[Mugge]

A couple of days ago I downloaded the beta version of Open Office 3. The big news is that it now no longer requires X11 to run, but apart from adopting a global menu-bar, the UI is pretty much the same. Here are some of my other observations:

General:

• Very integrated suite. The individual applications make good use of each other.
• Lots of features, but the UI is not as refined as Office 2004.
• Perhaps a little faster than Office 2004 on an MBP rev. A. Pretty good considering it's the first beta version.
• Lot's of plug-ins available. (OO v. 2)

Writer:

• Now comes with proper support for collaboration, but the features are scattered across various menus and when reviewing Writer puts a big ugly dialogue box right on top of the text in question.
• A nifty bibliography database powered by the database application. I've tried to use End Note with Office 2004, but this one is much easier to use.
• Seems to have very good Office 2004 compatibility.

Calc:

• Solver, though only linear.
• Some VBA support.
• Probably the best component in the suite. It's a little early to say, but so far I think it's better than Excel 2004.

Base:
Not something I'm an authority on, but it seems to do the same as Access and can act as front end for a lot of database systems. I guess the big news here is that you can use data managed in this application all over the Suite. So Even if you aren't usually into databases, this one offers an easy and flexible way of supporting your writing (bibliography and notes) or data-sources for Calc.

Draw:
It's not as terrible as Gimp, but Omnigraffle is still the king here.

Impress:
Uglier than PowerPoint.

I'm quite sure it will turn out better than Office 2004, though I haven't had an opportunity to try Office 2008 yet. Maybe some of you guys can chip in on that part. Personally I'm quite excited to see a cross platform office suite that's works so well. Sure iWork is more visually pleasing to work with and makes better use of OS X's services, but with version 3 Open Office exceeds MS Office in hard features. I used to be worried that Open Office was too big to work as an open source project, fortunately it looks like I was wrong about that.



[edit: and here's the 3.0 beta download link and features page. - Brad]

[ghoti]

Why are office suites so slow? From your description, it's likely going to be similar to Office 2008. A word processor is really only a glorified text editor, how can these things be such huge beasts and so damn slow?

It's a good thing that projects like OOo exist, but until somebody can invest some money into making it usable and reasonably bug-free (like Shuttleworth did with Ubuntu), I don't see many people using it.

[Fahrenheit]

I agree, Ghoti. Why is Pages one of the slowest apps I have. And why on a C2D 1.83 with 2 gig of RAM does it take a good 5 seconds to open a document? Its ridiculous - I would sacrifice half of the features for speed.

[Mugge]

I totally agree, and it's a mystery to me too. With Word 2004 I found that tracking changes was something that really could bring my MBP to it's knees.

With regards to bugs, I've only come across three so far. Two in relation to the toolbars in Writer and then it keeps crashing when I try to load my masters thesis. However, I'm not going to pass judgement over bug issues until the release version is out. The biggest problem I see with Open Office is that the UI isn't as thought through as it could be. Some operations require a lot more actions than in Office or iWork.

[Brad]

As long as OOo 3 is faster than NeoOffice, I'll be happy.

The speed of NeoOffice is just embarrassing. On a 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo, I shouldn't have one-second delays when copying and pasting a handful of cells in a small, one-page spreadsheet! I can live with the eye-gougingly bad UI issues, but the performance just drive me through the roof.

[ghoti]

I actually really like Pages and Numbers. Pages is much faster than Word 2008, and a LOT faster than NeoOffice. Numbers doesn't do everything in the world, but it does the things I need, and it's quite simply Spreadsheets Done Right. It's much more pleasant to use than Excel, even if ignoring the speed issues.

I may give OOo 3 a whirl once it's out of beta, just to see how it compares. But I doubt that I will want to use it, I really like my programs to look like Mac programs, not early '90s X11 apps.

[Brad]

Originally Posted by Farenheit I agree, Ghoti. Why is Pages one of the slowest apps I have. And why on a C2D 1.83 with 2 gig of RAM does it take a good 5 seconds to open a document? Its ridiculous - I would sacrifice half of the features for speed.

Well, bear in mind that word processors are like web browsers on steroids. They have to render ridiculously complex documents under a mountain of rules and they have to do it constantly, every time you enter a letter from the keyboard or make a selection and change some formatting. Even the simple documents still have to go through the same suite of formatting rules that make the complex ones work.

