An Early Look at OpenOffice.org 3.0 369
ahziem writes "With the final release 167 days away and an alpha version available, it's time to look at OpenOffice.org 3.0's new features: view multiple pages in Writer, notes in the margin, Microsoft Office 2007 file format support, Solver in Calc, new visual theme in Calc, native tables in Impress, more columns in Calc, error bars in charts, performance improvements, real native Aqua Mac support, and more."
Crap, is documentation out of date? (Score:2, Interesting)
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But seriously, it should be one of the goals of the project to ensure that such books are not really need. The GUI should be intuitive where possible and on-line help should be thorough where it is required.
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So if the documentation says "Warning: Once a file is deleted from the recycle bin, it is impossible to recover" that shows that there is a flaw in the software?
Re:Crap, is documentation out of date? (Score:5, Interesting)
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You obviously dont have a clue! What makes you think the operating system "overwrites" the file to the same place on the HDD? All you have done by "overwriting" the file is to create more copies of it on the HDD. The "DoD overwrite" is performed more like a low level format, and done on the entire media. It NOT something you can successfully apply from most OS file management utilities.
I never suggested just idiotically copying a file of the same name over the file you wish to delete. I suggested using a "secure deletion" program - there are many out there. They don't just say "Can you please write x file with the same name Mr Friendly OS?". They use the OS file table to determine the exact sectors occupied by the file's current data, remove the entry from the file system table, and then proceed to write random data across those previously occupied sectors. It does NOT have to be don
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Any statements in the documentation that start out "Don't" or marked "Warning" or "Notice" are always present because of flaws -- the right approach is to fix the software (and remove the statement from the documentation).
Let's apply that to other products in the real world. How about a table saw: that's covered with warning stickers and the instruction manual is full of safety notices. These are all flaws, and we'll change the saw's design to remove them one by one. At the end of the process, we'll have a flawless and user friendly cutting tool: a plastic butter knife.
No thanks, I'll take my powerful but "dangerous" software over dumbed down pablum.
Re:Crap, is documentation out of date? (Score:4, Interesting)
And the people who know it so well that it's all reflexes. I know, I worked as a PowerPoint presentation designer for a few years, and everything I did then had begone to work automatic. How I would approach a complex slide (objects to use, grouping), how I would grab objects, menus, shortcuts, everything. PowerPoint 2007 wants to make me tear my hair out.
New Feature (Score:4, Funny)
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Insert -> Note only gives you a note marker; mouse-hovering is needed to read the content of the note. Marginal notes that are visible all the time would be most welcome -- one of the few features I have occasionally missed (though not often) from another popular office suite that I once used.
(Also welcome would be a fixing of the bug that requires me to press Alt twice before I can get keyboard-shortcut-access to the menus in Impress. Yes, I reported the bug ..... several years ago. Oh, and also the b
VBA (Score:2)
I heavily rely on scripting for my spreadsheets and generating text documents. The files themselves could easily be moved to OOo, but the scripts cannot. To make matters worse, the builtin scripting of OOo is crap. There, I said it. Somebody is probably going to bitch at me for it, but OOo's scripting requires 20 lines of complicated code for what you can do with 2 or 3 lines of VBA code. That is just not acceptable for a scripting language intended to be used by non-hardcore programme
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
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Re:New Feature (Score:4, Informative)
un-maximised , this fits nicely on a widescreen monitor . It will happily display the same document in two windows .
Will be good to have that properly integrated though.
Maybe it might be worth putting some logic in OOO to detect widescreen and adjust the layouts accordingly ,
seems a lot of programs are not designed with widescreen in mind.
Toodle-pip
Amias
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*A themable interface so it can look like office 07 or pre-07
In other words, copying Office?
*Dynamic toolbars so that when you select a table the top toolbar gains table buttons, but removed non-usable buttons (dims ones that arnt directly to do with tables, like formatting)
User interface that changes based on where your cursor happens to be is a Bad Idea. Consistency = not having to remember where to find things at any given time.
*Intelligent, spell checker, for years spell checkers haven't changed, if it picked out words that made sense in the context of the sentence that would be a huge step forwards.
Agreed. Also, the ability to add words to the dictionary with one 2 clicks instead of three. (Seriously. Why the hell woudl the user know or care whether it goes to 'sun.dic', 'openoffice.dic' or 'user.dic'?!)
