And now for some vaguely on-topic off-topicality: OOo 3.2

[David Gerard]

I just downloaded and installed OOo 3.2. You should too.

On this here laptop (a Toshiba R600 with 1.4Ghz Core 2 Duo and 3GB
memory, running Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit), I have the included OOo 3.1 and a
copy of MS Office 2003 running under Wine.

I have tended to use Excel simply because it starts in under a second
from cold, whereas OOo Calc 3.1 takes seven seconds from cold.

Let me tell you: that extra six seconds is approximately forever in
user interface terms.

And before someone cuts'n'pastes a reply about Excel preloading hence
the startup time being illusory - I said Wine. No preloading. OOo is,
quite simply, ridiculously fat and slow. I've used OOo since 638c and
it's always been fat and slow. Way too fat and slow.

So let me heartily recommend you install OOo 3.2, because Calc starts
in two seconds from cold. Enough to compete with Excel for user
convenience. Download the .deb tarball. Official instructions at
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Run_OOo_versions_parallel#Installing_3..2A_versions_.28three_layer_OpenOffice.org.29
tell you how to extract the binaries into a convenient folder in your
home directory.

(And that person stuck on Windows? Just download and install:
http://download.services.openoffice.org/files/localized/en-GB/3.2.0/OOo_3.2.0_Win32Intel_install_wJRE_en-GB.exe
)

I understand the 3.2 cycle was quite expressly a speedup and bugfix
cycle. *GOOD*.

It's also worth noting
http://www.webmasterpro.de/portal/news/2010/02/05/international-openoffice-market-shares.html
- OOo is around 10% in US and Canada, up to 20% in some countries. At
that point it's really serious competition for MS Office, no two ways
about it.

Man. OOo is usable at last. Who'da thunk?


- d.