Well, I have to tell you that I am impressed by OpenOffice 2.0. I am not an IT specialist, I work in humanities. I have to write that among word editors I use OpenOffice 2.0 is the winner. I have to read, and sometimes correct documents in four languages (German, English, Japanese, Polish). Compatibility is in my case the key issue.
- WordPerfect - nice, but only if you use only one language. WP has problems with keymapping. Moreover, the newest version (v.12) loses the formatting of pre-eight versions.
- Ichitaro - the best but, unfortunately, limited to Japanese only
- Ms Office - not a WYSIWYG program(!!!!), which means that it is practically useless if you want to exchange anything longer than, let say, 20 pages with heavy formatting. A lot of problems with importing/exporting both crosslanguage (e.g. Japanese ---> Polish) and crossversions (e.g. 2000--->2003). If you mix both languages and versions you can be sure that you are spelling a disaster. Never be sure what you will get.
- OpenOffice (used 2.0 betas, 1.xx versions were rather unimpressive) - almost perfect. Imports 1.xx documents without any problems. Nuts and bolts happen sometimes, I guess because they were betas :-) Cons? Hmm, maybe marginal popularity? I hope OO is going to get more and more popular. It is worth of it.

PS I do not mention the price tag because all the above were bought by the institution where I work (OO is, of course, an exception).

My largest problem with office, and I see this all the time, is how Word cannot under any circumstances handle large tables within it's documents. The documents will eventually corrupt, or cause word instability, or crash the entire machine. This constantly happens, I can't seem to train people to use tables minimally in Word, but really it shouldn't be the user's fault: Microsoft should put a hard limit in it's documents if it cannot handle large tables.

This is consistent across all versions of Word, Word 2003 is no better than Word 97. Lovely, eh?

Is OOo ever going to release 2.0 or is this a WordPerfect situation where they sit on a version for years and years? Pull the trigger folks, or Microsoft Office 12 is going to be in our hands before OOo 2.0 will be. After that, OOo is toast: stick a fork in it, since no one gets excited by this project anymore.

Where the BETA 1 was!?!?

Nevertheles i'm happy to see them reach 2.0 at last

It's not MS, and it's not as robust, but it sure does seem to do what a lot of people need. I'm interested in their back-end base->writer connection. It'll be interesting to see if a full document creation system can be engineered out of it.

"It'll be interesting to see if a full document creation system can be engineered out of it."

Heh, it would take lots of time, but I was thinking of doing such a thing. Probably just another dream, but who knows.

Well still a big lag of interface .. Cant agree with the office 2003, it runs great I think and should be something to learn from - not to critise whitout any real reasons, not just for bad coding, which theres a lot less of in office than any other MS product..

What systems are you guys running? The interface is quick as hell on my 2.8Ghz dell....?

Top o' the line she is not....

StarOffice and OpenOffice open in about 2 seconds on my system, which isn't the fastest, either. If it's too slow, change a couple of default settings. Go to Options>Tools to Memory. Under Graphics Cache change Use to 128MB and Memory Per Object to 20. Doing so, it opens fast enough for me. If you're not using Macros, you can disable Java, which will make it even faster.

Zenarcher,

I'm not sure how you figured this out, but it did make my Oo load so much faster. I'm impressed!

John

One thing, how long of a delay should i tell Oo to dump everything from RAM when not in use?

Took them long enough.

??

I'm sorry, did you want buggy, slow code? Here ya go: Http://www.microsoft.com/office

Stability, speed, and efficiency take time. There are some *massive* improvements in these areas with the 2.0 branch.

Any 1.0 branch users out there should take a look. The difference will blow you away.

What exactly is buggy about office 2003 from microsoft? Its fast, it runs extremely well on every pc i've put it on. Please explain your logic behind this comment. I am not defending office 2003, but I dont like comments that have no basis. Show me one bug that has affected you in any version of office since 2000?