*A more intuitive interface, with pointless effects, yeah people like them. For example turning pages by the corner, dragging text FF3 style, clicking on a small graph to have it expand to full size.
This was a joke, right?
*Firefox plugins, so that we can view presentations in browsers.
That'd be very cool; and yet also very irritating. I personally hate the way PDF
Stability (Score:2)
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Looking forward to 3.0
Re:Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
My 2nd hope is for OOo 3 to stop using Java for the wizards. Or for anything really. There's no point in having Java handle things behind the scenes on an otherwise compiled application. It just make things slow to load and slow to run.
And my 3rd hope is for OOo 3 to finally make tables creation and editing in Write as easy, free form and trouble free as it is in MS Word. Click a button, start "drawing" your table any way you like, without giving any consideration whatsoever to the number of rows and columns, dividing cells anywhere you want, merging cells in any way, moving cell boundaries left and right and up and down without any invisible wall preventing you (not even the table's boundaries): that's how it should be, and how it actually is in MS Word.
Do these 3 things and I'll never look back to MS Office.
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On the flip side perhaps you should accept the line as the suggestion it is, and not get all offended someone offered a personal usability issue?
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3rd hope is for OOo 3 to finally make tables creation and editing in Write as easy
While my Wife and I have no issues with tables, maybe it's just not intuitive for you. It happens all the time. Maybe shelling out the dough for an MSOffice license is what you should do rather than complain about something you got for free?
Why can't you complain about a free product, if everyone just decided to ignore bugs and usability issues because they haven't paid for the software then nothing would ever change. If usability isn't up to scratch then go file a bug with as much useful feedback as you can provide, "please make it work exactly like product X" isn't a valid comment here, and see what the developers have to say about it. Open source projects often have transparent and interactive development processes and people who will list
Re:Stability (Score:5, Interesting)
That said, no, it has nothing to do with it not being "intuitive to me". OOo's tables, or at least the user interface around them, simply have less features than MS Office ones. For people who just need a "n x m" table now and then that's surely not a problem, but the moment you're required to make a very complex table layouts to accommodate within millimeter of precision fields that will be printed on non-blank, pre-printed paper form, you have a really hard time doing so in OOo. The funny thing, though, is that you can import a document with a complex table from MS Office to OOo, and it works well. That's why I think the problem is in OOo's user interface, not on its internal table support.
Re:Stability (Score:4, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just-in-time_compilation [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HotSpot [wikipedia.org]
Re:Stability (Score:5, Informative)
Java is often Just-in-time compiled at runtime by the Java Virtual machine. Hence, when Just-in-time compiled, its performance is: [12]
* lower than the performance of compiled languages as C or C++, but not significantly for most tasks,
The average performance of Java programs has increased a lot over time, and Java's speed is now comparable with C or C++. In some cases Java is significantly slower, in others, significantly faster[13]
No, Java isn't perfect, but blanket assertions that "Java is just plain slow" and other that that ilk, are just plain wrong. In a great many contexts, the performance of Java is more than sufficient. If something you see that uses Java is too slow, that just argues that it needs to be optimized, not that it can't be performant because it's Java.
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I'm sure it's just me (Score:5, Interesting)
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Then again, Writer is also the only component I use. There are also some other minor problems with
For the scientists: ERROR BARS (Score:5, Insightful)
Kudos to the development team for implementing these changes, and allowing me to further propagate open source software within the academic community.
Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS (Score:5, Interesting)
But if you can suggest a good data analysis application that runs on Linux, I will listen, and will surely try it.
Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS (Score:5, Informative)
When I started my PhD I used Gnumeric for several statistical analysis however, after spending some time I had to learn to use a real statistical package. I went for R, which is very well known an accepted through the research community (mainly because it is the open version of S, and can be scrutinized). After using it for about six months I found it better to make even the most simple statistical analysis on it. Oh, and the charts really look professional. No matter what I did in Gnumeric (tried once in OpenOffice but its graphics capabilites simply suck \BBBbig Time), I could not obtain decent charts to add to a LaTex publication.
I would suggest rKward [sourceforge.net] to use R. it is the best IDE (IMO, after trying several and trying and failing to setup several others).
