OpenOffice.org Hits 1.1

sander writes "OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet). The announcement is here, there is a really nice features page and a long list of mirrors carrying the goodies." OO.org releases for languages other than English should be here soon, too.

Start up time?

[n1k0]

Has the start-up time been reduced for this release? When last I tried (a few weeks ago), it was rediculously slow.

Here's hoping,

-Nick

Re:Start up time?

[madfgurtbn]

Has the start-up time been reduced for this release?

It looks like their website is groaning under the load right now, so I can't give you a link, but there is a roadmap up somewhere which says startup time is one of the highest priority goals for version 2.0.

Startup is still quite slow even on speedy hardware, but I don't think it has been one of their highest priorities yet.

Re:Start up time?

[MeNeXT]

Do like msoffice. Set it to start on login and minimize it. Then it's very fast...It's how MS does it.

Start up time is the least of my problems...

[Dimensio]

I recently installed the last release candidate, and the startup time was nothing compared to the sluggish feel of the app itself versus the relatively responsive 1.0.x releases (though the startup time there was bad too). I'm wondering if this has been improved.

Re:Start up time?

[MarcQuadra]

I'm running on a hotrod 1466Mhz athlon / 768MB/ 10GB running gentoo. First load takes about 11 seconds (that's a long time) but subsequent loads are pretty zippy. I suggest you either prelink the app (which I don't do) or put a script in your init.d directory to recursively cat the /opt/OpenOffice directory to /dev/null, that would effectively 'precache' the application.

Also, try building from source if you can, you'll be able to set the optimization and several options that you don't see with a binary-only install.

Re:Start up time?

[sickmtbnutcase]

$ emerge oooqs
That'll fix your startup times, and the tray icon is pretty handy.

Re:Start up time?

[BrookHarty]

Wouldnt cat'ing a whole directory during bootup take more time and resources? I know there all these stories about speeding up booting for linux, wouldnt you do this after you boot into X? Save the cache for the initial processes and X startup. Then cache all your applications, terminals, office, mozilla, xmms, etc. Thou, seems like overkill for a couple seconds off the application start time, to read the file twice. (My head hurts thinking about it)

Kinda like windows, it boots up into the login screen, th

Re:Start up time?

[BlackBolt]

The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness. *In comparison* to either MSOffice or Corel WordPerfect Suite 7 or 8 on Windows it is abysmal.

Please note: I put "in comparison" in asterisks because the trolls think people should "get faster computers, fool". My friend was given OO.O recently and was immediately disgusted by the startup speed compared to MSOffice. "You get what you pay for", she said. NOT a good showing for open-source software. The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.

Re:Start up time?

[ekuns]

The horrible startup speed is by far OpenOffice.org's greatest weakness [snip] "You get what you pay for", she said. [snip] The price is irrelevant, because they promptly pirated MSOffice97 and were happy.

Wow, do you see the irony there? Someone complains that "You get what you pay for" and then pirates commercial software? I have no sympathy, nor respect, for people who pirate software. You mention that person's complaint like it's someone whose opinion should be taken seriously. Someone who is

Re:Start up time?

[aardvarkjoe]

since cheap hacks like preloads are not the linux way, for the size of the app, the speed is sufficient.

How is making something faster a "cheap hack?" It sounds like intelligent design to me. When I turn on the computer, the difference between 60 and 80 seconds of boot time is fairly irrelevant -- I'm doing something else anyway. When I start up an application, the difference between 5 and 25 seconds until I can start using it is immense.

If we're reduced to saying, "well, yeah, it's better ... but it'

Re:Start up time?

[timeOday]

Well, don't worry because I installed Openoffice 1.1 rc5 yesterday (oops) and IIRC it offers preload.

Why are hacks bad? Because the same thing might be done in a better way.

I think it would be cool if the linux kernel would collect statistics on which pages tend to be resident in memory. Then after bootup, it could use idle disk time to read those pages so they'd be in the cache. The advantage is that this would benefit ALL apps without any application-specific coding.

Re:Start up time?

[aardvarkjoe]

making office appear faster by loading tons of libs into memory...

