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An Early Look at OpenOffice.org 3.0
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday March 19, @10:07AM
from the remember-the-future dept.
from the remember-the-future dept.
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."
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Technology: OpenOffice.org 2.4 Released 173 comments
ahziem writes "The multiplatform, multilingual office suite OpenOffice.org has announced the release of version 2.4. New features include 5 PDF export enhancements, text to columns in Calc, rectangular selection in Writer, bug fixes, performance improvements, improvements supporting the growing library of extensions such as 3D OpenGL transitions in Impress, and much more. Downloads are available either direct or P2P. In September, OpenOffice.org 3.0 will add PDF import, Microsoft Office 2007 file format support, and ODF 1.2."
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
New Feature (Score:4, Funny)
I'm sure it's just me (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
still need an outlook replacement (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:still need an outlook replacement (Score:5, Informative)
Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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(?).
Performance? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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.
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.
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...
Re:Openoffice.org needs a more friendly website (Score:5, Informative)
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?
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)
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.
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.
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: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.
Re:Crap, is documentation out of date? (Score:5, Interesting)