Finally 3.4

OpenOffice finally made it to 3.4
And - of course - it now has the Apache branding...

Get the details here.

Seems like minor changes only over 3.3, but let's see.

Finally some movement.

Weird Thunderbird Bug

Since I upgraded my Thunderbird to version 9 if could no longer paste tables from OpenOffice.org Calc to Thunderbird as a table... they always get inserted as graphics.
Paste-without-format would just copy the plain text, but - of course - no format.
The problem has also been reported with Microsoft Office and LibreOffice.

I did not really notice the first couple of times, until co-workers started to complain that they no longer could copy/paste elements from my "tables" because they were images.

Did some searching on the web and found the bug ... indeed introduced in TB9 supposed to be fixed in FB10 (have to test this on a vbox):

The actual problem is when Thunderbird parses the meta-data of the clipboard, it does a locale-specific parse of a decimal number (the version)... but the version string will always contain a dot (.) and never a comma (,), since it is not really a decimal number. So there is a difference between e.g. German and English system(!) locale, i.e. the problem will appear on German windows, but not on English windows.

Changing the decimal symbol to a dot (.) in the Windows system settings will actually "fix" (circumvent) this problem. I just tested this.
Not sure, which system-wide setting I should keep now...

As I noticed in the bug, the fix is to treat the version as a string, not a (decimal) number.... That's better.

How to get Thunderbird attachments as read/write...

This has been bugging me for years now... ( I guess ).
When I double click e.g. an OpenOffice attachment in Thunderbird, the document is then opened as read-only in OpenOffice.

There's 1000+1 reasons on the web why this is a) intended and b) good... but I still did not like it.

Some (short) analysis revealed, that Thunderbird is actually setting the read-only attribute of the attachment, so OpenOffice was not to blame.
Easy to google from that and find a really good tip here:

One has to set the configuration value browser.helperApps.deleteTempFileOnExit to false [1]

E voila... Works fine now.
No unintended side effects so far.
--
[1] you might have to create it...

OpenOffice.org 3.2 available - a highly recommended update

via Malte Timmermann's Blog

This update is highly recommended, not only because of the many security fixes and security feature improvements, but also because of some noticeable performance improvements.

As always, make sure to only download from trusted sources, like http://OpenOffice.org. The reason is explained here.

OpenOffice.org Calc shortcuts

I just learned that Ctrl-+ and Ctrl-- add (or remove, respectively) a cell/line in Calc.

Haven't noticed that before, and I only learned it, because I wanted to zoom in/out (like in Firefox)...
Boy, I'm glad there was a popup, and I did not ruin my spreadsheet without knowing it...

OpenOffice 3.1 finally working

So after a debug and (re-)install marathon yesterday, I finally got OOo 3.1 to properly run on my laptop – it did run fine on my desktop and in my virtualboxes. Only on my laptop Calc (scalc.exe) would refuse to work.

Turns out that when trying to fix the Java-UNO-bootstrap problem under OOo 3.0 I manually copied a couple of .DLLs to different locations, which were now interfering with with the 3.1 installation.

I only noticed after completely removing 3.1 for the 2 ^nd or 3 ^rd time that there still were .DLL files in the OpenOffice directory. So I manually removed that, re-installed (must have been the 5 ^th time) 3.1 and – voila – it finally worked. Calc now runs fine, even controlled from Java through UNO.

Should have thought of looking into the installation directory earlier... grrrrr...

OpenOffice 3.1 is available - really ?

and ready for download.

However, after installing OOo 3.1 I could not longer work with Calc. Neither thru starting scalc.exe or opening a .ods document, or creating a new spreadsheet from within a running openoffice instance.

Through the UNO/Java API I saw that there is a problem in loading the SCMI.DLL library, but no further indication on what exactly fails there.
Removing and re-installing did not help.
Using the US English version instead of German didn't help either (could've been a build problem with the German build). No hint on google either.

Had to revert back to 3.0.1 - calc now works again.

I'm quite angry - mostly at myself, because I usually test new versions in my virtualbox... This time I did not,.... argh!!!

Rejoice: Ancient Greek Spell Checker for OpenOffice

So the last reason that kept you guys from using OpenOffice.org is finally gone:

Ancient Greek Spell Checker | OpenOffice.org repository for Extensions:

Spell Checker for Ancient Greek based on Morpheus word list (provided by the Perseus Project).
This is an alpha version.
Known issues:
1. Hyphenation is not yet supported.
2. Apostrophe is considered an 'ignored character'.
3. Retrieval of long words is quite slow.

At least it proves that OpenOffice.org DOES have proper language support...

