fidzu : OpenOffice

And here are some more Chart features in OOo 3.3 Beta:

Several defaults were changed to allow a faster creation of a pleasant looking and readable chart.
So the diagram size is now larger with 9x16cm wide screen. That allows also for larger fonts at the axes, data labels and legend entries. We have 10pt here now. The somewhat outdated comic style with black borders around all the data points and symbols was left behind in favor of a modern clean look without borders.

The 3D charts have received some tuning in the geometry creation and the default lights to brighten things up. They have been too dark and grey so far. Pyramids have got a new geometry also and are rotated with the flat side to front now. The floor in 3D charts has been flattened. And 3D charts are now created with "realistic look" by default, that means (no borders and smooth shading).

Old	New

If you have further ideas what defaults should be changed you are invited to join here: http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/User_Experience/Improving_OOo_Default_Settings

A tip. If all these defaults do not fit your needs, und you have typically many changes to make on each chart, the following might help saving time. Create a chart from some dummy data with as much data series as you will need at maximum. Create also some dummy titles if you have them typically. Then make all the settings on this chart. Set your own typically used chart type, colors, line style, line thickness, fonts etc. Save the Document with the Chart somewhere where you have easy access to it.
Now every time you need a new chart, open this document and copy the chart from there. Afterwards simply drag and drop new cell ranges on it.

18 Oct 2010 11:03am GMT

#i115100# - Database access: Table DATE data displays wrong year in 64bit Win7
#i115099# - Presentation: Cant change animationpath
#i115101# - Presentation: Display Errors in Edit-Mode when task bar animation is active
#i115104# - sc: date format not copied special. or display is wrong.
#i115102# - sw: Saving to .doc (97) with a column break adds a paragraph before the break.
#i115103# - sw: line spacing less than 100% doesn't display properly

18 Oct 2010 3:43am GMT

• Up earlyish, off to NCC - visiting speaker spoke on troubles, peace, and joy. Home to prep for lunch.
• Chris, Joy & daughters over for lunch from Oak Hill - lovely to see them, fantastic to have sorted relatives. Enjoyed their company for some hours, first fire of the year - starting to get rid of the huge stack of wood left over from the building work.
• Sogged in front of some children's DVD with the babes, light tea to make up for the mammouth lunch; bed early.

17 Oct 2010 9:00pm GMT

#i115096# - framework: filter: apple(pict): a proposition to draw thick lines/frames
#i115097# - sc: fails to open/display my folders
#i115098# - sc: fails to open/display my folders
#i115094# - sw: Open Office writer cant support ₹
#i115095# - sw: writer crash when open next file

17 Oct 2010 1:43pm GMT

#i115092# - Chart: Dotted transparent lines disappear in edit mode
#i115093# - sc: Navigator won't go away

17 Oct 2010 3:43am GMT

• Up early, dropped remarkably reasonable babes off with the Brighty's, and off for another day session again with Steve Hall.
• Studied the Five Circle theory: Physical, Emotional, Volitional, Rational, Spiritual - at some length, most interesting. Ellis' A-B-C-(D-E-F) theory, Did a little self-awareness work - scary enough.
• Back to collect babes, read stories, dinner, bath, bed, lay around talking until late.

16 Oct 2010 9:00pm GMT

#i115091# - Presentation: Text is wrongly hidden when using animation
#i115088# - framework: The task "open" in the startcenter doesn't work as expected
#i115089# - sw: Geodon 80 mg
#i115090# - www: Mirror TU-BS down

16 Oct 2010 1:43pm GMT

#i115082# - Chart: Chart Area always displayed with KDE "View Background" colour
#i115086# - Drawing: Cannnot copy image from Java to OpenOffice
#i115080# - Drawing: shape attributes lost when removing/re-inserting a shape in a Draw document
#i115083# - Installation: Installation of bundled dictionaries failed
#i115087# - sw: Tables are very different inspite of having identical configurations
#i115084# - sw: Tabs not holding
#i115081# - sw: Unlike Writer's native fields, Endnote-generated fields are not shaded
#i115085# - sw: hyperlink to local document causes text space to expand beyond page

16 Oct 2010 3:43am GMT

This post is a sequel to this previous post, so refer to that post for the detail of what I've been working on.