One of the most important advantages of using a statistical package like R is that you can get it to output to standard output in a console. That way you can use whatever scripting language you know (I used GAWK, sed, and other bash niceties) to prepare your data to be included in whatever word processing/typsetting program you need. It really saves a lot of time.
Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS (Score:5, Informative)
I'm usually the first to encourage people to move beyond spreadsheets and use better tools for statistical analysis. That said, a spreadsheet is a really quick and easy way of doing simple data analysis, and it's perfectly fine to use it at such.
The problem comes in when people start trying to use spreadsheet applications for more complicated analysis or want to do more complicated graphics than a spreadsheet easily allows. If and when that time comes, it becomes really worthwhile to have at least one other tool in which to work. As the other reply suggested, R [r-project.org] is a free (and excellent) implementation of the SPLUS language. The package is explicitly designed with statistical analysis and graphics in mind. In fact, a nice introduction to the language is Data Analysis and Graphics Using R - An Example-Based Approach by [anu.edu.au]
John Maindonald and John Braun . You might be able to find the book at a university library before deciding whether to plunk down the money to buy it.
MATLAB is more of a general purpose language, which can be very useful for some fields and not as useful in others. It's definitely overkill to buy MATLAB to do basic statistical analysis, and it's probably not the best tool for the job unless you already know the language well. Most other commercial statistics packages (SAS, SPSS, Stata) have Linux versions, as this community has tended to be more server/unix-oriented historically.
To bring this back on topic, it's nice that OpenOffice.org is expanding its feature set in the statistical/graphing arena - I've personally found it quite lacking compared to Excel. That said, it's also important to know when you've moved beyond what a spreadsheet is relatively good at and find a package which can do the more complicated analysis. Spreadsheets and stats programs are both complements and substitutes in various ways.
Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but one of the really awesome projects that is underway is R integration with Calc [openoffice.org]. It's very preliminary right now, but the goal is to be able to use R functions from inside Calc. Should be pretty sweet when it's ready.
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Re:I'm sure it's just me (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'm sure it's just me (Score:4, Informative)
The same thing is supported in Open Office Writer 2.0 as well, see Changes on the Edit menu. I *think* it's even reasonably compatible with the Word implementation, but don't make any more dubious claims to your friends based on my say so.
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Re:I'm sure it's just me (Score:4, Informative)
It does, but not nearly as well as Word. For instance, I'm not sure how well it handles tracking edits by multiple people, and I do know that deleted text shows up in the original place, just strike through, which probably throws off the pagination. Word displays deleted text in the margin, like the new notes feature. I was excited when I read that because I expected OO Writer to follow suit, but according to the article, that's not yet. Still, the notes in the margin seems like the fist step there, so hopefully better track changes support is not far behind. Here is another issue [openoffice.org] with the track changes feature that I had forgotten about.
(This is a feature I use myself a fair amount, and have been disappointed with OO's support for it.)
I also have a couple votes for this improvement [openoffice.org], which is to add something like Word's normal mode. Having the margins there I think is really obnoxious. Normal mode in Word will make it so that successive lines aren't a couple inches apart on the screen. Even Word's page view mode lets you collapse the top and bottom margins.
There aren't major issues with OO Writer, but at the same time, there are enough minor annoyances that I'll still take Word in a second.
(Calc vs. Excel is another matter... I go back and forth there. Excel has a bunch of annoyances too...)
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Sure. Tons of people do. XCode, Visual Studio, and Eclipse all support it.
Version control, as is done with code, should be done on a content management server in an office environment.
That's a huge pain in the ass. To view edits with comments, you'd need to download both Word files, open them both up while also keeping the CMS open, and flip back and forth between each window. Using Word's built-in functionality, it's all in one single document on one screen. (And yes, y
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I've experienced a bit of the same with Linux apps, if something is hard/not working then it's because it's Linux. So I let them struggle wi
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still need an outlook replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:still need an outlook replacement (Score:5, Informative)
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it just isn't a full office suite without one, not to say that thunderbird isn't bad or anything. hopefully, they will have one when 3 comes out for everyday use. I still would like to see a publisher replacement (for printouts and what not).
