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OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Posted Mar 27, 2008 18:17 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305)
Parent article: OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Does this version actually work on Mac OS X? Every Mac release I've ever tested simply crashes
on startup.


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OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Posted Mar 27, 2008 18:29 UTC (Thu) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

There's NeoOffice, but it's so bad you'll end up wishing that it had just crashed and saved
you the trouble of trying to use it.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Posted Mar 27, 2008 18:34 UTC (Thu) by cpeterso (guest, #305) [Link]

That's why I keep trying OpenOffice's Mac releases... because I *do* use NeoOffice. :(

Funny product review

Posted Mar 27, 2008 18:57 UTC (Thu) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

LOL - your "product review" of NeoOffice is classic!

OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Posted Mar 27, 2008 19:59 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Just to provide a balanced perspective, I use NeoOffice 2.2 (and now 2.3) (mostly Writer and
Calc, with some Draw) every day, and have no problems with it, and neither do the users that I
support, beyond normal user-support issues that you'd expect from any application.  This is on
a G4 (PPC) Mac Mini, a G4 iBook, a Core 2 Duo iMac, and a Santa Rosa MacBook, depending on
where I am, and which user I'm supporting, at any given moment.

I also have OOo on a Windows XP machine that I have to use from time to time, so I do have
that for comparison.  And NeoOffice doesn't compare badly IMHO.  In fact it does some things
rather better than OOo, including OpenType support (thanks to the use of ATSUI, Apple's font
libraries).  I use fonts like Warnock Pro all the time with NeoOffice, and it publishes them
to PDF very nicely, subsetting, normal ligatures and all.

So I think perhaps your character assassination of NeoOffice is, perhaps, somewhat premature
and unwarranted.

I've also tried the developer builds of OOo/Aqua, and they were surprisingly usable for a
bleeding-edge alpha.  I wouldn't quite use them for something I really cared about yet, but
they seemed to be coming along nicely.

OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Posted Mar 27, 2008 20:29 UTC (Thu) by allesfresser (subscriber, #216) [Link]

Sorry, that was meant to be "2.2.3", not "2.3".

OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Posted Mar 28, 2008 17:54 UTC (Fri) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link]

I've used it on a 1.33ghz Powerbook, it freezes for about 5 seconds any time that the file is
saved to disk. This includes the periodic automatic saves.

I get periodic draw artifacts within the window, but this at least hides the godawful font
spacing problems that it has when the window is clear.

5 seconds? You are sooo lucky!

Posted Mar 31, 2008 8:56 UTC (Mon) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

I have a spreadsheet with 30'000 URL's and some numbers attached to them. When OpenOffice.org decides to autosave this beast it freezes for 30-40 seconds! Not matter what I use: Windows or Linux (I don't have Mac) it's VERY annoying.

You can say it's pretty big file, but still - it's just 500Kb .ods! Autosave is big problem for such files: without autosave you risk losing your work and with autosave you are losing significant productive time (30-40seconds every 15 minutes or so - that's 15min per day).

OpenOffice.org 2.4 released

Posted Mar 30, 2008 14:19 UTC (Sun) by Kluge (subscriber, #2881) [Link]

I've been using OOo v2.3.1 on a new Mac running Leopard.  Startup is slow (as is performance
generally, compared to MS Office) and always gives an error message.  For no apparent reason,
it starts up a bash prompt.  And the X11 interface is relatively clunky and ugly.

But it does work.

Then I recently downloaded OOo_2.4.0RC3_MacOSXIntel_install.dmg (I think from
http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/download/OtherDownload....) and it works great. Startup is
faster, look-n-feel is better.  Unlike the official release of 2.4.0, which behaves just like
2.3.1.

I suspect that the RC3 I have is a native (non-X11) build, although the official native
snapshot build DEV300_m2 works very poorly for me.

In short, I recommend going to http://ooopackages.good-day.net/pub/OpenOffice.org/MacOSX/
and downloading the latest RC.  For whatever reason, my experience with these builds has been
much better than with the offical releases.

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