Granted, that's no excuse for slow word processors, but it's a layman's explanation for it. We had relatively speedy (albeit basic) WYSIWYG word processors twenty years ago and our current hardware is magnitudes faster than what we had then. Heck, even the fully-feature Microsoft Word 98 of ten years ago was a speed demon in its time.

[ghoti]

Originally Posted by Brad Well, bear in mind that word processors are like web browsers on steroids. They have to render ridiculously complex documents under a mountain of rules and they have to do it constantly, every time you enter a letter from the keyboard or make a selection and change some formatting. Even the simple documents still have to go through the same suite of formatting rules that make the complex ones work.

That's only true if these programs are horribly badly written. Most documents have a simple box layout with no overlapping objects that the text needs to flow around. If there is nothing to flow around, there's no reason to do anything fancy. Plus, the layout can be incremental, since you only get single characters added, usually at the end. If something else changes (say, an image is inserted), that can cause a larger layout update, but any decent program needs to be written in a way that it only updates as much as absolutely necessary. It's certainly not comparable to rendering a website from scratch.

There are a few things that eat performance, like the constant dictionary lookups for the on-the-fly spell checker. These actually slowed down earlier versions of Word (when that feature was introduced) considerably. But we have much, much faster computers now, this really can't be a problem anymore.

[Banana]

Isn't OO mainly Java and XML, thus contributing much to suckiness? Has it been addressed?

[Mugge]

As far as programming and performance is concerned, couldn't it also be the formats that are guilty of bad programming? I suppose that even the best wordprocessor would suffer if it had to handle a bad file format.

Whether the application is coded in this or that isn't something I'm terribly concerned about as a user, as long as it's relibale, reasonably fast and offers the nessisary features.

[Frank777]

Originally Posted by Banana Isn't OO mainly Java and XML, thus contributing much to suckiness? Has it been addressed?

I understand that OO 3.0 for Mac is being built only using Cocoa and Carbon.
That's the main reason it will likely supplant NeoOffice.

I do feel sorry for the NeoOffice guys. They kept the faith on the platform when Sun refused to support Macs.
Their hard work must be respected. I wish both groups could find a way to work together.

I believe OpenOffice 3.0, if running solidly on Mac, Linux and Windows, has a decent chance of considerably reducing MS Office usage. Mainly in the home, education, non-profit and small business markets.

[Kraetos]

vim FTW.

[Frank777]

Um...what?

[Brad]

emacs WTF.

[Mugge]

I had Emacs on my old Amiga's Workbench 1.3. I thought it was a word-processor.



I do like the concept of XML forms in OOo. Now if only I could figure out how to make them point to the database that I created...

I'm learning myself new things these days.

[Banana]

I have to say, vim is starting to grow on me...

It's so nice to be able to keep the hands at the keyboard at all times without running to mouse.

[Kickaha]

You like vim, you'll love sed. Just keep at it, it's worth it.

[Frank777]

My geekdom encompasses Star Trek/Wars right through recitation of the Green Lantern Oath (Is CGI ready for that movie yet?)

But if you're going to reference obscure text editors, please detail what the heck it is you're talking about.
We aren't all UNIX groupies here.

Furthermore, this wasn't even applicable to a thread on office suites on the Mac, let alone saying that it's 'going for the Win'.

[Kraetos]

Originally Posted by Frank777 My geekdom encompasses Star Trek/Wars right through recitation of the Green Lantern Oath (Is CGI ready for that movie yet?) But if you're going to reference obscure text editors, please detail what the heck it is you're talking about. We aren't all UNIX groupies here. Furthermore, this wasn't even applicable to a thread on office suites on the Mac, let alone saying that it's 'going for the Win'.

Never mind.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by Frank777 right through recitation of the Green Lantern Oath

Which one?

[Kraetos]

Originally Posted by Banana I have to say, vim is starting to grow on me... It's so nice to be able to keep the hands at the keyboard at all times without running to mouse.

FWIW, I feel the same way, and do most of my word processing in TextMate using Markdown syntax.