Spicebird [spicebird.com] looks promising. It's based on Thunderbird and Lightning, but overall it seems much nicer. Like Thunderbird it's licensed [spicebird.com] under the MPL, GPL, and LGPL. I tried it out a few days ago but not throughly. Linux.com [linux.com] did an article on it recently, which, btw, is how I found out about it.
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O'07 already supported... (Score:2)
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So is there a good reason to switch?
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*Yes, I know there's LyX, but I've yet to find a portable version that doesn't crash/burn on startup
Still no Comment/Uncomment button in Macro editor (Score:4, Interesting)
The things has a full fledged debugger with breakpoints and everything but they expect you to comment out code manually one line at a time?
OO 3.0 (Score:2, Insightful)
Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Informative)
I don't want to get in any sort of an argument, but I just wanted to say that I think the NeoOffice guys deserve a little respect here. OOo went for years just not giving a damn about Mac users and meanwhile the NeoOffice project produced a very usable piece of software.
Yes, NeoOffice is still a bit slow. Last time I tried the alpha OOo Aqua port, it was pretty slow too. Hell, OpenOffice is a slow on Windows and Linux. MS Office on Mac is slow too, for that matter. It seems like only Apple has put in the work to make an office suite on OSX that performs well. But NeoOffice is quite an achievement for a small collection of developers, and it works well. I use it on a regular basis, and don't have any significant problems aside from a slow initial load.
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Re:Finally! (Score:5, Insightful)
So it's not that I don't like iWork (I love it actually), it's that I want my data in open format and it looks like odf is a good choice(?).
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Performance? (Score:5, Interesting)
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http://katana.oooninja.com/w/openoffice.org/performance_improvements [oooninja.com]
Good, but the interface is still lagging (Score:5, Interesting)
Whether your like or hate the office 2007 interface, at least MS is out there rethinking how people use applications, which tasks they need to access the quickest, etc. OO is sticking to the same old massive row of buttons. Koffice is doing more thinking along these lines, but personally I don't really like where they're going. But at least they're rethinking things.
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Me, I'd much rather they put their heads to making OO run faster with less memory. It's truly pathetic that MS Office 2k3 runs faster under vmware+xp than OO does natively in linux.
Re:Good, but the interface is still lagging (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, but I've mentioned stuff like that before and I got modded troll for it.
Hopefully 3.0 will be faster, I use OOo on Linux at work and it takes _ages_ to start.
If they get it right, maybe a lot of companies might actually switch from MSO 2K3 to OOo instead of going to MSO 2007 - since switching to MSO 2007 will require massive retraining/relearning, perhaps more than even switching from MSO2K3 to OOo.
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The Office 2007 interface isn't "bling." It's a new interface strategy determined from the results of dozens of usability studies, many of them real-world in office environments, not just some random thing someone sketched in a notebook.
The real problem isn't that OpenOffice should "put deve
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And by that, I assume you mean, at least MS is out there needlessly changing the interfaces for applications we've gotten used to over the past, oh, 20 years, such that they deviate from UI paradigms we've become intimately familiar with. Yes, thank goodness for that. God bless MS.
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Hopefully... (Score:4, Insightful)
It'd be nice if they'd copy MS Office 2004 [wikimedia.org] for OS X or Lotus Symphony [wikimedia.org] rather than continue on with a bad copy of MS Office 2003. Notice the side bar? Floating on OS X (I prefer floating, btw), part of the window in Lotus Symphony. For me, at least, that is significantly more helpful than toolbars/menus or that irritating "ribbon".
It's also be awesome if Writer supported tabs and split editor [coconut-pa...ftware.com] like Eclipse. Those two features are one of the main reason I do everything I possibly can in Eclipse.
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Dear God, NO. Please no. I nearly had an aneurysm trying to click on the tiny little icons in the floaty window that is so difficult to reach and so easy to use to hide important things with. It's like Clippy, but more insidious! You're trying to read or type and THERE IT IS! THE TINY LITTLE USELESS WINDOW! GAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!
...
Err... Yeah. Just don't copy the Office 2004 interface. It really is terrible. (Well and truly!)
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Great news but... (Score:3, Informative)
Performance improvements (Score:2)
X error bars (Score:2, Insightful)
Makes it less attractive in a scientific environment (like undergraduate report writing).
Still no mention of an outliner mode (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe I missed it - there was no mention in the articles listed.