Anyway, I have settled with the following Compatibility option page:

which should be just adequate for what it needs to do without being too annoying.

Also, just for the matter of documenting its behavior, the following chart shows what actions are associated with what key bindings for the two key binding types (Default and OpenOffice.org legacy):

Key Binding	Default	OpenOffice.org legacy
Backspace	delete contents	delete
Delete	delete	delete contents
Ctrl-D	fill down	data select
Shift-Ctrl-D	data select	-

where the actions are

• delete contents - launch the delete contents dialog.
• delete - immediately delete the cell content, without the dialog.
• fill down - fill cell content downward within selection.
• data select - launch the selection list dialog.

Note that all the other key bindings are left untouched. Also, the list of key bindings that can get reset by this functionality may grow in future releases.

16 Oct 2010 2:09am GMT

I'm happy to announce the release of version 0.3.1 of the Multi-Dimensional Data Structure (mdds). This is a bug fix release, and contains no major changes from the previous version (0.3.0). The highlights of this release are:

• use of autoconf tool, to allow you to run ./configure && sudo make install to install the library, and
• drop the requirement for C++0x support, by using equivalent features from the boost library which mdds already depends on.

When using this library without the C++0x support, however, you need to define the MDDS_HASH_CONTAINER_BOOST compiler macro in order for the mdds library to use boost's hash_containers, instead of the ones from C++0x. Similarly, you can define the MDDS_HASH_CONTAINER_STLPORT to force mdds to use stlport's hash containers instead.

I will briefly explain the incompatible support of hash containers various libraries. Originally, the stlport library supported two hash containers, hash_map and hash_set, in the std namespace which can be used as hashed replacements of std::map and std::set, respectively. In C++0x, however, these two containers have been renamed to unordered_map and unordered_set which are still in the std namespace. Boost also provides unordered_map and unordered_set, but they are in the boost namespace. The change that this release contains should hopefully be useful when dealing with this incompatible hash container situation in various libraries.

This release contains patches from David Tardon and Phillip Thomas, who fixed various bits of the Makefile script. Phillip also helped me fix the rpm spec file. Thanks a lot!

16 Oct 2010 12:51am GMT

• Up early, prodded mail, ran tests builds, did some product analysis. Knocked out my Mannah House homework: "List some of the key elements / concepts of, and differences between Psychoanalytical counselling, Person Centred counselling, and Rational Emotive Therapy." and mailed it off. Lunch.
• Fixed lpsolve dependency problem; $(IFEXIST) doesn't work on directories (it turns out). Analysed the output from another of Julian's wizard valgrind tools run on LibreOffice. Added another easy hack or two. Tried to dig through the torrent of good mail & patches flowing into the inbox.
• Dinner with Mary, out with J. to counselling evening with a new lady - Lynn; amusing evening about pratical counselling, communication, etc.

15 Oct 2010 9:00pm GMT

We are going to switch from the OpenOffice.org to the LibreOffice code base on openSUSE.

I'm happy to announce LibreOffice 3.3 beta2 packages for openSUSE. They are available in the Build Service LibreOffice:Unstable project. They are based on the libreoffice-3.2.99.2 release. Please, look for more details about the openSUSE LibreOffice build on the wiki page.

The packages are beta versions and might include even serious bugs. Therefore they are not intended for data-critical usage. A good practice is to archive any important data before an use, …

As usual, we kindly ask any interested beta testers to try the package and report bugs.