You're wrong on this count. You're not making it appear faster; you really are making it faster. As I pointed out in my last post, preloading means less wasted time for the user. If you've got a "non-hack" way of making it faster, I'm all ears, but if program design detracts from the experience of the user, the design is flawed. A 30-second startup time is simply unacceptable.

eys, some you ahve to preload, especially system libs. but

Just tried it

[KrackHouse]

IBM should help out with the marketing of this, it's really great. Get better icons, etc. here -> http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=7 131 It seems faster than 1.0, more polished.

Re:Just tried it [KDE LOOK ICON SET URL]

[ShadeARG]

Hyperlinking the URL would fix the problem and make access convenient. Why not try [kde-look.org] it?

My favorite feature

[carl67lp]

My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF. It's one of the reasons why I still use OO even though I almost always have access to Microsoft Office.

That, and there's something to be said for the ability to literally unpack a saved file, look at the raw data, and get exactly what you need. (I had to do this on a spreadsheet before I installed OO again, and was able to retrieve an important CD key. ;-) )

Re:My favorite feature

[jlechem]

Yes but can it save word files to crappy html files with propriatary tags?

I didn't think so.

other missing features

[commodoresloat]

I can't get any work done with a word processor that doesn't interrupt every fucking letter I try to write with unhelpful advice. Until OO gets this kind of functionality it will be useless to the majority of MS Office users.

Re:My favorite feature

[mblase]

My favorite feature has to be the ability to export to PDF.

You know, in Mac OS X (or Windows, if you buy Adobe Acrobat), you can export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing.

Come to think of it, I'd be surprised if there wasn't a Linux printer driver to do the same thing....

Re:My favorite feature

[koali]

Huh, on Windows you can install a postscript printer, print to a file and use ps2pdf :-b The same can be said about Linux.

Re:My favorite feature

[carl67lp]

Sure, but in Windows, you either have to pay for Acrobat (not exactly cheap), or find some sort of convoluted workaround. OO does it very smoothly and easily.

Mind you, it's no substitute for Acrobat (which I use monthly), but it works in a pinch for those short, simple documents.

Re:My favorite feature

[Bistronaut]

PDF995 [pdf995.com] is a shareware (free version pops up a web page every time you use it) app that does exactly that. Plus, if you want to register it it's only $9.95 (hence the name). It's great. You can set up the same thing with all free software, but it's a pain. PDF995 takes the pain out of making PDFs for free on Windows. That said, I use OOo. It rocks.

Re:My favorite feature

[Qube]

Or better still, PDFCreator [sourceforge.net] does all that for nothing with with no ads or nagging - completely GPL. Comes with a proper no-hassle installer, and is as easy to set up and use as PDF995 or similar.

Re:My favorite feature

[Alan]

or find some sort of convoluted workaround

You mean like kazaa? :)

Re:My favorite feature

[platypus]

Lookee here [webxd.com]

Freepdf, if you're not doing prepress stuff, it is actually better than acrobat (I use 4.0) IMO.

Re:My favorite feature

[F1re]

Use PDF Creator from SourceForge:

PDF Creator [sourceforge.net]

Re:My favorite feature

[The Madpostal Worker]

There is a redirector [wisc.edu] which will redirect a printer port to a ghost script process, which is essentially a free version of distiller.

Re:My favorite feature

[generic-man]

In Windows, you can use PDFCreator [sourceforge.net] to export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing. Unlike Adobe Acrobat, PDFCreator is free (GPL).

Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO

[Tor]

You know, in Mac OS X [...] you can export a document from any application to PDF format, as long as that application supports printing.

True, however those PDFs are HUGE compared to those that OpenOffice creates -- with no seeming improvement in quality. Indeed, the OO seems a bit better at detailed pictures etc.

I printed a 3.2MB MS PowerPoint presentation to PDF from a Mac, and the resulting file was 22MB. I exported the same file from OO v1.1 (which, by the way, has been in Debian 'sid' since Sep 25), and the resulting size was 2.3MB.

Indeed, the PDF created from OO seemed smoother (despite having to import a foreign document format) than the one created via the "Print to PDF..." option in the Mac OS X print dialogue.

-tor

Re:Print to PDF from Mac is inefficient

[Alderete]

I love the capability of Mac OS X to print anything to a PDF file, it's a great feature to use in a pinch. But it's no substitute for a real PDF generation tool, like Acrobat, or functionality built into OpenOffice.

