Open Office 2.0

[rendezvous]

I just downloaded it to give it a try.

It doesn't seem like there is a replacement for visio in open office 2.0 which is a shame.
You can import diagrams (not saved in vsd format though), but don't think about making any major changes.

I tried loading a powerpoint presentation too, just to see if it was all f***d up.
There were some minor issues, the text was left adjusted in one place instead of centered and the fonts didn't look exactly the same. Another presentaion hade issues with tables where some values wouldn't end up in the right colums and spill down to the row below.

 

[Zaphod]

I tried loading a powerpoint presentation too, just to see if it was all f***d up.

Using linked/embedded objects I presume? It took me a while to notice that this can look like crap, in particular from Excel, as I mostly use drawing objects or scaled images for final revisions. Embedding from other OOo programs works much better, but there are some occasional issues there as well.

 

[DemoCoder]

No linking/embedding in mine. Straight textboxes or tables. Text spacing is all screwed up, I get stuff that looks this this:


T H I S I S TH E T I TL E O F M Y S LI D E

 

[Simon F]

I especially hate the way Visio diagrams seem to get reformatted when you paste them into Word ... .

Sorry for the delay in replying... company web proxy is playing up ..

The solution to your problem is to always link to your original Visio file. Edit it in Visio by opening that source file and IIRC never launch the visio editor by double clicking the diagram in word.

When you want to save an external copy then you can break the links to the source files.

Tip 2: Stick with 100% and 200% view modes only - all the others will redefine the grid so nothing lines up properly

Visio is one program that I have no problems with...use it periodically for process flow diagrams. Go fgure.

Try creating a really complex diagram (possibly with several pages) and see if it crashes while saving....

We've just upgraded to the most recent version so I'm praying that'll be the end of the "save and destroy" bug.


Frankly, I'm just so disappointed how little things have advanced since I first used MacDraw on my 512k Macintosh.

 

[Joe DeFuria]

Try creating a really complex diagram (possibly with several pages) and see if it crashes while saving....

I have several of those...I can honestly say I have never encountered that save / crash problem. (Currently using Visio 2002, SP-2).

I know that doesn't help you much.

 

[Frank]

In summary: OO is a great and well-developed tool for new documents, but not so good when importing existing ones. Then again, there are many things that do work in OO that break MS Office, like multi-page tables in Word, or just large documents in general.

And the main problem is in embedded objects and the type of data that is represented. (Ansi vs. unicode, data sources, display elements and such.) That will probably never be fixed, as long as both products are actively developed, and the first one (MS Office) changes that all the time, even through unrelated updates of other Windows components.

Then again, it works pretty good if you save your OO documents as MS Office files and open them in MS Office.

 

[Moloch]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120
Evidently being free comes at a price.

 

[Simon F]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120
Evidently being free comes at a price.

I think on Slashdot someone made the comment that when you load open office, it starts all the programs at the same time, hence the memory use.

 

[silence]

dunno whats the big deal.... question is, do you notice it? i dont.
do i like option that i can save everything as PDF?....oh yeah, i love it.

it has all i need, i doesnt cost anything and if someone discovered that it takes more CPU to load... weeeee... i am not running it on PII 200 Mhz.... i also have more then enough memory


(my Firefox takes longer to start then Open Office.... but thats cause i have 70+ extensions in FF)... so i really dont care about loading times, specially when i dont even feel them....

 

[Frank]

http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=120
Evidently being free comes at a price.

Most of Office and IE are preloaded inside Windows itself.

 

[Frank]

Btw, ever tried to open a spreadsheet, csv or other datafile that has more than 255 columns, or when you live in Europe or anywhere they don't use the dot and comma as in the US? OO does that nicely, like many other things on which MS Office breaks down.

MS Office is mostly the universal standard, it's not because it's actually good at many things. That's why Microsoft hasn't improved it since Office 97. Like they only did with IE now Firefox is killing them. So, let's hope many people will switch to OpenOffice. It's a very good choice.

 

[Quitch]

Most of Office and IE are preloaded inside Windows itself.

Care to back that up?

I find OpenOffice.org 2.0 a big improvement over 1.x, though it's still no match for the Office suite.

 

[Moloch]

Most of Office and IE are preloaded inside Windows itself.

Er ya IE, but office
Based on what I've seen of java(and read), I'm gonna blame it on the poor performance of open ofice.

 

[Quitch]

Aye, try finding a nippy Java product... good luck

 

[Saem]

Azurues, maptools, intellij and a few others.

 

[Moloch]

Azurues, maptools, intellij and a few others.

Azurues uses large ammounts of memory.
60mb+ at startup for me.
Utorrent, on the otherhand, uses like 5mb.
However like all torrent programs I've come across, over a period of the time the avail ram goes way down despite the ammount of ram reported to be using to be quite reasonable.
i.e utorrent says it's using say 5MB and I exit the program because my system feels sluggish and all of a sudden just freed 150MB.

 

[Crusher]

Visio isn't part of an Office edition anyway, so why not just use OOo to replace Office Pro and buy Visio separately (as you would anyway) and still save yourself $500?

And if you aren't shackled specifically to the .vsd file format, you can try to save even more money by ditching Visio and going with something like Dia.

 

[Quitch]

Azurues.

If you think that's nippy, you've been using nothing but Java recently (or badly written apps ) As someone said, look at uTorrent. That is a good comparison... in fact, compared to any other BitTorrent client Azurues is slow (and memory hungry).

 

[Moloch]

So what's the deal with windows freeing more memory when I exit torrent programs than is reported to be used by the program?

 

[Quitch]

Don't programs reserve memory too?