OpenOffice is a great product, but it is not up to par speed wise. It gets the job done, although its interface is a bit clunky still at the beta 2 release, but it has lots of room for improvement. Its a nice step in the right direction, hopefully by 3.0 it will be refined enough to where the interface works a lot better.

badda-bing-badda-boom.

http://www.technewsworld.com/story/32061.html

Not that big an issue to most folks, and MS cleared it up pretty darn quickly, so...

My above post was not an MS bash. Any inference was unintentional, I could probably have worded that one statement better...nevertheless....

The main point was that huge increase in stability and speed of the 2.0 branch of OpenOffice makes the abysmal 1.0 branch look like it was written by a 2 year-old.

Just making sure, most people are quick to acuse microsoft of bugs in their code, but I honestly wonder how many people that whine about these bugs are actually affected by them. Honestly, I have never been hit by a single exploit for the windows platform with the exception of the RPC blaster exploit.

Anyways, Your point is well taken. 2.0 is a very great improvement over its predecessor and I look forward to more and more versions. Perhaps a startup program would help these programs launch faster. This is indeed a great piece of software, but it does have a lot of room for improvement and to better its potential.

Anyways, I apologize for jumping on you, as I said, I am just tired of people posting complaints about bugs or slow code or exploits without substantiating any proof of their claims or stating how they have been negatively affected by said issue.

No problem.

I heard rumor that said start-up program existed. Have not searched for it.

*shrug* MS does it, why not OOo? :P I hope not. Last thing I need is for every program out there to load at startup. *shudders*

Don't think it is needed, either. The writer starts up for me in about 2 seconds, and calc does not take much longer. Maybe 4. My system isn't a hot-rod, either, so I don't know where these claims of slowness are coming from.

2.8Ghz P4, 1GB ram, 1SATA 60GB HDD... Nothing exceptional.

I suppose the fact that I open/close it frequently could count for some of it as I believe windows is pre-fetching, but the bump from that shouldn't be so extravigant as to affect it so greatly.

Most recently, Outlook 2003 crashes when I open it. Access has multi-user corruption issues unless you split the backend from the frontend. Access 2002 will crash if I hover the mouse over a linked table, when it tries to display a tooltip. Access 2000 had no such problem. Occasionally, an autonumber in Access will reset to zero, giving a bunch of duplicate key errors. The database upsizing wizard usually doesn't work. I've had Word unrecoverably destroy enough documents that I'll never trust again. Excel is nice. The solver sometimes crashes, but it beats no solver at all. Occasionally someone will email me a 2mb excel file with only a dozen rows of information, followed by 32000 or so empty rows that I can't seem to trim off using Excel, but OOo will do it automatically.

What I don't like about OOo 2.0 is that it tries to look like Office 2003, with the hard to look at gradient toolbars and such.

I personally don't find a problem with Microsoft Office.

As in 'Took them long enough', I meant in how long it was in 'Snapshot' mode or whatever they called it. It was like that for what, nearly a year?

Don't get me wrong either, I use Open Office.

OOo has a start-up program as optional. You probably selected not to do so on install, just as i did...

ahhhhem, don't ever put an active PST on a network share, or you will be closing and reopening the file constantly.

Oh, and lets not forget about the normal.dot bugs that have been present since Office 95.

Ohhhh, don't even TALK to me about Office! Sure, I still use it if I have to, but OOo is much better, IMO... among other things, you can't run Office off a flash drive, and you certainly can't cover up anything, plus Office 2000 refuses to upgrade, and of course my Office XP Master cert isn't good for anything anymore...

A program that takes 2 seconds to start adds 5 seconds to your boot time. I have nearly everything in my computer disabled because of that, including(somehow) active desktop and folders.

And no, I don't mean "turned off", I mean disabled...

I think it starts up quite fast enough without it...and it doesn't suprise me that I disabled that during install...I hate those things. :P

Frikkin' WinAMP agent. Grrrrr....

Media Player Classic (GNU) all the way!