FreeSoftNews

Like it or not, one of the most important features of any Microsoft Office alternative is being able to read Microsoft Office files. With the recently released OpenOffice 3.0 Beta adding support for importing Office 2007 (AKA OOXML, AKA .docx) files, I decided to test how it would handle files created in Microsoft Office 2007 saved in both .doc (the older version) and .docx (Microsoft’s new format.)

Read more at Linux Loop

The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce that a new public beta
release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now available. This second beta release
has been produced in response to feedback to the first beta, released in
May. It is made available to allow as many users as possible to test and
evaluate the next major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended
for production use at this stage.

If you are a regular user of OpenOffice.org, here’s a great opportunity to
help us make the next release the best ever.

• Read more: New OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta available for testing

OpenOffice.org 3.0, the next major release of the open source office suite, is scheduled to be released in September. Which means that it is pretty much guaranteed to be included in the next release of Ubuntu 8.10, Mandriva 2009 and Fedora 10, all of which are due out in October. Until then it is easy enough to test out the beta releases of OpenOffice 3.0 without removing your existing 2x OpenOffice installation. Installing OpenOffice 3.0 beta also means you can test out Sun’s PDF import extension which is also still in development.

Read more at Tectonic

Around 3 month ago OpenOffice.org released its 2.4 boasting quite an impressive arsenal of advancements. However if you thought 2.4 was major release, then you have seen nothing! Come September, OpenOffice.org will release it’s 3.0 version! That must be quite a big jump! The upcoming 3.0 version is widely regarded as an important milestone in the project’s development. Here are some of the advancements I am most excited about:

Read more at Royal HeHe2-ness!

Alternative Find and Replace for Writer (AltSearch) has the ambitious goal of replacing and enhancing one of the most basic pieces of OpenOffice.org functionality. It’s undermined by a chaotic interface, but if you have the patience to continue past first impressions, you will find AltSearch comes far closer to fulfilling its promise than you might initially imagine.

Read more at Linux.com

Why doesn’t free trump expensive? Every Microsoft product has a free, open source counterpart created by dedicated programmers who loathe everything the company stands for. The free stuff is darn good. Yet companies and individuals continue to buy billions of dollars worth of Microsoft products. To be fair, Microsoft software is sometimes better than the competition’s. But quality isn’t the only factor: The company has spent years digging moats around its castle, building digital walls to keep other vendors out and users in.

Read more at LinuxInsider

Easy PDF editing is coming to OpenOffice.org, but you’ll have to be patient for a few months. Recently posted to the OpenOffice.org Extensions site, the Sun PDF Import extension (SPI) is only in beta, and only works with recent developer builds of OpenOffice.org 3.0, which is scheduled for September release. Right now, the quality of the final release is anybody’s guess, but the beta’s capabilities fall squarely in the middle of the available PDF import tools.

To investigate SPI, you need to download and install a snapshot build of OpenOffice.org 3.0. Then, from within the build, you can install SPI from Tools -> Extension Manager. The next time you start OpenOffice.org 3.0, you’ll be able to open PDF files from any of the options for opening an existing document in the File menu.

Read more at Linux.com

OpenOffice.org Beta 2 Release Candidate 1 build BEB300_m2 has been uploaded to the mirror network.
The version will install as OpenOffice.org 3.0.

As I expect another build I have uploaded the install sets for en-US only and added language packs to the extended mirrors.

Attention: unfortunately the Bouncer links linked from the download page do not work (yet).

If you find severe issues within this build please file them to OpenOffice.org’s bug tracking system IssueTracker and notify the OpenOffice.org releases mailing list.

Read more and get download links at GullFOSS

OPENOFFICE.ORG NEWSLETTER

Volume 05 - Issue 12 - 06/2008

Please send news clippings to:
dev@marketing.openoffice.org

Contents

1. Announcements
================
* PDF import extension is now online
* OpenOffice.org Annual Conference Update
* OpenOffice 2.4.1 is released
* Addition of Japanese language support to its Users’ Community Forum

2. Success Stories
==================
* OpenOffice.org being distributed to Portuguese schools
* Polish retailer selling laptops with OpenOffice.org pre-installed
* French hospital migrates to OpenOffice.org
* Millions of copies of OpenOffice.org distributed by Asustek

• Read more: OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 05 - Issue 12 - 06/2008

Beta version of PDF import extension for OpenOffice.org is now available online. Fully functional version, special features like importing layout of LaTeX PDF or import of complex vector graphics, will appear later. However even the preliminary version of this extension allows to open and edit PDF documents up to version 1.4. Files with restricted permissions are not yet supported.

The extension is available at OpenOffice.org extension repository. OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta or later is needed in order to run the PDF import tool. The extension can be installed via the extension manager in the tools menu of OpenOffice.org. In the extension repository you’ll find versions for Linux, Windows, MacOS X, Solaris x86, and Solaris Sparc, both for OpenOffice.org 3.0 and StarOffice 9.

Read more at Free Your Media

Oracle and now IBM seem to have strange ideas about creating a business around open source software for the enterprise. First it was Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux program, derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux sans its proprietary bits and supported for peanuts to beat RHEL and similar community projects such as CentOS. Now it’s IBM, which has taken old OpenOffice.org code under the now-retired Sun Industry Standards Source License and released it as a proprietary closed source freeware office suite. The first stable release of IBM Lotus Symphony, released last week, has no obvious advantages over OpenOffice.org. The suite is targeted at enterprise customers, at the expense of free and open source alternatives.

