With plenty of beta releases over a long testing cycle, we can expect a polished and stable OpenOffice.org 3.0 this September.
GullFOSS announces OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta 2 was released yesterday.
You can download it for testing here.
I’ve been using the earlier beta with great success on my Mac and some Windows boxes. It seems about ready for primetime use already.
While I was in Istanbul last week, so too was the GUADEC conference, though I was not able to attend any of it. A few interesting interviews with Mark Shuttleworth came out of the GUADEC event, but I’ll have to report on them secondhand.
Matthew Helmke interviewed Shuttleworth yesterday on his blog. They speak of many things, including Shuttleworth’s start in technology and a little bit about his other interests.
On Ubuntu, Shuttleworth says, “The key values were that it should be released on a predictable schedule, should be part of the Debian family, should always deliver the very best of the free software stack in a nicely integrated stack, should be governed as a community independent of the company(s) that back it, and should be available free of charge, with all security updates, for a long enough period that it’s actually useful as a commercial, production platform. I would credit the whole Ubuntu community with helping to turn those ideals into a real, and quite remarkable, product.”
derStandard.at focuses much more on the technical side of running the Ubuntu project in
Shuttleworth: “Apple is Driving the Innovation”. Shuttleworth is very interested in collaboration between projects, between Linux distros, between KDE and GNOME, and between companies working in the space.
And the title? It comes from this Shuttleworth quotation: “The fact that OS X is growing, tells us that Windows is weakening. The fact that OS X is growing and Linux isn’t, tells you that OS X is offering things that Linux is not. One of those is the pace of change, the level of innovation. You really have to give credit to Apple for driving innovation. Another of those things is their focus on the web as an experience. They recognize very strongly that the web is the killer application of the PC today and not Microsoft today.”
Good insight, and it proves once again why Shuttleworth is an important leader in the open source world. He takes inspiration from everywhere and channels it effectively into Ubuntu and his other projects, creating high-quality software for everyone.
HTML validation services have long been available for web developers to guarantee the sites they create follow the latest W3C standards. This has made it easier for web browser creators, site developers and web visitors to all keep coordinated and offer the best experience across the web. If something isn’t working, running the pages through an HTML validator helps to pinpoint whether the problem is in the code or browser, and then it can be fixed by the appropriate party.
In the same way, the open standard ODF format now has an online ODF validator service.
Michael Brauer, its creator, announces the service on the GullFOSS blog:
“What is it? It is actually a web page where you can check whether an ODF file meets some basic conformance or validation requirements defined by the ODF specification. This service is in particular useful for developers that want to test their implementations, but it may also be used to check if a particular file is a valid ODF file.”
My take is that this will be a very handy tool once Microsoft Office starts producing ODF files, since it will offer an independent service verifying whether those files are valid ODF or have been corrupted in some way. Based on Microsoft’s track record in failing to properly support open standards, we should expect major difficulties with the ODFs they produce. And the ODF validator service will let us pinpoint the cause of the problem. Surely Microsoft will claim that ODF is a broken file format, but users will be able to run the files through this validator and prove that is is MS Office, in fact, that is broken. (All this is conjecture at this point, but past experience suggests we’ll see it come true yet again.)
Quick note: I’ll be getting married on Saturday, and will be traveling to Istanbul and the Turkish coast for the following 12 days.
I may get the chance to post here, or perhaps not, but I should be back in New York City on July 12. See you then!
Combining two of my interests, Kay Ramme of Sun has created “ODF@WWW,” an ODF Wiki. It includes some of the capabilities I had envisioned in my post about an OpenOffice wiki extension, and adds some cool new ideas of Ramme’s own.
Thinking about the rich editing ability of OpenOffice, and the lightweight collaboration of a wiki, Ramme “understood that these two approaches may be married to become an “ODF Wiki”, combing their strengths – simple editing and simple publishing – while eliminating their weaknesses…”
He jumped right into the project: “I installed an Apache webserver, enabled WebDAV, did some (hacky) bash scripting, and got the following.”
It’s a great start, and I am looking forward to what Ramme develops next with this project.
Frank Mau observes a rapid increase in downloads of OpenOffice.org. He writes, “Looking back on our last download numbers we can see them increasing version by version. We grew over 20% from Version 2.3.1 to 2.4.0. Now the 2.4.1 started and it looks good to beat our own record.”
He credits the quality of the software, and the new, more easily navigated website as major reasons for this increase.
