OpenOffice will see a new release today: version 2.4. Among the new features are improved multi language management and 3D eyecandy for Impress.
OpenOffice.Org 2.4 will be the last version before the new and shiny 3.0 will hit the streets in September/October 2008. While it is only a minor release it does come along with some nice additions:
- Impressive Eye Candy: 3D OpenGL Transitions – Eyecandy! Because it would be nuts to release a piece of software in these days without it!
- Improved multi language support – This is important for all people who are not English natives. And while the current OOo implementation for switching languages just sucks, the new options might help a lot here.
- Exporting PDF/A for long-term archiving – Not much to add to the title: With OOo 2.4 you can finally export to ISO’s PDF/A.
- Backreferences in replacements – I like that one a lot: it is a search and replace mechanism where the replace can be constructed out of the bits found by search. Anyone knows how to do that for example in KDE’s kate?
- Block selection mode – Funny thing, might come in hadny if you get a screwed up file where blocks were created using white spaces.
- Display equations for regression lines – Don’t mix it up: OOo was already able to do regressions. But now you can also see the equation 🙂
- Convert Text to Columns in Calc – If you often have to deal with txt or cvs files you will love that feature. Basically it is a way to re-import txt-Data and separate them even if they are already in your Calc file.
- Relative Links in PDFs – A handy feature in case you use multiple PDFs which have references to each other.
- Export Page names as PDF bookmarks – One of these small but quite useful features: It will allow you to export slides in Impress (or pages in Draw) and link them by name. These will be shown in every recent PDF viewer and will ease navigation.
- Show bars side by side – Combining two data into one bar graph now looks better because the bars are not at the same position but a little bit distinct.
All in all it just looks like a polished minor release. And exactly that was expected. Major improvements will come up with 3.0 – I hope the presenter view will be part then.
Besides these improvements OpenOffice.Org also got a new webpage for the release. Be sure to check it once or twice today because the official announcement and download links will appear there. In case you are a Fedora user: Fedora 9 will ship with OpenOffice.Org 2.4.
On a personal note: I’m still alive. But I have to hand in my final thesis these days, so I’m quite busy. Also, the entire thesis thing didn’t went like I expected it, so I am not only busy but also stressed out and quite frustrated. Shit happens…
/home/liquidat 
For backreferences in Kate, you have to check the 2 checkboxes in the Replace dialog: “Regular expression” / “Regulärer Ausdruck” and “Use placeholders” / “Platzhalter verwenden”. In the KDE 4 version, these settings can be found in the expanded power user version of the search bar.
Thanks for the links. 🙂
Is there any roadmap for upgrading the kde nwf (kde widget theming/styling for oo.o) to kde4 widgets? As is, oo.o sticks out like a VERY sore thumb in my kde4 desktop. It doesn’t even pickup my color scheme.
Kevin, thx for the hint! And Andrew, you’re welcome 🙂
Joe, I don’t know to be honest.
High time OpenOffice gets backreferences. I would have needed those a year ago, and had to resort to using both Kate *and* OpenOffice to get that stuff replaced.
On the other hand, OpenOffice can specify a specific format for replacements, which is cool, and Kate cannot do that because it doesn’t know formats at all 😛
Good to see OpenOffice getting better steadily, it’s a nice stopgap measure until I can finally switch to KOffice 2.
I was going to suggest backreferencing with regex which works great, I’ve converted a HTML document to XHTML for a test I was doing and added a / to all images with one go, easy.
Now I’m left to wish you luck with your thesis, I’m near the end of mine! 🙂
Thanks, I really wanted to know what was new in this field.
Joe, the most i’ve seen on qt4/kde4 theme for openoffice.org is this one line on opensuse wiki (who did the qt3 frontend i think)
http://en.opensuse.org/KDE/KDE_on_openSUSE11.0#Nice-to-Have
Link corrected by liquidat 🙂
Thanks for the review. Looking forward to trying it.
NIce new features, but OOo is such a resource hog that ALL I’m interested in is improved startup time, smaller memory usage and other performance improvements.
trg: I agree, that is very, very important. But the list of bugfixes regarding start up time and memory problems is huge – and there are many fixes for OOo 3.0 as well. So OOo 2.4 should already be faster.
Yes, since forever. enable regular expression and placeholders in the search & replace utility.
Anders, thx for the hint, it was also already mentioned by others 🙂