Open Office 3.0 works well, easy install

[Paul Johnson]

In Ubuntu 8.10, I have been eager to try out Open Office but did not
want to install it from the tarball.  I noticed here:

http://www.theopensourcerer.com/2008/10/14/how-to-install-openofficeorg-30-on-ubuntu-intrepid-ibex/

that you can add a repository for 3rd party updates and Synaptic (or
apt-get) will grab the Open Office deb packages. I just added this one
line in a file in /etc/apt/sources.list.d

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/openoffice-pkgs/ubuntu intrepid main

But you can do it through Synaptic if you are GUI.

I do not see any big changes in the Word Processor, so if you are
mainly interested in that, I don't think there's a huge incentive to
upgrade.  However, my testing indicates that the Open Office 3.0
spreadsheet oocalc is substantially better than the 2.4 version.
Perhaps it is just a "lucky break" that the things that bothered me in
particular have been fixed.  Spreadsheets that MS Windows users send
me from Excel are now much more likely to be imported correctly, with
formulae in tact.  To my eye, the ooimpress (slideshow) program works
better as well.

The really great thing is that the package manager will let you remove
this new OpenOffice if you hate it and easily put the old one back.

-- 
Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504
University of Kansas