Known bugs

• only the LibreOffice branding package is available; you need to replace OpenOffice_org-branding-openSUSE with libreoffice-branding-upstream
• shell wrappers are still ooffice, oowriter, …; we need to discuss the new wrapper names with other distros first
• application stops immediately when you start it for the first time; just start it once again
• extensions are not registered after the update from OpenOffice_org-* packages; a workaround is to reinstall the packages once again; We plan to remove the registration during installation; it will allow users to disable the extensions by themselves
• some packages were not renamed, .e.g. OpenOffice_org-thesaurus, …; they are not built from the main LO sources; we will do it later
• user configuration is stored into ~/.libreoffice/3-suse; we might try to share the directory ~/.libreoffice/3 after we fix the incompatible BerkleyDB; Well, we are not sure if it is enough and it is a good idea, so it will need some more testing
• packages can't be installed in parallel with the generic LibreOffice linux packages; the problem is that both builds use the libreoffice-ure package name; it will be solved in beta3; a workaround is to install the package using "rpm -i" instead of "rpm -U"
• GNOME quickstarter is started by default; you might disable it in Tools/Options/OpenOffice.org/Memory/Enable systray Quickstarter
• SLED10 build is not available; need more love

More known bugs

• Free Desktop bugzilla
• Novell bugzilla
• OOo issuezilla

Other information and plans:

These are the first packages with new name. Please, be patient if they are not perfect. Please report unknown bugs.

The new packages automatically remove the obsolete openSUSE OpenOffice_org packages. It still will be possible to intall the plain OpenOffice.org packages in parallel, though.

15 Oct 2010 5:47pm GMT

OOO330_m11 has been built by Hamburg RE. No open build problems are known, and smoketest has been passed successfully.

Tasks and their ChildWorkspaces for Milestone OOO330m11

Child Workspaces integrated:

automationooo330m9

Automation related issues with low impact

calc60

Fix for issue 115025

jl161

Showstopper

native338

JRE 6 U 22 for OOo 3.3

sb133

OOo 3.3 configmgr showstopper

ooo330m11masterfix

15 Oct 2010 3:53pm GMT

#i115072# - Database access: OOo crash when Base connected to text file ad run one query
#i115076# - framework: OpenOffice.org hanging
#i115078# - sc: Crash when opening files with nonstandard file extensions
#i115079# - sc: Crash when opening files with nonstandard file extensions
#i115075# - sc: Funktion N() does not handle matrix
#i115077# - sc: trouble reading xls files
#i115071# - sw: Table Row Height Formatting Limitation when containing heigh enough nested tables
#i115073# - sw: change case
#i115074# - sw: docx can not be opened by the writer

15 Oct 2010 1:43pm GMT

A lot of tools (web-based and others) claim to output XLS (Excel) files, when in fact they write files that have the .xls extension but contain CSV or HTML content. If you open an HTML file in OpenOffice.org, without selecting a specific filter, it's opened in Writer/Web, because that's the best option for HTML editing. Similarly, text files are opened in Writer. But users expect their pretend-to-be-XLS files to open in Calc, as if they were real Excel files.

In the past, we had two partial solutions to this:

• The CSV filter was configured with the extensions .csv, .txt and .xls, so for any file with .xls extension, it was checked if it might be a CSV file. This was somewhat fragile because it depended on the order in which the filters were handled.
• System registration for file extensions is done with the module executable, that is, "scalc.exe" for .xls. This causes the framework code to only look for Calc filters when opening the file from the desktop or from a web browser. But it doesn't work on the Macintosh, where we have only one executable.

So we had to find a better solution. With 3.3 Beta and the fix for issue 89332, this is now handled explicitly in Calc's filter detection code: If an XLS filter is pre-selected (in the dialog, or automatically from the .xls file extension), and the file content is HTML or plain text, the filter detection accepts the file as valid and silently changes the filter to "Text CSV" or "Web Page Query". The file is automatically opened in Calc, using the improved CSV import dialog or the new HTML import dialog.

Short summary: Even if it looks like a text file, swims like a text file, and quacks like a text file, you can now call it an Excel file.

15 Oct 2010 12:46pm GMT

October 13 saw our birthday. Ten years is a long time and even longer when you think about it. Each day-pff. A long moment of waking, eating, exercising, loving, talking, eating, sleeping, and then again. Pause and the weekend passes with all you haven't done and look forward to the new week to come. Repeat? Hardly, each week, month, quarter differs, marked by forgotten memories recalled at odd moments, marked by the wonderful persistence of others, friends, colleagues, acquaintances, met at conferences and domestic places.

