The new beta release of OpenOffice.org was not released by Sun Microsystems, but by the OpenOffice.org community, an open-source project. Sun is the founder and principle sponsor of the community, but OpenOffice.org also benefits from contributors sponsored by other companies, as well as hundreds of activists who contribute on a volunteer basis.

Sun Microsystems will no doubt release a version of their Star Office product, based on the same codebase as OpenOffice.org, just as we may expect IBM to release a new version of Lotus Symphony, and RedFlag to issues a new version of RedOffice. However, OpenOffice.org comes from the OpenOffice.org Community.

You can in fact change the default paper size, just not in the preferences dialog.

As, no doubt, 25 comments have already pointed out.

I don't understand the difficulty in understanding that OOo is NOT Office, and it's not trying either. It's different software and it does things differently, take it or change it. Try and do that with MS!

By the way: http://www.oooforum.org/forum/viewtopic.phtml?t=802

It's not that hard to find ;-)

That forum post is nearly 3 years old.

I don't have that problem on the current version (2.4). My default paper size for new documents is A4.

Interestingly, without even trying my copy of OO.o2.3 has the default set at A4, now how did that happen???

"Well with Bittorrent hitting the skids, the freetards will need to find an alternative to ripping of MS Office 2008"

When I unwisely accepted a new computer with Office 2007 on it I spent a couple of hours of use trying to actually get some work done before giving up and downloading OpenOffice to actually get some work done.

What Microsoft thought they were doing with the 2007 interface completely eludes me, the only things that I could do were due to having memorised the keyboard shortcuts.

I would think there is little if any chance of anybody ripping off a new copy of office simply because most people don't want it.

yes, mine also defaults to A4 - but you may wish to change the default to letter, or legal or some other weird page size. It may also default to letter if you live in a strange country, or use Linux (same thing really!)

I'm praying that it looks nothing like the new M$ office. Slow, bloated and awkward..

Have they fixed the Access-a-like yet? Last time I rtied to evaluate the quite, the database stank, and regularly broke.

Will OpenOffice now support *THE* ISO document format (yes, I know ODF came first, but let's face facts). Getting that right before MS (the inventors) would be kudos.

I hope they have given the spreadsheet a good shake. That was the weakest application. And I hope they have redone how the formatting behaves, as that was the weakest aspect of all applications.

I use MS 2008 in work and OO at home. For serious work, MS is still the only choice for the reasons I mentioned (shame really...) I hope OO 3.0 gains traction, it would be nice to see some proper competition.

Given that is utterly impossible for anyone except MS to comply with OOXML in full due to all the BS "do this like MS Office 5.x, 6.x, etc." comments in the spec, no OOo won't be able to get that 'right' before MS does.

Well, OpenOffice's attempt at being an Aqua application isn't very convincing. In fact, it's quite obviously just some weird cross-platform widget set with an Aqua theme that's not even very close.

The good news is that if you don't like the way buttons look in OS X, don't like the way that the pinstripe look was de-emphasised a few years ago and is completely gone in v10.5, really hate text rendering that uses the colour arrangement of LCD monitors to significantly improve character forms (you know, the stuff Microsoft calls ClearType) and don't like the way that application preferences work in OS X then OpenOffice is the application for you!

On the plus side, at least it can pair-kern. Try typing "You WANT" into Word, whack the font size up to 72 and check out the giant gaping holes in your text between the Y and o, and the W and A.

...one has to accept that it's commonly used throughout the corporate world. When I create a document, be it text or spreadsheet, or indeed anything, I don't use MS Office - I don't even have it at home, where I'm Mac based, or (until recently) at work, where I was Linux based - both situations using OpenOffice.

Thing is, I tried opening a spreadsheet originally created in Excel on my openoffice install last year, and the workbook formulas in there went to shit - they just would not work. This could be MS bypassing some standard, it doesn't really matter. The person who originally created the spreadsheet used MS Office, and the person I'd ultimately be sending my amended version to was using MS Office. And OpenOffice couldn't handle what was going on. What use is that? Should I ask my suppliers and my customers to change their software too?

Now I'm all for software that give an alternative to overpriced, bloated mainsteam products, but until they're guaranteed to offer 100% compatibility, unfortunately I'll have to resort to borrowing someone else's machine with MS Office installed to get some work done occasionally.

I don't think it's right, but that's just the way it is...sadly. Trying to get the world to accept some new standard, even if it's the right one that's been ignored by MS, just isn't good enough. The only real alternative to MS Office is something that does the job better, correctly, yet still handles MS-created documents like they were native - and every previous attempt by everyone thus far hasn't managed it.

I have high hopes for OpenOffice 3; Hopefully, they've realised that they have to conform to the existing rulebook as well as define the next one.

Will it support [O]OXML?

"...and can also open files created with Microsoft’s Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X."

Apparently so. Although the degree to which the loaded documents resemble those from Office 2007 remains to be seen.

If you've looked at retail prices for MS Office lately you may get some idea of why people are using OpenOffice.The price of Office does not reflect the amount of work put into it - otherwise MS's Applications division would not be making 60% profits.

...Ronny

"If you've looked at retail prices for MS Office lately you may get some idea of why people are using OpenOffice.The price of Office does not reflect the amount of work put into it - otherwise MS's Applications division would not be making 60% profits"

Nowadays Office probably is too expensive compared to the work that should be going into it. The stuff of putting text on screen so that it appears exactly as it prints, of things like searching and, in the case of OS X, spell checking and grammar checking has long ago found its way into the operating systems. Free SQL-based database engines abound, and of the platforms supported by Office, at least OS X installs one by default. Similarly PowerPoint isn't doing much that the Windows Presentation Foundation and CoreGraphics can't do automatically. The kicker is almost certainly that Office can't use the OS facilities for many things because it needs to support the various hacks of previous versions that have found their way into the file formats. Word's typography is famously erratic, Excel deliberately duplicates bugs that may or may not have once existed in Lotus 1-2-3, and I'm sure the other components have similar cruft issues.

However, it would be wrong to ignore the way that the price of Office has fallen in recent years. The home-user version is now just about £100, whereas before the 2007/8 versions, home users had to pay more like £400. Even if business prices remain the same (and I don't have a clue), that presumably still means a sizeable overall reduction in the amount of money obtained by MS for Office sales?

I hope they have worked on the utterly pathetic mail merge tools in OO. I hate Office but rolling out a few hundred names tags or address labels from a merge is a snap. Otherwise OO is a cool product in many respects.