The OpenOffice.org 3.1 free office software released today contains a raft of new features voted for by users, including much improved on-screen graphics and improvements to all its components. The software is available as a free download via the OpenOffice.org website.

Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) May 7, 2009 — The OpenOffice.org Community today announced the general availability of OpenOffice.org 3.1, a significant upgrade to the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. Since OpenOffice.org 3.0 was launched last October, over 60 million downloads have been recorded from the OpenOffice.org website alone. Released in more than 90 languages and available as a free download on all major computing platforms, OpenOffice.org 3.1 looks set to break these records.

The OpenOffice.org Community is listening to its users. Users of previous versions of OpenOffice.org were asked to vote for their ‘most desired’ new features, and this wish list helped shape the new release. The new release also includes a feedback mechanism where users can opt-in to supply feedback automatically to the developers about how they use OpenOffice.org.

The biggest single change (half a million lines of code!) and the most visible is the major revamp of OpenOffice.org on-screen graphics. Techies call it anti-aliasing – users just appreciate how much crisper graphics are on screen. The improved look extends to other subtle changes, such as: how images display when they are being dragged, how selections of text are highlighted, and even adding the ability to overline text.

New core features include:

Writer (word processing)

• Improvements to comments: reply feature now supports ‘conversations’
• Further grammar checker integration
• Outline levels within paragraphs for complex documents

Calc (spreadsheet)

• Hot hints for formulae, with new and improved formulae available
• Improved sorting
• More performance bottlenecks removed
• The zoom slider added to the status bar
• Rename sheets with a double-click

Chart (graphics engine)

• Flexible positioning of axes for scientific and educational users
• Flexible handling of “missing” data points

Impress (presentation)

• Font size buttons

Base (database)

• SQL syntax highlighting
• Easier deployment of macro applications

Internationalization and Localization

• Improved support for bidirectional scripts
• New locale support

Behind the scenes, OpenOffice.org also now has a more capable file locking mechanism, enabling users to share files safely in a multi-user, multi-platform environment.

“OpenOffice.org 3.1 demonstrates that we are listening to our users, and thanks to the long term commitment from our sponsors, we can invest the time and effort to make significant changes to the software,” said John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead. “OpenOffice.org has all the features users want, it’s easy to use and free. We urge everyone to download and try it today.”

Download OpenOffice.org 3.1 for free

Guide to new features

Finally, after 3 years of continuous improvement, OpenOffice 3.0 has been released.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is more powerful than ever before and with support for MS Access 2007 .accdb files, improved support for VBA macros, and a new ability to read MS Office Open XML files, it’s even easier to make the change away from legacy MS Office software.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 naturally has a fresh look, with a new start center, new splash screen, new icons, and a host of usability improvements. New core features include:

Writer (word processing)

• New slider control for zooming which allows multi-page display while editing
• Powerful new multilingual support
• Improved notes capabilities
• Ability to edit wiki documents for the web, in addition to conventional office documents

Calc (spreadsheet)

• Increase in capacity of up to 1024 columns per sheet
• Powerful new equation solver
• New collaboration feature for multiple users

Draw (graphics)

• Ability to cope with poster-size graphics – up to three square meters or 32.3 square feet.

Impress (presentation):

• Fully featured table designer inside a presentation

You can read the full press release here: http://www.prweb.com/releases/OOo/3/prweb1459364.htm

And download OpenOffice.org 3.0 for free at: http://download.openoffice.org/

Whack 1.0 has been released. Whack is our Open Source XMPP (Jabber) component library for XMPP components. External components are processes that run outside of the Openfire’s process but can connect to the server to register new XMPP service. Whack is an implementation of XEP-0114: Jabber Component Protocol.

Unlike the other igniterealtime products, Whack followed a different evolution path. We started coding Whack around November 2004 and after a few months it was operational. Openfire and Whack share the same component’s API so around 2005 we were able to run Fastpath as an internal component (i.e. running in the Openfire’s process) or just move it as an external component using Whack. It was impressive seeing the same code running as internal and external. Since then Whack continued to evolve but always at a very slow pace. Whack was always stable in each step but it was just not ready for prime time. We wanted to keep adding more things to it to reach a 1.0 release. Since our collaboration software Clearspace uses Whack to integrate with Openfire we needed to push the boundaries of Whack once again and I’m happy to say that we now reached the 1.0 release. And that is why we decided to make a public release in 2008 after 4 years of continuous but slow growth.

A few months ago we also released a new product called SparkWeb. SparkWeb is our Open Source web-based IM client. SparkWeb is based on XIFF just like Spark is based on Smack. Today we updated the products page to list SparkWeb as an official product. Welcome SparkWeb! The family has grown a little bit now.

You can get Whack from here. Questions could be posted to the Whack forum.

SparkWeb can be downloaded from here. If you want to build from the source code you can read the Getting and Building SparkWeb document.

Chuyên gia công nghệ Stuart McKee của tập đoàn phần mềm Mỹ thừa nhận ưu thế của định dạng tài liệu mở và có phần áy náy vì đã không hỗ trợ chuẩn này trong Office 2007 sớm hơn.

“Chúng tôi tồn tại nhờ vào việc kinh doanh phần mềm. Chúng tôi chưa thể triển khai ODF trong quá trình phát hành Office 2007, nhưng cam kết sẽ xây dựng một sản phẩm không đơn giản chỉ đóng vai trò phiên dịch giữa ODF và OOXML”, McKee nói.

ODF (Open Document Format) trở thành chuẩn ISO từ cách đây 2 năm trong khi OOXML (Open Office XML) của Microsoft mới được Tổ chức chuẩn quốc tế thông qua hồi tháng 4. Một vài công ty như IBM và Sun cho rằng OOXML quá độc quyền để được coi là một chuẩn.

“Microsoft tham gia vào cuộc đua quá muộn và thật khó để tiến hành những cuộc đàm phán trên toàn thế giới khi mọi thứ đã an bài”, McKee thừa nhận thành công của ODF.

Microsoft sẽ hỗ trợ định dạng tài liệu mã mở trong gói Office vào năm tới, nhưng khả năng OOXML và ODF sẽ hợp nhất thành một chuẩn chung là điều khó có thể xảy ra.

Xem bài đầy đủ bằng tiếng Anh tại:

http://www.infoworld.com/article/08/06/19/Red_Hat_Summit_panel_Who_won_OOXML_battle_1.html

(theo InfoWorld)