The file size different noted here (22MB vs 2.3MB) is hardly unusual; indeed, it's the rule, not the exception. In dozens of attempts, I never made a PDF file remotely close to what Acrobat Distiller was capable of doing, size-wise.

If your job doesn't depend on being able to send people PDF files, the built-in version is fine. But if you share your PDFs regularly, spend the time or the bucks to get a real PDF solution.

Re:Print to PDF from Mac vs Export from OO

[Graymalkin]

In Jaguar (10.2) the Print to PDF feature doesn't use any compression. OO's print to PDF feature supports image compression. In Panther (10.3) Apple is finally adding compression support to their Print to PDF feature so the files ought to be a whole lot smaller than the ones produced in jaguar. Granted they might not be as small as a dedicated PDF generation utility might output but they are much better than Jaguar's PDFs.

Regardless, the ability to print anything to a PDF is a very cool feature. Want to send an AppleWorks document to a Windows user? Print to PDF and you're pretty much set.

Re:My favorite feature

[johnnyb]

Actually, Linux supports this to. Just print to postscript, and run ps2pdf on it, or better yet, set up a printer to do that for you.

In fact, I have my Linux PDF Printer set up using SAMBA so the whole office can use it. This way noone has to buy Acrobat, and we can all print to PDF without even installing software (it's just a printer install - the drivers are already installed on Windows).

Re:My favorite feature

[lactose99]

There's one called PDFCreator in Windows that emulates a printer and allows you to "print to PDF".

Re:My favorite feature

[mblase]

Ahh, good: there's a Linux print-to-PDF solution after all [linuxgazette.com].

Of course, OO's button is certainly easier to use, but I think adding it either to the "save as..." dialog or the "print to..." list (or both) is more intuitive.

Re:My favorite feature

[aled]

Why would you want a one-click-save-to-pdf when you can install ghostscript and ghostview and configure... ah, never mind.

Re:My favorite feature

[PurpleBob]

You mean the print dialog is missing the "Print to file" option?

For those that have tried both....

[FreeLinux]

I would be particularly interested in hearing from those that have tried OO1.1 and StarOffice 7.0. Specifically, what are the differences? What does StarOffice 7.0 have that OpenOffice 1.1 does not?

Re:For those that have tried both....

[Anonymous Coward]

StarOffice 7 has a database component (AdabasD) that is not OSS, since its not created by Sun. SO7 also has more clip-art style stuff, a WordPerfect filter (also not OSS due to 3rd party code), and a different spelling checker (same thing again).

And it costs $79 (OpenOffice.org 1.1 is free), but you get Sun support with it.

Dan
fa@ooo

Excellent!

[Chuck Bucket]

I've been using the 1.1 beta, and this is exactly what Linux needs to show it's "ready" for the corp desktop. Combine OO with Evolution, and what else do most (90% of corp users) need?

CB

Re:Excellent!

[t0qer]

what else do most (90% of corp users) need?

An OS compatible with the "Just install this dialer to get access to TONS OF PRON!" software that I so often find on the laptops of company officers?

Re:Excellent!

[Bull999999]

Evolution has MAPI connector as n add-on.

Re:Excellent!

[allan_q]

Just click on Actions > Expunge to delete these marked messages. You can also hit Ctrl-E. After a while it becomes second nature.

Re:Excellent!

[AstroDrabb]

Did you go into the "Deleted Items" folder and then click "Actions -> Empty Trash"? Works for me. Also, Ximian puts out Ximian Connector that lets you connect to an MS Exchange server and get all of it's features. This is what I use at work and it works great. I have full access to the calander and corporate contacts for meeting requests, etc. With the contacts, when you go to send an email, you click the To button and there you will see a find box. Type in the first few letters of the frist, last

Re:Excellent!

[override11]

You are indeed an ignorent piece of dog doo you AC

A business, for any number of reasons, needs to keep email resident on the server. You really want sales contacts and messages on an end users PC that he takes home, takes flying, lets kids play with, etc?

But then again, how would I expect a 12 year old to understand that. Maybe after you grow a few more pubes and actually start working in a business instead of your mom's basement you will understand.... but most likely you wont.

uprgradeable thu?