Read more at Linux.com

The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce the release of
OpenOffice.org 2.4.1, a minor update of OpenOffice.org 2.4 released in
March 2008. OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 (EN-US for Microsoft Windows,
GNU/Linux, and Solaris) is available for immediate download from
http://download.openoffice.org. Please contact the appropriate
native-language project http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html
for details of availability in other languages, and the appropriate
porting project http://porting.openoffice.org for details of other platforms

Full details of the changes may be found in the release notes
http://development.openoffice.org/releases/2.4.1rc2.html.  For details
of security vulnerabilities fixed, please see our security bulletin
http://www.openoffice.org/security/bulletin.html. To our knowledge, none
of these vulnerabilities has been exploited; however, in accordance with
industry best practice, we recommend all users upgrade to 2.4.1.

OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 is the twelfth release in the 2.x series (launched
in October 2005) and demonstrates the Community’s commitment to
continuous and regular improvement of its software. The next major
release - 3.0 - is planned for Q3 this year. If you would like to help
us, please visit http://contributing.openoffice.org.

The OpenOffice.org Community

Stubbornly, OpenOffice.org continues to ship with only a handful of templates. Despite the efforts of several sub-projects and individuals to change the situation, the standard OpenOffice.org download includes only a couple of slide show presentations and a few templates to accompany the wizards available in the file menu. This lack of templates is a serious handicap for many users, and often leaves a poor impression on new users who are accustomed to the selection of templates found in other office suites.

Fortunately, an hour on the Internet can net you hundreds of templates. Depending on the templates, you can install some as a package via Tools -> Extension Manage, and some individually by downloading the file and placing it in the ~/.openoffice.org2/user/template directory. To use a template, go to File -> New -> Templates and Documents, and scan.

Below are some of the most useful sources for templates. The content of these sources overlap to a degree, and the quality of individual templates varies in all of them. Still, between these sources, you may be able to find what you need without taking the trouble to design your own template.

Read more at Linux Journal

Planning is now well under way for the OpenOffice.org Annual Conference
(OOoCon 2008) which will be held in Beijing, China between 5th-7th
November 2008.

First announcement: OOoCon 2008 now has an official logo! - visit the
conference web site http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008 to see the
exciting new image.

Potential speakers: there is still time to submit your proposals for a
paper at OOoCon 2008. Following a replan by the organisers, you now have
until 18th July to submit your proposal.
See http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/cfp

Finally, the organisers are now actively seeking sponsors for the
conference. If your organisation, company, public administration, etc
would like to show its support for OOo in a very public way, now is your
opportunity.
Please see http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008/sponsors.html for
further details.

The OOoCon 2008 team look forward to meeting you in Beijing in November!

Hi,

I’m happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 2.4.1rc2 is available in the Build
Service OpenOffice.org:UNSTABLE project.

Call for testing:

It is the second and hopefully final release candidate of OOo-2.4.1 and we
would like to ask you for testing and reporting bugs.

Where to get it:

• Read more: OpenOffice_org 2.4.1rc2 available (call for testing)

Now available for testing is the PDF import extension, which also includes hybrid PDF-ODF export. PDFs are designed for layout instead of for further editing, so when a word processor, spreadsheet, or presentation application exports to a PDF, the layout and document structure are lost. To avoid disappointment, you must keep in mind creating a PDF is not a reversible process because of the limitations of PDF as a format.

Implementations may either favor editing or layout. This extension’s current implementation favors layout, so it imports PDFs into Draw. Keeping all that in mind, this extension still has many uses such as adding annotation, filling out forms, making minor edits, using a PDF as a picture, and reusing PDFs for which the original source is lost. Because of the limitations of PDFs, these uses may not be completely painless.

Read more at OpenOffice.orgNinija

Contents

1. Announcements
================
* Call for Papers for OOoCon 2008 Started
* OpenOffice.org 3 beta is ready for testing
* Announcing the Sun Presenter Console
* More than 100 OpenOffice.org Extensions Available
* OUT NOW!! - The first public version of ODFDOM
* OpenOffice.org builds for Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T)

2. Success Stories
==================
* Survey: Strong Use of Open Source Desktop Applications
* German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) Deploys StarOffice

3. Featured News
================
* Reminder: “A maximum total of $175,000 USD may be awarded”
* OpenOffice.org QA weekend in Essen, Germany

* OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta Feedback
* Aqua’s Beta: we’re listening
* Strong Presence of OpenOffice.org at LinuxTag Berlin

• Read more: [ooo-announce] OpenOffice.org Newsletter - Volume 05 - Issue 11 - 05/2008

Hi,

I’m happy to announce that OpenOffice.org 2.4.1rc1 is available in the Build
Service OpenOffice.org:UNSTABLE project.

Call for testing:

It is the first release candidate of OOo-2.4.1 and we would like to ask you
for testing and reporting bugs.

Where to get it:

• Read more: OpenOffice_org 2.4.1rc1 available (call for testing)

Some complain OpenOffice.org is slow and bloated. With each release there may be dozens of performance improvements, but there are also new features, some of which may slow things down. This the natural balance in software development, but in the end, what is the net effect on performance from one version to the next?
The benchmark

We need a good benchmark to produce good data, but what do we measure? Let’s assume the most common operations are starting OpenOffice.org, opening a Writer document, scrolling from top to bottom using the down arrow, exporting the document, and closing both the document and OpenOffice.org.

Read more at OpenOffice.orgNinja

Wikis are a great way to collaborate on text documents, but different wikis sometimes use incompatible wiki markup languages, and few wikis provide simple WYSIWYG editors to shorten the learning curve. Even for those fluent in wiki markup, using a word processor to create wiki content is often more convenient — especially for publishing existing documents and for creating complex tables. Now the newly available Sun Wiki Publisher simplifies the process of publishing an OpenOffice.org Writer document directly to a compatible MediaWiki wiki from OpenOffice.org 2.4 or later without the need for a Web browser.
Read more at Linux.com