OpenOffice Reader for S60 smartphones

officereader - Google Code:

"For the first time ever, it is now possible to read your OpenDocument files from OpenOffice.org, KOffice, AbiWord and Lotus Symphony on your Symbian Smartphone using Open Source software"

So there ... I've downloaded it to my Nokia E71 and managed to open various OpenOffice documents (presentation, spreadsheet & text) and it works quite well so far, especially on text and spreadsheets (presentations don't really make a lot of sense on the small display).

So, if you are an OpenOffice.org user (or you work with OpenDocument documents) and have an S60 phone, go an get it here.

Windows file type registration for OOo 3.0 Beta for Windows

Just installed the latest OpenOffice.org 3.0 build over the previous one, and all the Windows Explorer integration was lost.
I googled around a bit, and found this on GullFOSS:

"If you test the OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta on the Windows platform, you might be wondered about the missing system integration. Well, we decided to avoid the system integration in the Windows registry, because it conflicts with an existing system integration of an OOo 2.x, that you are probably using for your daily work. But if you know, what you do, you can of course get the complete system integration for your Beta tests. You only have to set the global property WRITE_REGISTRY, that is used as condition in the Windows Installer database. So please use

setup.exe WRITE_REGISTRY=1

or if you prefer the direct call with Windows Installer service:

msiexec.exe /i WRITE_REGISTRY=1"

I reinstalled with setup.exe WRITE_REGISTRY=1 as stated above and it worked like a charme.

OpenOffice.org 3

I've been playing around with the latest OpenOffice.org 3 builds for a couple of weeks now...
One of the nicest changes in the Writer is the zoom functionality, which (quite frankly) s^h^h ^h was not that good in previous releases.

Now it looks like this:

You can actually zoom by dragging the slider... as expected.

A lot better than in the old dialog:

So lets forget about that.

btw: you can safely run OOo 3 (developer builds) alongside an older version (e.g. StarOffice 8 in my case).

New StarOffice/OOo language feature

Just noticed that OpenOffice 2.4 and (therefore) StarOffice 8 Update 10, have a new faster way to select/change the language for the spell-checker - right down in the status bar (where you actually expect it).

A click on it, and you can change the language.
Fast. Intiutive.

Finally.
Thanks.

Sun ODF Plugin 1.1 now fully working with Microsoft Office 2007

For lack of an MS Office installation I cannot verify it, but this is great news reported by Malte Timmermann

Sun Presentation Minimizer for StarOffice and OpenOffice

The Sun Presentation Minimizer is a great OpenOffice.org extension to reduce the file size of an Impress presentation. It does so by

• cropping images according to their visibility

• reducing image quality (e.g. 50% JPEG at 150 dpi)

• removing hidden slides

• removing notes

etc.

And – quite important – it gives you a summary of what it is about to remove or modify and also an estimate on the gain (new vs. old filesize). The default setting is for a copy of the file to be created, which is good, since this is the safe path...

I have tried it on one of my recent presentations, and could reduce it from 7MB to 2.3MB... quite impressive for the default options. And (on screen) the presentation looked exactly the same... which should not be too surprising, since you really do not need 300dpi for some supporting images and graphics.

Great tool. Get it here at the OpenOffice.org extensions repository.

OpenOffice as a Java Update

This just popped up on my computer...



would be even cooler if it detected my (running) StarOffice ...

The OpenOffice.org Extension Repository

There is a new repository for OOo extentions.

What I like - from the first look only - is, that it is not only categorized, but also tagged.

via Erwin's StarOffice Tango

Strikethrough in OOo vs MSOffice

Yet another nice little story on Office shortcomings. PowerPoint cannot strikethrough. They rather recommend to manually put a (graphics) line over the text.
see details at m³s online Pamphlet

Excel bug

Boy am I glad that I run StarOffice, not MS Office. A new bug was discovered in Excel that runs like this:

850*77,1 = 100.000

instead of 65535.
Of course I immediately tried in StarCalc, and it does it correctly.

Wonder, if Microsoft users consider this an incompatibility between Calc and Excel...

See the explanation and discussion here, and also the explanation by Joel Spolsky.
So, it is a display bug only... and it is (I fully agree) extremely rare and unlikely...

But still fun ...

Thanks to m³ for the pointer.

IBM to join OpenOffice.org

IBM joins the OpenOffice.org community to develop and promote OpenOffice.org technology

Welcome, guys.

from OpenOffice.org and Simon and CNET

Correcting false statements by Microsoft

Erwin Tenhumberg corrects a couple of statements Microsoft usually brings forward against ODF as their common ODF/OOo FUD in Erwin's StarOffice Tango.