[cyrax777]

I just wish there was a simple patch to upgrade the old one instead of having to download the whole thing all over agien. But hey its FREE and alot better then MS OFFICE imho so ill take what I can get.

Bill is besiged on all sides!

[TerryAtWork]

And since he metamorphoses in a glittering blue-steel engine of destruction when threatened, I wonder how he's going to handle this one....

A day too late...

[Kadagan AU]

Yeah, I saw this announcement on newsforge earlier today, and I had to hit myself. Just yesterday I downloaded and installed the winblows version of OOo1.1rc5, and now I've gotta update to the final ;). If I had only been slightly more patient!!

Re:A day too late...

[swtaarrs]

Actually, rc5 is the same as 1.1. It's not uncommmon with many apps for the final release candidate to be rereleased as a stable version. For those of you who might not believe me, here are the md5sums of the two install zips (ignore any spaces that may get shoved in there..):

4e38b597c1e646d07bb83153b73fe5d3 *OOo_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install.zip
4e38b597c1e646d 07bb83153b73fe5d3 *OOo_1.1rc5_Win32Intel_install.zip

Of course, you have to trust me to believe those md5sums, but life's tough, ain't it? :)

RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Lord Satri]

FYI, received this interesting info from OOO's staff :
In my enthusiasm for OpenOffice.org 1.1, I neglected to clarify a point (see http://www.openoffice.org/servlets/ ReadMsg?msgId=848545&listName=announce ).

OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 is *identical* to the recently released OpenOffice.org RC5.

Therefore, if you have downloaded RC5, there is no need to download 1.1.

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Dysan2k]

Good bit there, but wouldn't/shouldn't the 1.1.0 version have the debugging stripped out to lean it up a bit? Just my opinion. OO's been perfect for an Office replacement for me. Granted, these days I do very little word-processing and even less with a spreadsheet, but when I needed to type up something, it's done me right. I'm using the beta still where my roomie is using rc1. Time to upgrade when I get home.

Let the sucking of the bandwidth BEGIN!

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[pmz]

Good bit there, but wouldn't/shouldn't the 1.1.0 version have the debugging stripped out to lean it up a bit?

I've been bitten by leaving debugging symbols out of open-source software I've compiled. On the occasions that something crashes a program, being able to get something other than gibberish out of a core file is very helpful. It also allows people to e-mail a stack trace along with bug reports. Even though debugging symbols add bloat, I'm almost in favor of distributions leaving them in by defaul

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Zathrus]

There's also the issue that under some compilers there are different things that occur when you compile in debug mode and when you compile in "release" mode.

The most common one I've seen is that debug mode will automatically initialize variables to a known value (usually 0), while that's not done in release mode. This makes finding bugs that are exposed by this particularly fun to find (the most common issues are counters or pointers that are never initialized -- in debug they'll be nicely set to 0 or NULL

Re:RC5 and 1.1.0 is the same

[Delirium Tremens]

Therefore, if you have downloaded RC5, there is no need to download 1.1.

That is not exactly true because there was actually 3 rc5 release attempts, the latest one even being called rc5b.
So your RC5 being the same as the final version really depends on which RC5 you actually downloaded.

Here's a nice page

[zr-rifle]

with the complete illustrated feature list.
http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features /1.1/

Loading times seem to have been improved, that's great news since that's what's keeping me using Abiword for common word processing jobs at uni. Let's see if there's already an ebuild for it...

1.1 final is the same as RC5

[kg4eyf]

The zip file is identical to the RC5 release. If you got it already, then there's no need to download it again.

Welcome features

[mopslik]

Macro recorder, native PDF, and Flash? If I wasn't so grumpy about downloading OO.o 1.0 just a few weeks ago, I'd jump right on it.

Apart from the sluggish startup, I've been nothing but impressed by OpenOffice.

If it helps...

[Sir Haxalot]

Here's the Google Cache for the Openoffice Homepage [216.239.59.104]

What a great office suite

[Kadagan AU]

Hey, for those who haven't read all the details of 1.1, I thought I'd point out that this really looks to me like it's far better than MS Office. Not only does it have 99% of the standard functionality that MS gives, at a much much smaller (read: free) pricetag, but it gives some great bonuses! OOo Draw seems like it's got most of Visio's functionality (a $400 app for the pro version, from MS), it also has built in PDF writing capabilities ($450 from Adobe)! Also, as far as I know, the last version (1.0.1) couldn't actually write .ppt (powerpoint) files, it could only view them. 1.1 is supposed to support writing them as well. Overall this looks ultra-damn-sweet!