And code: evolutionary, progressing, slowly catching up with the notions of the future born of too much science fiction-but getting there, now, ten years in.

In my birthday message I couldn't describe what a profound personal and cultural and even political change we, the OOo community, have really made. Prior to our intervention on this global stage there was no cry for open standards in edocuments that had gotten any traction; there was only the acceptance of "just like a standard" because it was universally (!!) used. There was, in short, massive misunderstanding and the acceptance that the opaque status quo, where you can only accept the commodity because there is no choice.

There was no or little sense that the decisions to adopt, which is to say, buy, this or that software for desktops (numbering in the tens of millions) was anything like a political decision, and thus subject to public scrutiny and standards of accountability. Now there is. I first raised this logic sometime in 2003, 2004, at conferences, where I urged people to understand that their tax dollars were at stake when software was bought for government use, and that there were quite reasonable alternatives, both to the application and to the format.

It was a kind of "political" argument but of such a nature as irreducible to any political agenda, unless one should foolishly argue that patronage, corruption, and opacity constitute a kind of political stance. They don't. They constitute a phase in civilization that we strive to emerge from, however imperfectly, however much we slide back.

But OOo gives us the tools to step more boldly into the light. It's not a matter of insisting that one use X over Y. It's a matter of insisting that the purchasing actions be accountable, that they be defensible according to the terms we accept.

Those terms include:

• Wise use of public money:
• Spend tax revenue (and associated interest income) on tools that do the job not on brands that cost more and do more than is needed.
• Ensure that there is room for growth, both with the application and with the format used. This is another way of saying,
• NO VENDOR LOCK IN
• Comment: Vendor lockin means that it's really hard, if not financially and technologically impossible, to move away from a vendor's system, as millions of documents, and the applications required to work with them, cannot be easily transferred or ported over to another system. It's a catastrophe, and it has configured much of our software universe. But not only that. We see it with the internal combustion engine, we see it with structures of power distribution, we see it in many places: what we did long ago has consequences today-global warming comes to mind-and changing things to a more desired way is immensely, immensely difficult. But not impossible. We, modern civilization, got rid of the utterly needless lead in gasoline. We got rid of asbestos in many places. And so on. When the need is clear, the concerted effort is possible, the result achievable. I see this now with software. There has seldom been a time in human culture when the informational drama has been so stark.
• That's because there has never been a time when there were so many children needing schooling, when there were so many adults needing re-training (because their traditional ways of life have been demolished by, say, climate change), when so many are moving to cities and thus away from rural areas, and in cities, they need not just to know how to read and write but how to do that on a computer.
• And they need to be able to exchange their ideas, their readings, writings; and do the other things that demand knowledge of and access to software enabling these communications.
• And that software has to be free software, or at least based on it. Else, what are we asking of the world? That they pay a private tax to do what has, since the modern period (post Renaissance) a nearly free activity? (Paper costs money, as do pencils; but very little, and one can always find a means of writing for free. It is in a nation's interest to have a literate population: they earn more money, make for a commercial urban world, and enrich the overall nation.)
• Free software enabling the capture of thoughts and their communication is requisite for a future that is a future and not a dreary dive into the past. It is needed so that children can be taught, so that adults can communicate without cost and fear, so that new things designed to address the dramatic spectacles of our present and future lives can come into being.
• And OpenOffice.org is the key to that. Whether as we see it now, as an integrated application, or as a set of useful tools drawn from the "Cloud" is beside the point. It's the free technology unbounded by platform, license, imagination that is key, and that uses an open standard, the ODF, that frees you to choose what works for you-not for the vendor.

So, happy birthday, OpenOffice.org, and thanks to all for the support, contributions and community. We really have changed the world, we really are changing it. This first decade-Well, it was our childhood. We are reaching now, in the second decade, the next phase, and it's a phase we all look forward to. I'm proud to be a part of OpenOffice.org, to be part of the global community and to have had a small part in changing the world for the better. How many can say the same? But isn't that the point? Join us and make the difference needed.

15 Oct 2010 11:38am GMT