OpenOffice.org 2
Of course, I alluded to it in my Mandriva 2006 article, OpenOffice.Org 2.0 has officially escaped (been released). Bringing a nice shiny new gui for a database (BASE) a bit quicker load times, lot’s of other improvements.
At this point I’ve had ~15 minutes on OO.org 2.0 most of that spent installing a plugin for parsing text to seperate cells in calc. From what I’ve seen though I think it’s a great improvement over 1.x. It is noticably faster, I like the fact that the “use existing database” can grab thunderbird/outlook/outlook express contact info. It also looks like there’s a good way of installing plugins (packages) through the program. Somehow, I expect that process will be streamlined in future releases. (Maybe linked to the web? Look for new packages? etc…)
One of the things that has annoyed me with OpenOffice in the past is cutting pasting from a table on the web into calc. It always seemed to lose the formatting and dumped the data all in one column instead of in rows. From what I saw in the Windows version of 2.0 this is fixed. I copied and pasted from a web page table of the periodic table of elements. Not only did the table data go into cells correctly, the areas where there was more space between cells were parsed to “merge cells” and come up with an impressive handling of the task.
Hopefully I can come up with some time to get OpenOffice upgraded on the desktop and find other improvements to mention…