Re:What a great office suite

[Papineau]

The precedent version was 1.0.3.1, not 1.0.1. And it could save .ppt files (at least on Linux, but there's no reason it couldn't on all supported platforms).

Re:What a great office suite

[Kadagan AU]

oops. it appears I'm out of date. I was running 1.0.1, and it didn't save them. Not that I ever create them, but I'm sure that some people do.

The ultimate crime!

[ctid]

Aaaargh!! Even the list of mirrors is slashdotted! How unspeakably evil...

w00t!!!!

[An Onerous Coward]

I've been playing with the earlier release candidates, and so far it's been sweet. Much faster than 1.0, better conversion from Office formats, the whole .pdf exporter.

In other wondrous news, KOffice plans on switching [kde.org] to the StarOffice file formats. That should save the filter writers a whole bunch of work on both sides.

I would say, "I'm going to install this on the machines of all my friends and relatives," but rampant piracy has led them to think of Microsoft Office as "free," and the power of brand naming has led them to think of any replacement as inferior. So I'll be installing it on the machines of all friends and neighbors who aren't computer savvy enough to notice the difference. :)

"release candidate" != "feature freeze", sadly

[Anonymous Coward]

OpenOffice.org 1.1.0 has finally been released (after 5 release candidates -- should make it pretty sweet)

Don't read too much into the word "release candidate", which is a Sun marketing tool rather than anything like a feature freeze. As someone working on OpenOffice translation, it has been somewhat difficult when "release candidates" come out containing whole new modules like crashrep and officecfg. Also, there is nothing like a timeline or a release plan like the mozilla project uses - as a contributor, the first you hear about an OpenOffice release is when it appears on the website. This makes it very difficult when you're trying to convince organisations in your country to switch - you're working in the dark and have no timescale to plan against.

Don't get me wrong - I think OpenOffice is a brilliant product and will be pushing it very hard in my country. But if they'd open up the development process half as much as they've opened up the licence, it'd make advocacy a lot easier.

Cool!

[the bluebrain]

... only 1998.9 versions to go (plus a couple of arbitrary letters), and we'll have caught up with Microsoft!

(hey - there are "industry analysts" out there that count this way)

Open in one taskbar item??

[WankersRevenge]

The most irritating thing open OO is when you open new documents, it opens up a new taskbar slot. Is there are a way to open documents in one app as opposed to a gazillion of them?

For those who run into trouble looking for mirrors

[ErrorBase]

Now at a station near you !
Windows : Linorg [linorg.usp.br] Projeto Brasil [rs.gov.br] ISC [isc.org] | IndianaU [iu.edu] | BinaryCode [binarycode.org] | ibiblio.org [ibiblio.org] | PAIR [pair.com] | SecsUp [secsup.org] | Telentente [telentente.com] | Umbc [umbc.edu] Vienna UT [tuwien.ac.at]

Linux : IndianaU [iu.edu] | ISC [isc.org] | BehrSolutions [behrsolutions.com] | BinaryCode [binarycode.org] | ibiblio.org [ibiblio.org] | pair [pair.com] | SecsUp [secsup.org] | Telentente [telentente.com] | Umbc [umbc.edu] Vienna UT [tuwien.ac.at] Belnet [belnet.be] | KULeuvenNet [kuleuven.ac.be] CVUT [sh.cvut.cz] Sunsite [sunsite.dk] FUNET [funet.fi]

Bit Torrent link

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a Bit Torrent for this at Suprnova.org [suprnova.org]:
OpenOffice 1.1 Win32 English [emptylogic.com]

Torrent anyone?

[carlmenezes]

Server's slashdotted.

Anyone got a torrent file?

Thanks.

Re:Torrent anyone?

[carlmenezes]

Windows install torrent link :

http://www.emptylogic.com/suprnova/torrents/378/ OO o_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install-zip.torrent

Linux torrent anyone?

Here, I'll start a Linux torrent

[tugrul]

Doesn't seem like anyone else has.