Wait - the first article linked to this page:
http://qa.openoffice.org/issues/buglist.cgi?Submit+query=Submit+query&issue_type=DEFECT&issue_type=ENHANCEMENT&issue_type=FEATURE&issue_type=PATCH&resolution=FIXED&target_milestone=OOo+3.0&email1=&emailtype1=exact&emailassigned_to1=1&email2=&emailtype2=exact&emailreporter2=1&issueidtype=include&issue_id=&changedin=&votes=0&chfieldfrom=&chfieldto=&chfieldvalue=&short_desc=&short_desc_type=allwords&long_desc=&long_desc_type=allwords&issue_file_loc=&issue_file_loc_type=fulltext&status_whiteboard=&status_whiteboard_type=fulltext&keywords=&keywords_type=anytokens&field0-0-0=noop&type0-0-0=noop&value0-0-0=&cmdtype=doit&order=Reuse+same+sort+as+last+time [openoffice.org]
which mentioned an outline mode. Maybe it's coming after all?
How about better keybinding support? (Score:2)
A feature to automatically load alternate bindings at startup would be nice.. Maybe even including some alternates with the release? I'd gladly contribute my efforts. This detail should not be left as a (somewhat clumsy) exercise for
why I avoid OOo (Score:5, Interesting)
1) Charts - 99% of the time when I'm using a spreadsheet, it's just to make a quick graph of some data. The MS office charting features are really simple to adjust after the fact, while the OOo one is like pulling teeth.
2) Performance - OOo feels less responsive than I'd like, and it takes a long-ass time to load. (Blame java?
3) Aesthetics - OOo still looks like it's stuck in the mid 90's. MS Office has nicer fonts by default.
Anyways, I'm not trying to flame or criticize. I'm just honestly presenting the reasons why I don't like OOo in the hopes of fostering some good discussion.
Blame java? (Score:2)
SVG import (Score:2)
A New Look at Desktop Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Comparing them, editing one against the other, using one as instructions to modify the other. In fact, if every window panel could slide open (side/side, or up/down) into two, each displaying a different doc (of the same type, or even of different types), that would really increase my productivity. Using one doc as a guide to another is an extremely common use case for most people. All the extra window dragging/resizing/aligning, every time a pair of docs are used, is a hassle of prohibitive annoyance.
What would really be great would be "generic windows" into which I could assign panels from arbitrary different external apps. So I could open a configured document that would spring up with a Firefox window already showing in the 2/3 left side of the main window, and an editable OO.o Writer document in the right 1/3. I could, for example, save "configmarks" setting some page (eg. instructions) as the default in the browser panel, and some template (eg. my letterhead/footer) in the Writer panel. I could have compound docs with different configmarks in each. And let the other GUI widgets for the parent apps get called when I use the compound doc's menus/toolbars, combined together.
I'd love to have quick access to arrangements of windows in stacks of tabs, each with a compound doc with Firefox, Evolution and Writer (or Calc, or any other GNOME app) panes in their usable panels, pointing to each of the actual docs I'm using right now.
GNOME (and KDE, too, with its own apps) could have the windowing-level messaging and composition features to do this. I'd love to stop "using Evolution while using Firefox" and instead just send messages while browsing/searching the Web. It also seems to me that such compound docs would be a lot easier to swing over to my mobile devices, which have such a small screen and clumsy manual controls. Is there a way to do this without rewriting all the apps to use "external panels"?
At the very least I'd like to keep a config that I open, which in turn opens several different independent apps, and just arranges their windows for that specific use. Including which doc gets opened in each, their arrangement on the screen. Is even that simple organization possible in the GNOME window manager? If not, then in KDE?
Major flaw in the build-process (Score:5, Interesting)
This does not affect the users directly, but it is a major pain for integrators/porters. OO.o has a terrible habit of bundling all of the 3rd-party software packages, that it uses, into its own source tree. I'm talking about (probably missed some):
If they could, I'm certain, they would've bundled Java too, but — fortunately — Sun's license prohibits that... Now I realize, that this is done to offer "a single package" to those, who build it on their own, but nobody does. Everybody gets these from their OS' integrators. And the pain for us is enormous, because to force OO.o build to stop its silly ways is a serious undertaking. For some of the above packages there is --with-system-foo configure-flag, but not for all, and the default is to always use the bundled one, so support for the external ones bitrots [wikipedia.org] quickly...
