publishing capability, so why not Writer?
3. Support for synchronized audio in Impress.
4. Built-in Adobe Presenter-like Flash export for Impress (self running presentations, hopefully with the option of continuous talking-head presenter videos, which both Adobe Presenter and Articulate Presenter currently lack).''
LyX 1.6 with XeTeX. WYSIWYM Pre-press Publishing.
And please, there is no way in hell that Writer or any Word Processor touches LaTeX and various editors like {Kile, LyX, TeXMaker, TeXShop.app and more} with properly installed systems like Debian or OS X for getting so much more power out of Publishing than you would with Writer.
Writer will do a lot of General Office Publishing well and make businesses wanting to leave Microsoft comfortable for doing so.
However, depending on your Pre-Press needs you wouldn't be using Writer to replace other tools that most certainly have such a massive set of tools to make it seemless to publish technical papers, novels, and other Non-DTP work an absolute dream.
There are many tools and people are starting to realize that there is no one-tool to rule them all makes them more skilled and less dependent on companies which is great for those doing the actual work.
KDE 4.1 & OS X offer solutions to solve your many blog woes.
I really think OpenOffice.org needs anti-aliasing. Impress would greatly benefit from it, and, in my opinion, Draw seems pointless without it.
i like what i see
Writers need a normal view / draft view that eliminates header/footer sections and page breaks.
A missing draft view mode is the main reason a professional writer is unable to use Open Office for work.
Powerpoint with embedded flash still doesn't work :-(
Is there an AMD64 Linux package, or do I have to force the 32-bit architecture?
About book publishing... Both MS Word and OOO suck in this regard. I am in this branch and I had to prepare two or three books in both of the two. OOO is a way better in this, since Word has a bad habit to mess things up, even when you are most careful and use advanced techniques, styles, etc. If you want good-looking book use LaTeX -- it is a waaaaaaaay easier to make a book in LaTeX, it is perfectly consistent, support for math is amazing, and hundreds more features that Office Suites won't be able to do in a hundred of years... And installing fonts for use with LaTeX is a couple-of-minutes job.
But, for writing some office docs, OOO rules:) Especially comparing to MS Office 2007
OK I have office 2007 on my work PC... Could with OOO? Well lets see:
Word = Writer
Xcel = Calc
Power Point = Presenter
Access = Base
Outlook = Ximian/Evolution Thunderbird
Visio = DIA
Project = Workbench
OneNote = Tomboy
Infopath =OpenMRS
Groove = ok... i don't have one..
Picture Manager = Draw; GIMP
Frontpage ... Quanta Plus, Bluefish, NVU,
Lets take another look at this. This is taken from the MS Office website.
What's included: Office Excel 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, Office Word 2007
Plus: Office Outlook 2007
Suggested retail price: $399.95 | $239.95
Now OOo.
OpenOffice.org 2 Components:
* Base
* Calc
* Draw
* Math
* Impress
* Writer
Cost: nothing... although you should donate something if you use it, it is just nice.
Please correct me if I'm wrong, but from where I sit, Standard MS Office is giving me 4 programs for a cost of $400.00 and OOo is 6 programs for a cost of $0.00.
Maybe we should look at a what you were talking about with all of the crap that you put down in an office suite.
MS Office Ultimate
What's included: Office Excel 2007, Office PowerPoint 2007, Office Word 2007
Plus: Office Access 2007, Office Accounting Express 2007, Office InfoPath 2007, Office Groove 2007, Office OneNote 2007, Office Outlook 2007 with Business Contact Manager, Office Publisher 2007
Suggest retail price: $679.95 | $539.95
I still do not see a FrontPage. Then again I have not used Front page in 10 years.
I'm not trying to bash MS, but from an IT stand point, OSS, or open source software, is by far a better solution, in my opinion. Changing formats of documents I don't have a problem with. Changing the formats and forcing a standard, I have a problem with. MS should have build the ooxml format into 2003, then 2007 it could have been standard. Just the compatibility issues drive me crazy with in the same vendor.
As for load times, I have really enjoyed using OOo on Linux and Windows. It just does what I need it to do.
Also on the topic about formats, Word Perfect has a hold on the law firms and they have their own format. I don't see anyone bitching about that.
I write my PhD dissertation using only opensource apps on debian based linux. I just bit the bullet and dumped windows, word and endnote (bibliographic) all in one go. Yes I was worried that I would lose the one key bit of functionality that I could not do without (e.g. an outliner in OOo Writer, or how could I replace endnote, and so on). But actually I will never go back now. I have much better solutions than I ever imagined: OOo suite does everything required for writing, etc. (including outlining if you dock the 'navigator' to the side of the page window), there are thousands of really good opensource apps, the fact you are not locked into formats, etc. Anyone who is still holding on to that "one app I can't do without" attitude are just kidding themselves.
Like Kevin Shields wrote people are whishing that there should be some split screen/view support. Please vote for it
here!
Before I knew of that issue I wrote a feature request myself here!