OOo_1.1.0_LinuxIntel_install.tar.gz.torrent [nyu.edu]

My impressions..

[adeyadey]

Have been running OpenOffice 1.1 under Windows a little while - only just scratching the surface. Looks like a great prog, but a bit slow to start up. But heck, so is Word..

Also doesnt seem to load old .WRI (windows write) files, a bit of an odd ommision, considering how much else it does..

PDF export is extremely useful, worth it for that feature alone.

If all goes well I think I will be trashing Word soon..

Gentoo

[captainclever]

Someone give me the nod when it's in Portage :)

Great program but missing MUST HAVE feature

[jbs0902]

I think OpenOffice (OO) and StarOffice are great programs, but until they allow me to use different line numbering schemes for each section/style, I can't use them.

I need to have no line numbers on 1 page, line numbering by 5 lines on the majority of the document, and line numbering by 1 line of the rest.

While they import Word/Visio very well and work on 90% of my other feature needs, that 10% is a killer for work.

I need OO bug #5131 [openoffice.org] fixed so I can move out of Microsoft land.

Neat!

[JediTrainer]

Now I'm curious... I've always been looking for a 'better' way to convert Word or Excel files to PDF.

Is there a way that OO can be scripted to convert a file from the command line on a headless box? (assume we're NOT running X)

Such a thing would be a lifesaver. I've been using Doc2PDF [sourceforge.net] (and I've contributed to the source a bit too), but I find it annoying to need a dedicated box to run the conversion. I'd much prefer having my Linux server do this (along with everything else).

Re:Neat!

[ReelOddeeo]

There are two issues here.

The headless box. Run soffice -help to get a list of command line options. Or go here [openoffice.org] to see a list of command line options. On Windows running soffice -help brings up a window showing command line options.

OOo can be programmed from Basic, Java, and Python. I have done all three. On Windows, you can use any Windows Automatation language, such as Visual Basic, Microsoft Visual FoxPro, Delphi. I personally have used Visual FoxPro to script OOo. Someone on OOoForum has

Re:Neat!

[ReelOddeeo]

The headless box question has come up several times on OOoForum.org and I've answered it there. (Macros and API section.) In short, you can either try launching OOo with a -headless option. Or use an X server that draws to a bitmap in memory. VNC server is such an X server. It has the additional property that you can connect to it using a remote VNC viewer to see what the pixels currently look like. This type of X server requires no particular physical display hardware.

Personal Star/OpenOffice timeline

[swordgeek]

Ah, how far we've come.

I got one of the very first copies of StarOffice 5.0b when Sun bought and released it for free. It very quickly got renamed 5.1, and I tentatively recommended it to a client as a means to solving their office-suite-on-xterm problem. Ended up having to support the evil bastard package as a result. Horrible, horrible thing it was. 5.2 was identical, except with slightly fewer bugs.

OpenOffice.org was born, and I ran screaming. Occasionally I'd drop in and check out the current release (around the 0.300 to 0.500 mark), and find that they had gone light years beyond SO5.2, but still had at least that far to go.

When Sun announced that SO6.0 was coming out, I started to check out the OO releases again, and found a passable package. Slow slow slow (still), but actually usable and convenient.

SO-6.0/OO-1.0.1 was a decent product. I used it regularly, learned to deal with its quirks (no anti-aliased fonts on Solaris--ugh!), and was relatively happy.

Then came the StarOffice 6.1 beta program, which I was a part of. That's when I fell in love, or at least like. StarOffice 7.0 (formerly 6.1) or OpenOffice 1.1.0 are GREAT packages, at long last! Slow to start up, but fast to use once they're running, and really well designed. It's professional quality software, available for multiple platforms, for free. My sole Windows machine is now no more than a games console.

This is a happy day folks! We finally have a complete non-MS desktop!

Enough with the startup time complaints!

[BuddhaDude]

This seems to be the single most commonly voiced criticism of Open/Star Office. How often do you really need to open your wp or ss during the day? I've been using OpenOffice every day at work this year, and here's how I get around this "problem":

1. Fire it up at the beginning of the day.
2. Work.
3. Shut it down at the end of the day.

And if you're the type who leaves the computer on overnight, you don't even have to re-open it the next day. Let's get real, folks.