Most of the local builds don't bother and so end up wasting disk space and CPU-time rebuilding packages, which are external to OO.o. The end results are also bloated, duplicating stuff, that's already installed on the users' systems and without bug-fixes, which have already gone into each of the respective package since its most recent "bundling" into OO.o tarballs.
Download a source tarball [good-day.net] and see for yourself... Something like: tar tjf OOo_OOG680_m9_source.tar.bz2 | grep 'z$'. No other software project does this on this scale and for good reasons — it is Just Wrong[TM]. OO.o better clean up their act in this respect...
Standards Boost (Score:3, Interesting)
Hybrid PDFs: fully editable PDFs with embedded OO (Score:4, Insightful)
This will be really useful in that you can avoid having to distribute some files in "exported
Writers need AUTOSAVE (Score:4, Insightful)
Writers want this. Computers can't be trusted. There are a few times when power supplies fail or computers crash. You don't want to rewrite an important few paragraphs.
This is great feature which writers would warm to and the word would spread. Microsoft doesn't have it.
I don't know who to ask at the OO website.
Re:Openoffice.org needs a more friendly website (Score:5, Informative)
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ie: Someone who is thinking about upgrading but isn't sure if it's worth the effort.
Re:Database support ? (Score:5, Informative)
??? It already exists? OpenOffice Base has a dependency on Java, but otherwise it's available for all platforms. (The core database is HSQLDB.) As I recall, you can use either JDBC or ODBC drivers to connect to a remote database.
The data sources configured in OpenOffice Base can then be used in programs like Calc.
So... I'm not really sure what the issue is?
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I think you misspelled "pivot tables". Are they in yet? If not, please end the discussion of why people are not switching from Excel to OO right here.
Re:Database support ? (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000252 [linuxjournal.com] shows how to implement pivot tables in OO2. http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007/programme/wednesday_186.pdf [openoffice.org] tells us that Pivot Table support will be improved in OO3
Re:Aqua? (Score:5, Informative)
Aqua is the set of widgets and such that make up the MacOS X user interface. It has evolved over the various versions of the OS, but it's still Aqua.
Quartz is the underlying PDF-based drawing technology that MacOS X uses to draw everything to the screen- including the Aqua UI widgets.
Referring to native Aqua is quite correct.
Re:Office 2007 ... still good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
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How is this marked as insightful?
He/She might be an insightful individual, but this comment is more trolling than (and completely irrelevant to) my original question!
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So I'm not sure what you seem upset about. That you couldn't incite some kind of flameage over this?
Me I use OpenOffice.org on Windows a
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Re:Office 2007 ... still good enough (Score:5, Insightful)
But some of us prefer Linux to Windows or MacOS, and many others have problems with Office 07. For us, this is big and exciting news.
I understand that as long as it works for you, you don't give a damn about anyone else, but if that's the case, please choose not to care a little further, and refrain from posting.
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The original post wasn't meant to troll for comments - but it appears that it has - does anyone have any COMPELLING reasons to switch? Because I havn't seen any advantage in switching, and I have no problems switching to a superior (for my needs) product.
Re:Tastes Differ (Score:2)
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OO is free and runs on Linux. MSO is not free and doesn't. My choice of OS has thus limited my choice of Office applications. What is there not to understand?
Or are you simply trolling?
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Where OO.o has the potential to come into its own is:
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For the rest of us, linux users, mac or windows users who don't want to pay for MS Office, and for anyone who prefers their documents be stored in a truly open format that won't forcibly be obsoleted by the vendor in 12 months when they need another stock price bump,
we are glad that OO continues to improve and remain a viable set of office tools.
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Well, thats one good point. I honestly appreciate your effort in actually answering my question.
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My short wishlist for Calc:
As you say, better charts. Make the damn things editable!
A better solver. One that doesn't wander off and get stuck in places that aren't even locally optimal on smooth 3-input optimization problems.
Fourier transforms. Excel has it, and they're not that hard to code up, and if you need them there's really no substitute. I need them.
There are others, mostly interface and performance related, but really if you give me those I'll be happy...
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