Frontpage is dead (and please let it stay that way). Expression Web is it's replacement and I doubt (though I've been wrong before, to which my wife reminds me constantly of ;) )it will ever be included in an Office Suite. As for OOO, it's getting more and more appealing all the time.
Those who are complaining because OOorg can't 100% duplicate MSWord formatting: neither can MS word handle documents from other versions of Word without munging the format. It's nowhere near 99.9% compatible.
The person who claims: "OOo suite does everything required for writing, etc. (including outlining if you dock the 'navigator' to the side of the page window)" is apparently not using outlining the way most professional writers do. It's awkward as hell to have to flip between windows, when MSWord lets me click to open or close entire sections of an outline to work on that seciton ... all in one screen.
That's a SIX-YEAR OLD FEATURE REQUEST! Issue #3959 has 161 votes for it. Read the comments, please This is a badly needed feature ... and we're getting eye candy instead.
Is 3.0 gong to get HTML capabilities?
SO far OO says it does HTML but if you try this little test (really do not try to make a real web page!!!).
Open a new document. Click the hyperlink icon in target put in the address you want to link to. In frame select anything (_self is good). Frame is button. Text is what you want to show on the button. give it a name like testbutton. Now do save as and change type to HTML. Oh it say it can not do it. OOOPPPPSSSS. Word has been able to do this sine word 97!!!!
I'd say feature requests are great but many of the complaints here are simply of the type:
"I tried Open office for 5 minutes, I didn't understand it, why isn't OpenOffice exactly like MS Word?"
Most of those complaints are simply not valid and are due to the poster not knowing OpenOffice.
I know it's hard to learn a new application when you already know something that works.
It took me several years to become good at MsWord. It took me more years and a great deal of frustration to become reasonably good at OpenOffice.
There are a lot of very good tutorials on Ooo's site.
Open Office is very good for most ordinary uses/users.
It is more stable than Msw for very big documents, it has eccellent capabilities for documents with tons of images and figures.
It lacks in some areas especially regarding collaboration and corporate needs, like its stupid mail merge mentioned above.
For everyone whining about the GUI, I reiterate that visual enhancements are often one of the final things to be added to a new version of software, after all the core functionality is in place. (Unless you are talking about Vista, where visual enhancements are the only thing to be added, after all the core functionality is stripped out).
Anyway, a GUI facelift is one of the features planed for 3.0:
from
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Features#Planned_Features_for_3.0_Release
"GUI enhancements - The GUI should be redesigned to get a more modern look. A good guideline is the new IBM Lotus Symphony that uses dynamic panels. This is better than MS Office's "ribbon", at least for documents, because it saves space on the top (normally documents are vertical)."
I'm really happy that OpenOffice seems to progressing so nicely, though to be honest I don't really use office suites that much since I mostly do scientific writing, and that requires LaTeX.
For email, right now the best Exchange solution is Evolution. While Evolution isn't exactly the best email client out there, if you are actually forced to use Exchange at all, heaven help you. At my University, which recently converted over to Exchange, those on the Microsoft server are lucky to go three days without some kind of server outage or lost email.
How about multiple tables per sheet in Calc? Look at Numbers (part of Apple's iWork 08) to see what I'm talking about.
Ach, ingrates!
Not a day goes by where I don't thank you guys for giving me such a useful bit of kit for free!
OK, it doesn't do everything but it doesn't annoy me as much as Word.
If you find it loads slowly try repeating "this cost me nothing, so it owes me nothing" until it gets going. Some of us would have to pay for M$ Office and frankly if you believe OpenOffice is even half as good, it's money well saved.
I'd just like to point out that, if OpenOffice 3.0 supports the Microsoft Office 2007 file format, then that does not mean that it supports OOXML, since not even Office 2007 properly implements OOXML as specified.
Outlining in MS Word or MS Office, are you kidding? It's one of the most buggy MS implementations - along with footnotes and end notes.
If OpenOffice will have those features, please pattern it on WordPerfect. We're serious here on the academe on Word Processing and MS Word (any version) is still too crappy for us.
OpenOffice is going the right way and if Corel won't update WP then maybe after 5 years OpenOffice will catch up and we have to ditch it entirely.
Most of the workers still prefer WP in combination with Writer. We use Writer in documents that require several graphics. WP is taking too long to convert things to WPG, their native format. So 80%(WP)-20% Open Office.
Compatibility for us is not a problem since we require our students to either submit in ODF, WPD and RTF formats.
I'm just into applications but isn't Quattro Pro the record holder of the most number of rows and columns. I remember our admin telling us to lessen the number of rows and columns in Quattro Pro to be compatible with Excel be it 2003 or 2007.
The biggest feature I'd like to see in Openoffice.org 3 is a new license. Make it GPL-compatible, but add a clause that prohibits users from claiming that it's slow to start up.
Does the 6-second cold start without prefetching really kill anyone? Heck, it only takes 8 seconds on an EeePC. An el-cheapo EeePC! Abiword takes 3 seconds to start up, and remember that OOo is a full suite.
The only trouble with a license change is that it wouldn't stop anyone from complaining. The most vocal complainers are those who used OOo 2.0 from Ubuntu Breezy, running on 500MHz P3s with 128 megs of RAM.
