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Crap, is documentation out of date?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)
I'm sure it's just me (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
Finally! (Score:5, Interesting)
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:I'm sure it's just me (Score:3, Interesting)
Then again, Writer is also the only component I use. There are also some other minor problems with
Re:New Feature (Score:1, Interesting)
Thanks, OOo! I left Microsoft Office in 2005 and never looked back.
Re:still need an outlook replacement (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:New Feature (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)
Perhaps there is a reposity out there that pulls directly from OOo so I don't have to update the program manually? Anyone know?
Re:Office 2007 ... still good enough (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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.
Re:New Feature (Score:1, Interesting)
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: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:Crap, is documentation out of date? (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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.
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?
Re:For the scientists: ERROR BARS (Score:2, Interesting)
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:Major flaw in the build-process (Score:1, Interesting)
Too bad they can't find a way to bundle and integrate Java as well..that would fix most fo the other issues floating around for folks.
If that was how OO worked on Linux, it would have been a complete failure. Most people don't know or care about the dependencies, they just want the Program to install and WORK with no hassle. If it means a couple of megs (or hundred megs) of duplicate apps/files/etc..who cares! Hard Drive space is cheap.
Purists can rip apart the OO distribution and modify it and rip out the duplicate files/apps to their hearts content, just don't force your puritanical ideals on everyone else who just want apps to install and function with no hassle.
Standards Boost (Score:3, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:still need an outlook replacement (Score:2, Interesting)
Outlook can sync up with google calendar as well now, but with the provider extension for Thunderbird you can specify which calendar to sync with Google. However in Outlook it syncs the entire default calendar, which has tended to accidently share private events with multiple people. I have no experience in regards to exchange server, so I'm not 100% sure how that compares to the Thunderbird + GCalendar experience.
Re:Good, but the interface is still lagging (Score:3, Interesting)
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 developers on bling," but that OpenOffice should get people who aren't developers. People who, for instance, are willing to run the usability studies, to come up with the big picture ideas to test. Psychologists to come up with those little tricks that make things appear faster and better without actually making them faster and better-- for example, the new progress bars in OS X and Vista both use a simple optical illusion to appear to be moving faster than they actually are. Even an artist, or at least designer, to set your color scheme up to look modern and fresh.
The problem is that all you have is developers. It takes a lot more than that to create successful software.
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.
I agree, that's also important.
Re:Stability (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Crap, is documentation out of date? (Score:5, Interesting)
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: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.
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.
Re:New Feature (Score:3, Interesting)
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 bug that prevents images from being inserted in a presentation if you insert it by keyboard shortcuts; that only works if I use the mouse.)
Re:why I avoid OOo (Score:2, Interesting)