Fix The Installer..

[wfberg]

Why a .zip file that contains compressed installer files? Couldn't there be one big executable that's the installer and contains the compressed files? Or even an installer that looks around whether the compressed installation files are on the disk itself, or whether it should download them (if the user chooses to install components which are not available)...

If you use MSIE, it will first download the .zip in a temporary directory, then COPY the .zip to your download directory (not an atomic MOVE!), then you have to unzip, then the installer has to decompress files.. Quite a lot of disk activity and space being wasted there..

Question (mainly for Gentoo users)

[dotgod]

Is it worth the time for me to emerge openoffice from source, or will openoffice-bin run just as quickly?

Re:Question (mainly for Gentoo users)

[Lord Ender]

First of all, openoffice-bin is only version 1.0.2 while source openoffice is 1.0.3. I have tried both, and personall, I think running openoffice optimized for my AthlonXP is worth having to wait a couple hours for it to compile. Linux is multi-tasking, it is no problem minimizing a kterm that is compiling. Alternatively, you can just start the compile before you go to bed. But OO 1.1 is not in portage yet :(

Dont forget to checkout the OpenOffice themes!

[-unta]

I really like OpenOffice but gawd it's ugly! If your running it under *nix make sure you check out the Toolbar themes addon.

http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=713 1

You can replace the normal toolbar icons with ones to match your desktop environment, but pretty-much any of the included ones are FAR better than the OOo ones. Please, someone at OO merge this into the main tree!!!

Quick Note on speed

[JayBlalock]

I'm on an old 1ghz Windows box. I don't know about everyone else, but the speed (without the Autoloader enabled) on startup is a *vast* improvement over 1.0 and\or whatever RC I had been using. About 2-3 seconds versus the 15ish it used to take. Enough speedup that it's finally become my default application for reading document files.

But, of course, YMMV.

Now to go see how well the new features work.

Really fast startup times with preliink

[AstroDrabb]

I just used prelink on OpenOffice 1.1 and get a 4 second startup time the first time I start it and 2 second startup times after that. I don't think you can get much better then that. This is on a P4 1.7GHz, 512MB laptop, so it is not the fastest box around. To prelink OOo-1.1 try this:

#cd to where you installed OOo
prelink -vm --ld-library-path=/opt/OpenOffice.org1.1.0/program soffice.bin

Replace the --ld-library-path= part with the directory where soffice.bin is installed. You need to do this as root unless you installed OOo as a normal user.

Make OOo look pretty and match your desktop...

[dotgod]

Download this [kde-look.org] to make OpenOffice match your icon theme. Then use this guide [theregus.com] to get your fonts looking good. In Gentoo you can get Microsoft's fonts by emerging corefonts

Feature: One-click Export to PDF

[Radical Rad]

Watch out! I think Amazon has already patented that one.

Re:OS X version? Not there yet...

[Lord Satri]

Nope, no native OSX port soon. See

http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/timeline.html

Re:Blah

[Kadagan AU]

I know this was a joke (and a good one at that), but OpenOffice.org is also available for Windows and OS X, and others.

Do you know if you can import pdf?

[Martin Marvinski]

That would be a really cool OpenOffice feature. I can already create pdf files in my earlier verision of OpenOffice by clicking print and selecting the output to a file (pdf).

I'd really love it if I could import pdf files and change them. Also on my wishlist is the ability to be able to password protect pdf files created in OpenOffice for the later versions of Acrobat that support it (5.0 or higher).

The Flash export is excellent, and I thank the OpenOffice team for that. AFAIK, not even Microsoft Offic

suck

[mnemonic_]

if you had omitted the closing tag, this could've been a great troll.

you have failed by declaring what was already obvious.

Yay!

[achacha]

I for one am very happy they released version 1.1. I am a happy user of version 1.0 on Windows ME. I had a choice of installing OpenOffice and buying MS Office.

I thought about what I wanted to do, and came up with a small list:
1. Read .doc files that people use at work (don't really care about formatting or power features, just want to read the content)
2. Read Excel files and generate simple spreadsheets

That is all.

For email I use emacs, for a database I use mySQL.

