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Content Tagged with User:conficio + Release

OpenOffice.org Release 2.4 is now available for free download.

Curious about what changed?

Release 2.4 has improved

• Ease of use for setting languages for selected text in multi language documents
• The chart module with
  • improved label formatting and positioning,
  • regression charts,
  • and inverted axis
• The presentation application (Impress) has added
  • 3d slide transitions
  • Pictures as slide background
• The spreadsheet application (Calc) has added
  • Splitting text into separate columns
  • Start formula entry with “+” for faster data entry from the numeric key pad
  • Better flow when entering rows of data
  • Drag and drop cells and columns to move them
  • Performance for loading large spreadsheets
• The word processor application (Writer) has added
  • more powerful regular expressions for find and replace
• Update notification for application and extensions
• Performance in general
• Improved localization and spell checking for 10+ languages.

OpenOffice.org Ninja has an excellent introduction to new features in Open Office 2.4. Screencasts about the new features are coming soon.

My dialog from yesterday, regarding am OpenOffice.org document viewer for presentations, did continue today. The user explained to me "The need [for an OOo Impress viewer] arises when you prepare a presentation using OO and take it on a flash drive to client site where there is no OO already installed. Hence the need!"

I believe this is a case for OpenOffice.org Portable, a build in the Open Office Eco System that allows to run the full application set from a portable drive, such as a USB Stick or USB hard drive.

Incidentally, the PortableApps team has released the latest OpenOffice.org version 2.3.1 a couple of weeks ago.

While OpenOffice.org Release 2.3 is just out the door, Developers like Carsten Driesner, Liang Weike and the OpenOffice team from RedFlag 2000, prepare new features for Open Office Release 2.4

One feature is the ability to create and store your permanant image list, which can be used to change the icons of the appliction w/o going through the build process. In combination with the OOo extensions I expect this to become the facility for different skins for Open Office.

The other feature mentioned is an enhanced help tip text for the print button in the standard toolbar. The new feature shows the name of the printer in the help tip text, just to remind you where your document will be printed. Sounds rather useful in an office environment, where multiple printers are available.

Liang Weike works for RedFlag 2000 the project that adapts OpenOffice for the Chineese market and helps develop new features as well.

The Openoffice.org community released its latest version, called Release 2.3.

It includes a new charting component with much more pleasing default colors, many enhancements that make Open Office extensions more viable and a series of bug fixes, some relevant to security vulnerabilities.

Behind the scenes many configuration options have changed or been added, such as:

• Suppressing to save the printer settigns with a document, which in times of roaming Laptop users, might print the document half way around the world.
• Improved export of spreadsheets with cotanget functions, such as COT(), ACOT(), COTH(), ACOTH() to MS Office compatible Excel files.
• A new Chart Wizard makes it easier to generate charts from spreadsheet data.
• A new report writer has expanded the abilities of OOo Base to write complex reports with grouping, sorting or different alignments of fields.
• Exporting drawings and presentations to HTML now support .png images.
• Exporting a text-document to a MediaWiki (think Wikipedia pages) format is now supported.

Also, don’t forget the smaller memory footprint that this release should include. This will make OpenOffice.org less memory hungry and more responsive as well.

I’m surprised hwo many changes have been made to the look and feel of menus and dialogs. Most of them are to please the extension developer community. I haven’t detailed the changes here, but be prepared to re-learn a few things, especially if you are a power user.

The OpenOffice.org community released today OpenOffice.org 2.2.1. This release does not contain new features but a list of many bug fixes from reading fields in Word® documents to adhering to the schema for ODF documents.

Upgrade is highly recommended for anyone who already uses release 2.2. You can download this latest release for free.

The developers of OpenOffice.org have implemented some major improvement of memory usage for OpenOffice.org Calc. In their sample spreadsheet it reduces the overall memory requirement by 28%. I have some users of OOo complain to me that Calc could not handle very large spreadsheet and it so it was very slow. This could be a major step to alleviate their pain.

Don’t hold your breath yet, because this improvement will only come to you with release 2.3 planned in September 2007.

Apparently speed is a major concern for the development team of OpenOffice.org. They were not satisfied with the time it takes to load large spreadsheets from Excel into OpenOffice.org Calc. So they improved Calc to load large spreadsheets faster by a factor of 15+.

When they say large spreadsheet, they mean really large, 25 megabytes, 100 sheets, 1 million cells and hundred thousand formulas. A change in the algorithm used brought down the times from ~39 minutes to 2:37 on a 1.8 MHz Pentium IV. On a Dual Core AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 275 with more memory, the time reduced from ~28 minutes to 43 seconds, almost a gain of factor 40.

Unfortunately, the improvements will only be included in Release 2.1, targeted for end of the year. Hope for a nice Christmas present.