OpenOffice 3.2 is actually good and usable.

[reddragdiva]

I just downloaded and installed OpenOffice.org 3.2. You should too.

On this here laptop (a Toshiba R600 with 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo and 3GB memory, running Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit), I have the included OOo 3.1 and a copy of MS Office 2003 running under Wine.

I have tended to use Excel simply because it starts in under a second from cold, whereas OOo Calc 3.1 takes seven seconds from cold.

Let me tell you: that extra six seconds is approximately forever in user interface terms.

And before someone cuts'n'pastes a reply about Excel preloading hence the startup time being illusory — I said Wine. No preloading. OOo is, quite simply, ridiculously fat and slow. I've used OOo since 638c and it's always been way too fat and way too slow.

So let me heartily recommend you install OOo 3.2, because Calc starts in two seconds from cold. Enough to compete with Excel for user convenience.

(Ubuntu: Download the .deb tarball, use official instructions to extract the binaries into a convenient folder in your home directory, point your OOo menu items at them. Windows: just download and install.)

I understand the 3.2 cycle was quite expressly a speedup and bugfix cycle. GOOD.

It's also worth noting that OOo is around 10% in US and Canada, up to 20% in some countries. At that point it's deadly serious competition.

Man. OOo is usable at last. Who'da thunk?

Comments

Usable for speed, maybe, but...

[(Anonymous)]

will it still make me want to pluck out my own eyes and choke myself with my optic nerves trying to get Impress to do what I want it to?

3.1, at least, seems about on par with MS Office '95 in terms of getting it to do what you want without it doing something totally different and non-intuitive (although it can technically do all the stuff that I've ever used more recent versions of MS Office for). Random resizings and movings, extreme difficulty in moving slides from one place to another, weird scrolling bugs, font weirdness...

Faith's XP install was getting crapped to the point of near uselessness, so we put Ubuntu on her laptop a few weeks ago rather than trying to do a fresh XP. It's mostly been smooth except for extreme frustration with OOo Impress, so I went to the basement and hunted down our Office 2003 disk and put Wine and that on her computer (which to Wine's credit, went perfectly smoothly, even with the web authentication).

My biggest frustration with OOo has been with Calc, trying to export graphs in a reasonable way.

-Sage

Re: Usable for speed, maybe, but...

[reddragdiva]

Because Impress is still complete shit. MS Office is still the right answer for an end user.

My theory is that the only good software Microsoft makes is the stuff used by the people who sign the cheques to buy it. So Outlook is a good meeting organiser, Excel is an excellent spreadsheet and PowerPoint is a very effective prop for lack of confidence in public speaking. There's quite a high bar to beat these.

[hennes]

I am currently playing with a Toshiba Tecra S4, with 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo and 1.5 GB memory. While OpenOffice 3.2 is downloading, I decided to read abit of LJ and DW. Finding this post quite amused me. :)

[reddragdiva]

Hopefully you'll be reasonably pleased! What OS?

[(Anonymous)]

The initial OS is XP. Simply because I had a coorperate (ghost) image for that laptop type.

In the weekend I will replace it with FreeBSD on a SSD (intel G2, 80GB).

[reddragdiva]

Interesting to compare its startup performance between OSes.

(IME with OOo on FreeBSD 2003-2005, it was ridiculously unstable and I got better results running the Linux binary under compatibility. YMMV.)

[ihcoyc.livejournal.com]

Thank 'ee for the report. I've been using 3.1 to open and convert the god damned .docx files that people insist on sending me; and to make PDFs when I need to do that. I will be interested in seeing how it works on the relatively antient computers I use at the office. (The office computers are mostly hand-me-down gaming machines from the house. My receptionist's PC has a blue glowing power supply and red flames on the see thru case. They clash.)

(For actual use, I still use Word for Windows 95, which still works and does everything I ask it to; having used it for almost fifteen years, I know how to make it do what I want.)

[reddragdiva]

Yes indeed. WfW 95 was really pretty good at getting the hell out of your way and letting you write.

We actually use OpenOffice as production machinery at work to automatically convert MS Word files to PDFs. Yes, it takes something as huge and fat as OOo to accurately render MS Word files. (MS Word sure can't do it consistently.)

[liam-on-linux.livejournal.com]

(For actual use, I still use Word for Windows 95, which still works and does everything I ask it to; having used it for almost fifteen years, I know how to make it do what I want.)

Ha! I nust went back to Word '95 myself, actually, on the Windows partition of my laptop. As you say, small, fast, efficient, & it does all I need & much much more.

I can't get it reliably reading Word 97+ format documents, though. That's the only snag.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Stability and speed I've not had much trouble with with.

Interworking with Word documents is a disaster, we have informally banned anyone from editing shared documents with OOo because we're sick of tidying up the mess it leaves each time.

As for general usability? It's awful, not that Microsoft’s attempt is a anything to write home about. Can we go back to 1990s office software please, if we have to use it at all?

[baljemmett.livejournal.com]

Yep; whatever version came installed on my netbook (so Dell's edition of Ubuntu) chewed up my investment-tracking spreadsheet, destroying nearly all the useful formatting and turning full-page charts into small ones scattered all over the data. I haven't let it loose on anything apart from its own documents since!

With regards 1990s releases, I used to find Office '97 about the best for making-vague-sense after I switched from SmartSuite due to nobody being able to make sense of Word Pro or 1-2-3 documents. Similarly, Visual Studio 6 popularly occupies about the same as-good-as-it-got niche in VS history; the later versions are very clunky but gradually getting better...

[reddragdiva]

Interworking: true. This also applies between different versions of Word, or with different printer settings. But software monocultures are much easier to achieve inside an office.

General usability: I expect it'll continue to be like eating a bowl of sawdust with milk for breakfast every morning. It is, however, improved.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

I should try that on my incredibly useful microscope calibration spreadsheet and see if Calc can now actually see the fucking numbers.

[reddragdiva]

Always a useful test ;-p

[damien-wise.livejournal.com]

Good news...ta for the review.
I use OO at home (or, I did until the laptop and desktop both died on the same day, around 6 weeks ago) and was always wishing OO apps (mostly Writer and Calc) would start-up more quickly and, well, just be more snappy / less laggy.
How is it for opening and saving PDFs without munging the formatting?

[reddragdiva]

PDFs are guacamole by nature - they're a generate-only format. Even Acrobat Pro has trouble with a lot of the PDFs it actually generated. If OOo can handle them at all that's amazing.