Microsoft Office offered nothing for

Re:Blah

[nocomment]

for the record, use the ISC mirror. I got a sustained spike of over 1M/s I downloaded the entire thing in just about 7 minutes. I'm on a T-1 by the way, so your results may vary.

Good stuff

[soloport]

Just put a new installation through it's paces. Nice work! It is faster. Actually (just started it again to check), it's DAMN faster! In fact it seems everything's sped up a bit -- e.g. menus.

Also tried the PDF exporter and brought the copy up in Mozilla (using the Adobe's reader for Linux). Yep. Looks like a real PDF to me. Haven't tried the MySQL interface, yet, but am excited to get away from the proprietary one.

FWIW, YMMV

I don't get it...

[EvilSporkMan]

Obviously I'm not l33t enough, but evidently this program writes 0 to the very first location in memory. Is this a joke on how much OO crashes? (supposedly)

Re:No torrents

[Trigun]

57KB/s sustained from ibiblio.

Re:Damn...

[prandal]

Google has a list here [google.com].

Amazing what searching for "Openoffice mirrors" turns up.

Phil

Re:Hello

[Mod Me God]

Although for the home your reasons are good, for the business:

1. My company pays, I do not. They get a huge discount and even if for 1000 users it only costs $100K eacg, that's only $100,000K (the price of a single senior analyst a year). Role that over the three year product lifestyle and $100K is the cost of a junior admin staff over those three years. In anorganisation of 1000 this is hardly a good thing, when all OO can do is all MSOffice can do. If OO did something extra that MSOffice did not that would be different, but it is not. Although OO has suppost for office documents, macros cannot be converted unless weeding the code (this takes time, hence money).

2. My secretary does the PDF writing if I need it, this takes less than 5 seconds for me to do and little longer for her (though she also checks various points of detail in it). If something big needs doing I'll forward to our printing department, who will ensure the layout stc is perfect - they are the best people to do the nitty picky presentational polishing, not me.

3. Business licences have already brought down cost of business software for businesses.

4. It's proprietary, and guess what... I can still change it to my needs! Yes I can write macros etc, and can integrate some VB into it and can seamlessly integrate a MS Access DB with Excel etc... but have you ever used Reuters etc??? Reuters worked with MS to reverse engineer Excel to work with live feeds from Reuters, Bloomberg did a similar thing. OO does not have this feature, and until it does will never be the spreadsheet of choice for front office finance work. In the back of a finance office a spreadsheet which cannot do pivot tables easily or work with the existing implenentation (i.e., existing macros or bespoke software) is not worth having on your hard disk.

5. The licence is cheap for a corporate, see 1.

In the end, unless the OO (or even a change over in proprietary software) offers cost savings over the costs involved in changing bespoke applications and macros AND can do all that the previous software will it be implemented by corporates. However to me, the ONLY SURE WAY FOR NEW SOFTWARE TO SUCCEED (proprietary or open source) is to offer new functionality. This is the only thing that can get over the inertia for companies to move. So come on OO, give me something new... I don't know what I want, you've got to do the development of something new and that is truely hard.

SOrry for rambling.

Re:Does anyone have a site for templates?

[ReelOddeeo]

Someone on OOoForum had posted this link [wizardsdesign.com] to some nice templates. I don't know if this set has made it over to OOoExtras.org yet.

Re:Wasted opportunities

[Paddyish]

Why make people have to suffer with the same usability and UI gaffs that MS has foisted on Windows users?

Because that's what people are used to. The lower the learning curve, the more people you will be able to sign on to the bandwagon. It isn't about making anything better - it's about providing an alternative with zero strings attached.

Re:for company?

[SonicBurst]

as a hopeless mathmatican

Good thing you're not an English professor.

1.1 RC5 is the same as 1.1 final

[Compact Dick]

Those who downloaded 1.1 RC5 for win32 can save themselves a 63.5 MB download and simply rename OOo_1.1rc5_Win32Intel_install.zip to OOo_1.1.0_Win32Intel_install.zip as they share the same checksum "4e38b597c1e646d07bb83153b73fe5d3".

I am not sure about the other platforms but I wouldn't be surprised if it were the same. Find out by checking out the OpenOffice 1.1 final MD5sums [openoffice.org] list.

Riding the first post to save bandwidth and unnecessary downloads.