OpenOffice 3.1 Released

harmonise writes "OpenOffice 3.1 has been released. According to the release announcement, this update received 'The biggest single change (half a million lines of code!) and the most visible is the major revamp of OpenOffice.org on-screen graphics.' See the OpenOffice 3.1 New Features page for a full list of changes."

Word count

[simonwalton]

Does it offer the ability to have an auto-updating word count in the status bar yet? It's absolutely essential to many people, particularly copywriters who are paid to hit a particular word count. It seems like such a trivial thing to implement and has been requested many times.

Re:Improved looks?

[MrEricSir]

Especially compared to MS Office 2007. It took me about 5 minutes just to figure out how to print something. I mean, it's an office program. There should either be a big PRINT button, or a File->Print menu.

And ideally, a talking paperclip to help you stab your eyes out.

Compaired to competition

[RiotingPacifist]

The new features are nice, but does it have anything that beats Microsoft's offerings?
DRM & sharing for companies ?
Integration with online services (like google office) for home users ?

Obviously I mean other than running on Linux & mac natively, but does it beat gnumeric & abiword yet? I mean when im doing graphs OO (2.x) simply isn't as easy to use as gnumeric and is missing quite a few options.

Won't download to my mac...

[Anonymous Coward]

I get some weird "download chooser" page, and if I select MacOSX from there, it won't download either. This is with Safari 4.

I think somebody is trying to be too "smart".

Re:Improved looks?

[IsaacD]

Ribbons seemed strange and unnecessary to me at first. Given some time, I've adopted them whole-heartedly. I've always had high hopes for OOo, but I have found myself disappointed and more than willing to pay for MS Office. Office 2007 even has PDF/XPS plugins available; the tablet and integration/collaboration features of MS Office leave OOo light years behind.

Most important question

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

When it encounters a ODF 1.1 document with formula arguments separated by commas created by the MsOffice2007 SP2, does it throw up a really really big nasty warning dialog that says, "MsOffice2007 is using ODF 1.1, please contact the vendor and urge them to start supporting ODF 1.2. We will be nice this one last time and hack around the commas and make them colons. But best if you could persuade the vendor of ODF1.1 docs to upgrade to ODF 1.2"?

Re:Sorry but...

[Burkin]

This just in: Words in the English language can actually have more than 1 meaning! But the Stallmanesque rant was pretty funny.

Re:.5 million lines of code

[Anonymous Coward]

In this case, Sun said [sun.com] "about 500.000 lines of code were changed/rewritten" just for antialiasing, a task that "took 5 years to complete".

And they didn't even simply abstract out the drawing and use Cairo -- they wrote their own antialiasing. So it looks a little different from all my other apps, and now I'll have yet another implementation of AA in memory now. (If that's not bloat, what is?)

The screenshots look prettier, but I'm not sure if this is progress or not. If they want to add another graphics feature, will they have to touch 500000 lines of code again, and take another 5 years? Or do they have their own ad-hoc Cairo-like abstraction internally so they can just add it in one area of the code? They don't say.

OpenOffice.org

[falconwolf]

it has had times where it seemed out of place on either Windows or OSX (particular OSX before it was a native application).

I use NeoOffice [neooffice.org] on my Mac and see no reason to switch right now.

when I'm using a program and I can tell it wasn't designed for the system I'm running it on, I count that as a problem.

What matters to me is whether it is and how much it's usable. That's one reason I won't switch for now, NeoOffice is quite usable. Then again I hardly use it.

Falcon

OO still has one major bug

[belmolis]

They still haven't fixed what I regard as the biggest bug in OO: the fact that file-opening and -saving dialogues default to the last directory it used rather than the current working directory when running on GNU/Linux. It is understandable that OO would use the MS Windows convention when running on MS Windows, but importing those conventions into Unix is a bad user-interface practice. There's a reason that Unix people move from directory to directory. For experienced Unix users who use different directories for different projects, the failure to track the current directory is very irritating.

Even if they feel it necessary to provide the option of using the MS Windows conventions for people switching from MS Windows to Unix, it should be an option, not a requirement. And I doubt that this would be hard to do: determining the default directory for those dialogues is presumably only done in one or two places and should be very simple to code.

Re:Improved looks?

[StuartHankins]

Not obvious enough to our users. You can't imagine the number of complaints we've had about this -- and the default format of files is Office 2007-only.

Several checklist items were added to our setup routines just to accommodate Office 2007, and retraining in many areas was needed.

Formulas and macros developed in Excel aren't the same, so one dept can't give one set of instructions to other depts not yet moved to Office 2007. In these financial times spending several hundred a pop seems more than an expensive transition, it seems a waste of resources.

Oh, yeah, it's bigger and slower too. Ugh. Where's the win in this situation again?

Great for Home / School use but...

[gnesterenko]

But still useless for any professional setting or high-level business education. Staistical and financial plug-ins are vastly inferior to MS Office. No VBA for business applications. These two alone make a hobby app for basic home uses, nothing game changing and certainly still not a real competitor to MS Office. That's not even mentioning the online collaboration tools of MS Office as well as Live Workspace. "The views expressed here are mine and do not reflect the official opinion of my employer or the organization through which the Internet was accessed."