“OpenOffice.org is a good product, for free and localized in many languages. We have extensions to extend office functionality if needed…
“Another factor is the one-download-click that enables the user to get the download starting with one-click from the homepage or the download main-page. In numbers, before we started with the one-click and the redesign of the pages 10% of visitors started a download of OpenOffice.org after visiting the homepage. After the introduction of the one-click and the other web-changes 20%.”
I’d add that OpenOffice is approaching a tipping point. More and more users are telling their friends, requesting it at work, or even standardizing on OOo across their entire company. This creates significant knock-on effects and substantial longterm growth.
With the upcoming release of version 3.0 (beta available now for testing) that includes a native version for Mac OS X, I expect these numbers to reach yet another plateau.
I just invented the word “sinofacture” yesterday.
It means to outsource manufacturing of something to China. I think it would sound good in a cyberpunk novel: “We needed to make it cheap, so we sinofactured the whole thing to a sprawling factory on the outskirts of the Shenzhen special economic zone.”
John Paul then pointed out an article in The Atlantic about sinofacture, though not calling it such.
Do a Google search for sinofacture and see what you get. Not much. Yet.
Erwin Tenhumberg is (sadly) leaving Sun and this may be his last blog post there. It looks like he’s following a good opportunity at another company, and he hopes to continue blogging about open source in some form.
Today, he points out a number of ODF and OpenOffice.org successes, such as a download average in 2008 of 1.2 million copies of OOo per week (with recent weeks averaging closer to 2 million). He also writes:
“In addition, Asus, Acer and HP are now shipping laptops with OpenOffice.org pre-installed, and more and more organizations deploy OpenOffice.org in a large scale. Finally, according to Google file type searches like this one and this one, ODF is still clearly the market leading editable XML document file format. Thus, I’m sure ODF and OpenOffice.org have a bright future!”
All this he reports in the context of an “ODF Workshop” Microsoft will hold at its headquarters in the near future. Skepticism is healthy with Microsoft, but if they implement ODF honestly and completely (with none of their “embrace, extend, extinguish” behavior), this really is the victory bell for the ODF format.
Ironically enough, despite MSOOXML being (controversially) accepted as an ISO standard, most of the media is triangulating on the conclusion that ODF has already won the next generation format war.
Infoworld reaches this conclusion in “Red Hat Summit panel: Who ‘won’ OOXML battle?”
They even find a Microsoft employee saying as much:
“ODF (Open Document Format) has benefited from the two-year battle over the ratification of Microsoft’s rival OOXML (Open Office XML) standard, which is native to its Office 2007 suite, Microsoft’s national technology officer said Thursday during a panel discussion at the Red Hat Summit in Boston.
“ODF has clearly won,” said Stuart McKee, referring to Microsoft’s recent announcement that it would begin natively supporting ODF in Office next year and join the technical committee overseeing the next version of the format”
This could certainly be a ruse on the part of Microsoft, but with several functional ODF suites already available, it will be extremely difficult for MS to support ODF in a broken way and then blame ODF for that failure. (As they’ve done with other standards in the past.)
“Panelist Douglas Johnson, an official involved with corporate standards at Sun Microsystems, said the attention caused by the debate has enabled other office-suite products to be competitive.
“The office-suite market has been ruled by one dominant player after another, but those markets were never governed by good open standards practices,” he said. “What has happened is that this dominant-player market has actually been upset and opened to competition that didn’t exist before.”
A competitive office suite market is a fundamental change that will benefit consumers and competitors going forward. It’s an important step in the ongoing effort to establish digital freedoms world-wide.
Free Software Magazine collects several years of experience into an article detailing how to Mail Merge in OpenOffice.org.
“In OOo there are lots of different ways to do mail merge. It took some trial-and-error to find the best methods for us, and that is what I will be describing here. The first choice to make is database format… I ran across a suggestion to use dBASE files, which have been the perfect solution.”
While writing the letter, you’ll enter variables that are custom-filled for each recipient.
“You may either type your entire letter first and then add the fields to be merged, or you may add the fields as you go. There are (at least) two ways to add fields. Using View→Data Sources, you may click on a column header (field name) and drag it to the letter in the spot where you want the field… The other method is to place your cursor where you want the field, and go to Insert→Fields→Other…, which opens the Fields dialog box (see figure 2). Go to the Database tab, and click on “Mail merge fields” on the left, then open up your table on the right and select the desired field.”
The second page in the article covers using mail merge to print envelopes, a particularly tricky but important task.
The third page covers printing labels from a mail merge, which is what I use mail merge for most frequently.