Open Office 2 released (5 Viewers)

[mikhail]

Open Office 2.0 has just ben released. In case you're unfamiliar with it, it's basically an attempt to match Microsoft Office (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Access, etc.) with an equivalent open source (free as in freedom) and free (free as in beer) software suite. I've been using version 1 for a long time now, and was quite happy to use it for most things. Version 2 is a big step up. It imports the Microsoft formats better, looks better and is a lot easier to use. It's still not perfect (particularly the database stuff), but for most people, it's Word/Powerpoint/Excel for free. Recommended.




From their site:
The OpenOffice.org Project is an international community of volunteers and sponsors including founding sponsor and primary contributor, Sun Microsystems. OpenOffice.org develops, supports, and promotes the open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. The project can be found at www.openoffice.org. OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard and is available on major computing platforms in over 60 languages. OpenOffice.org is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL).

A small piece on the new features

My old OO thread is here

 

Buy on AliExpress.com

[Lawnchair Bes]

so its not beta ?

 

[mikhail]

++ [ originally posted by Don Bes ] ++
so its not beta ?

Nope - all ready now.

 

[Lawnchair Bes]

that sucks, 2 days ago i d/l the last non-beta version, now i have to do it again

 

[mikhail]

++ [ originally posted by Don Bes ] ++
that sucks, 2 days ago i d/l the last non-beta version, now i have to do it again

Don't bother unless you've got a really fast connection. The difference would be tiny.

 

[Lawnchair Bes]

oh ok then kinda dissapointing though.

 

[mikhail]

++ [ originally posted by Don Bes ] ++
oh ok then kinda dissapointing though.

The idea of a beta is that it has all the features, but it might have a few bugs in it. By releasing it, the programmers get reports of the stuff that's going wrong and can fix it. OO's betas have been very stable though. Certainly, the last one would be pretty close to the finished product.

 

[Lawnchair Bes]

++ [ originally posted by mikhail ] ++

The idea of a beta is that it has all the features, but it might have a few bugs in it. By releasing it, the programmers get reports of the stuff that's going wrong and can fix it. OO's betas have been very stable though. Certainly, the last one would be pretty close to the finished product.

oh no, i said i just d/l the last non-beta version

1.1.5

 

[mikhail]

++ [ originally posted by Don Bes ] ++
oh no, i said i just d/l the last non-beta version

1.1.5

Oh. That would be a lot less featured alright.

 

[Lawnchair Bes]

i thought so

 

[Martin]

2.0 is very nice IMO, I've been running various betas for while, because they support the new OASIS standard. It looks more polished than 1.x..

 

[mikhail]

++ [ originally posted by Martin ] ++
2.0 is very nice IMO, I've been running various betas for while, because they support the new OASIS standard.

I've heard suggestions that MS are going to support that in the future. You hear anything about that?

It looks more polished than 1.x..

Very much so. All that clunkiness is gone.

 

[Martin]

++ [ originally posted by mikhail ] ++

I've heard suggestions that MS are going to support that in the future. You hear anything about that?

Let's say I'm a tad skeptical to such a promising scenario...

 

[mikhail]

++ [ originally posted by Martin ] ++
Let's say I'm a tad skeptical to such a promising scenario...

Me too. I did read something that suggested they could essentially have their own version of it (which is worse than useless), but I wasn't paying it much attention at the time and never got back to it. I'm not sure that can be true. Anyway, we'll see!

 

[Martin]

Well the grapevine says Office2003+ is gonna use xml for file storage. Obviously that doesn't really mean anything without knowing the details, the format is pretty irrelevant. Apparently, MS's idea of xml is embedded binary data and so on, not exactly open format. But we'll see what they come up with, I sure can't see Steve Ballmer say "oh it's an open file format, how magnificent, now people can get inter operativity with OpenOffice"..

 

[mikhail]

That'll be what I was thinking of I guess. Interestingly, OO2 already claims to be able to write to "Microsoft Word 2003 XML", which suggests it's already in a store near you.

 

[Martin]

Yeah, I'm impressed by how well OO handles the Office formats. But they don't know it inside out, there's always going to be some glitches.

I'm not really that concerned with Office anymore, I don't use it, I've switched to the latex->pdf platform.

 

[mikhail]

++ [ originally posted by Martin ] ++
Yeah, I'm impressed by how well OO handles the Office formats. But they don't know it inside out, there's always going to be some glitches.

I'm not really that concerned with Office anymore, I don't use it, I've switched to the latex->pdf platform.

One of my supervisors uses that to create papers, the other uses Word. I'm likely to wind up using both for work. At home, I'll stick with OO untill I find a compelling reason not to. LaTeX seems like overkill for minor stuff.

 

[Martin]

It is yeah. I had a good reason to investigate it, writing my thesis and I chose to give it a real test drive, knew very little about it in advance. I'm very happy with the results though, the one thing it's not good at is html/online publishing. I'm thinking about trying docbook next time, similar concept but newer implementation.