Sun OpenOffice has done everything I have needed for in excess of 5 years .I do everything on a Linux Box , who needs Microsoft. Keep up the great work Sun.
Things just keep looking better and better for OpenOffice. Each year the suite gets more polished and continues to pinpoint and fix any last bugs or missing features that might turn a user away. I can't wait to see what OpenOffice 4.0, 5.0, etc. look like.
At this rate, won't be long before serious office suite users are going "Microsoft who?" OO.org keeps steadily improving, while Microsoft gives us..... a ribbon and progressively less compatibility and flexibility? You can't even modify one thing about the Office 2007 GUI if you don't like the defaults, and don't get me started on how many presentations I've seen get graphically corrupted and ruined beyond belief at showtime thanks to the .pptx format.
The truest and best comment I have seen on here is:
This cost me nothing so it owes me nothing.
If people don't like something about OO.o, then change it! That is what OSS is all about!
Don't just sit there whining, get it sorted!
Thunderbird 3 is slated to talk to exchange servers If i am not mistaken.
I work in an office environment, and to quite frankly honest I use excel and thats it out of the 4000$ suite you talk about. I use Thunderbird as opposed to outlook because face it outlook is a bloated piece of trash. I can count on one hand the number of people that use more then just the email system in it.
One note, what would you use that for in an office environment. Access, your office doesn't have an it department with centralized database access that is web based. Thats lame buddy.
Vizio, please who the heck uses an application like this to draw layouts when Adobe and Corel produce much better products.
Picture manager.... Have you tried opening windows explorer or Konq.
Frontpage.... pfft only people who are ill-educated touch this or anything like it with a 10 foot poll. Drag and drop on web design is for the birds and any experienced designer knows that.
The code output on these things is horrible. But then you have a half broken browser (IE) to fix that right so who cares. Try note pad out let me know how that works for you.
I'd say it's pointless to launch into the same old MS-vs-OOo battle here. That's been waging since Sun first presented the open source projects, and plenty of other forums exist to continue that fruitless argument. There will be people staunchly in ons camp or the other for some time to come. To each his own.
The commentary here should focus on OpenOffice.org 3.0, not on which office suite people think is better for any reason.
On the outlining issue, I agree with the user who noted that the Navigator performs this function. To the person who argued about not being able to show/hide it with a click... actually, you can. Dock the Navigator to one side and use the "grippy" button to hide it. According to the Help file, "If you show the window by clicking the window border, but not the button, you activate the AutoHide function. The AutoHide function allows you to temporarily show a hidden window by clicking on its edge."
I'd like a way to assign this to a keyboard shortcut instead of relying on the mouse, but at least the function is available.
To the person who mentioned not being able to use connectors in Writer, you can, but you have to set it up. In Draw, drag the connectors you'll want into the Gallery, which makes them available to drag into Writer. They function the same.
To the people who complain about the interface appearance, you do have the ability to choose different toolface sets in Tools> Options> OpenOffice.org> View. You could also keep an eye on the Extensions page (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/).
I'm excited about Notes2 and about the ability to view multiple pages. Those two features are the most significant improvements in how I use OOo. I'll have a hard time not using 3.0 for production work... it's very tempting.
---Fox
iWork 2008 for me. It meets my needs, the price is reasonable and more than anything it is no Microsoft, nuff said.
These are the best features you have to announce? God this suite is lagging. I could have gone to school for computer science and learned to write my own office suite by now. Do I need to donate money? Ideas? Bug reports? What can I do to help this project catch up with every other office suite out there?
Now, one important feature is missing: TABS. This new version will keep clogging my taskbar.
You can write a better office suite after computer science class? Please do so, then others can start whining about the million features you're missing.
If you really need stuff from Word that are not available in OOo, pay the money and keep using Word. No problem, no reason to come here and bitch. But why are people angry at developers that are working on a free product? If you don't like it, don't use it. If you do like it, be more constructive in your attitude. Besides, this post is even to announce an early preview version!
For myself, I'm looking forward to the new release.
Cheers!
What about subpixel font rendering in Linux (if enabled in fontconfig/freetype)?
Openoffice font rendering really sucks in Unix platforms...!
Bye...
PS: Not to talk about char rendering... Using cairo you could get really a better output like GnuPlotter does!
In my post scriptum I didn't mean "char", but "chart"... So the plots imho haven't a great output!
Fortunately, what OpenOffice has to offer is good enough for a variety of uses. Also, it's a nice incentive for Microsoft to improve their software and lower their prices.
In the end though, the downside is that OpenOffice is nowhere near the quality of MS Office 2007. You get what you pay for.
3.0 looks awesome. I would like to see page numbering added to writer. I have found no way to currently add numbering.....please let me know if I missed it somehow.
bruce
Excellent progress. all I am missing now is the Excel statistics toolbox and related functions, and some nice graphics features Excel has. Continue the good work, and Microsoft will have to continue innovating, for us the paying customers.
Ugly, none intuitive interface.
One of the crappiest open source apps alive.
And that's coming from a Linux user.