I know, I'm strange. But it works. Very well, in fact. Like you said, I never have to move my hands from the keyboard, and as an added bonus, the final product can be converted perfectly and effortlessly into whatever format it needs to be in.

- Right off the bat, it can go anywhere, since it starts life as a plain text file, the most versatile file format in existence. As an added bonus, unparsed Markdown is highly readable; in fact, that's the entire idea behind Markdown.
- If it's going to be published on the web, TextMate can convert it to perfect XHTML instantly.
- If it needs to be printed, I can print the rendered XHTML.
- If it needs to be emailed to someone who wants a traditional document, I can copy and paste the rendered XHTML into an RTF file.

Most importantly, it's fast. TextMate, rightly so, never slows down.

[torifile]

Originally Posted by Frank777 My geekdom encompasses Star Trek/Wars right through recitation of the Green Lantern Oath (Is CGI ready for that movie yet?) But if you're going to reference obscure text editors, please detail what the heck it is you're talking about. We aren't all UNIX groupies here. Furthermore, this wasn't even applicable to a thread on office suites on the Mac, let alone saying that it's 'going for the Win'.

Wow, dude. Who died and made you the "On topic discussion only!!!!111" police? I believe it was a joke. And VIM isn't exactly obscure. Obtuse, maybe. But not obscure.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by Kraetos Most importantly, it's fast. TextMate, rightly so, never slows down.

Until you make the mistake of Find In Project in a project with a few hundred text files... and libraries... and executables... It's sad when you see a text editor beach ball on a 4GB machine because it's consuming, well, ALL OF IT.

Just don't do it, trust me. Go grab ack and install that on the command line instead. (Heyyyy... plug in ack to TM instead? IDEAR!)

[Frank777]

Originally Posted by Kickaha Which one?

If you're referring the various individual oaths, then obviously my answer is Hal Jordan's.

If you're referring to the..uh...'problem' with Jordan's oath, then I must confess I use the amended version.
Does that kill my Geek Cred?

[Frank777]

Originally Posted by torifile Wow, dude. Who died and made you the "On topic discussion only!!!!111" police? I believe it was a joke. And VIM isn't exactly obscure. Obtuse, maybe. But not obscure.

Well it was off-topic. No non-WYSIWYG text editor will make a dent against MS Office or OO 3.0.

And I was almost sure a UNIX groupie would have had a clever comeback waiting for me.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by Frank777 If you're referring the various individual oaths, then obviously my answer is Hal Jordan's. If you're referring to the..uh...'problem' with Jordan's oath, then I must confess I use the amended version. Does that kill my Geek Cred?

What, you mean the blackest/darkest change?

They're back to the original... in fact, a Major Event(tm) next year is titled Blackest Night. The seven Corps have to join forces to defeat the Black Lantern Corps using the Black Lantern that coalesced around/trapped the Anti-Monitor and...

But that would be telling.

[Banana]

Originally Posted by Kickaha You like vim, you'll love sed. Just keep at it, it's worth it.

Looked at the wiki- it looks like it's great for doing regular expressions and editing all over the place, but isn't that something that vim and/or awk can do as well, or am I missing the appeal here?



BTW, I wasn't aware of "UNIX groupies" existence. Are there any? Does that means we're supposed to chase Richard Stallman for his autograph and flash our suspenders at him? Are there roadies as well?

[chucker]

Originally Posted by Banana Does that means we're supposed to chase Richard Stallman for his autograph and flash our suspenders at him?

How dare you call that sinner part of the Exclusive UNIX Club™?

System V FOREVAH.

[Kickaha]

Originally Posted by Banana Looked at the wiki- it looks like it's great for doing regular expressions and editing all over the place, but isn't that something that vim and/or awk can do as well, or am I missing the appeal here?

Only the joke.

[Kraetos]

Originally Posted by Frank777 Well it was off-topic. No non-WYSIWYG text editor will make a dent against MS Office or OO 3.0.

Obviously. That's why it was a joke. vim is a programmers text editor, in no way intended for word processing.

UNIX groupie? I'm a programmer and a web designer, so I guess that makes me a UNIX groupie? I use vim for programming when I don't have access to TextMate - I don't actually write documents in vim. I don't even use vim on a regular basis, only when nothing else is available, since vim is available on any modern UNIX or UNIX-like system.