OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta available !

It is official, OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta version is available for download.

The feature list is here and you'll be glad to know that support for Microsoft 2007 file format (OOXML) is now a reality !

Also, OpenOffice.org for Mac is now an Aqua application that does not require the X11 windowing environment. Those of you who don't know what that means are blessed !

The stable version is planned for release in September. Although the free office suite is still not considered stable, it is stable enough for most of your non-mission critical work. I've been using test versions of 3.0 for a while now and I have been very pleased with it. I've noticed that it is significantly faster than NeoOffice at launch too.

Feel free to download it from here.

Office 2008 and OOXML on the Mac (update)

I have edited and updated the Office 2008 related posts:

Office 2007 files (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) on Mac
and
Office 2008 review

Office 2008 review

Ars Technica's word

Ars Technica has released a brief review of Office 2008, a few days before the suite's release at MacWorld 2008 ☞.

The new file format

For translators, the main appeal of the suite is the access it provides to the new Office 2007 format. There are plenty of things to say about this new format, and the first is that power users or developers who rely on the OOXML standard to create files that Office 2007/2008 should support are going to be a little surprised ☞...

Native !

Another important feature of the suite is that the new Office for Mac is now a Universal Binary, which means that it will run natively and equally well on both PPC and Intel machines. No more Rosetta between the machine and Office!

MacTech has run a few tests (2500) to compare Office 2008 to Office 2004 on G4 and Intel /Tiger and Leopard machines.

The conclusion is that Office 2008 is about 30% faster than Office 2004 on Intel machines and that it is "marginally" slower on G4 machines. Also, Office 2008 looks faster on Leopard than on Tiger.

Besides for the raw performance, the article points at the fact that the suite having been rewritten, a number of features are either more quickly accessed or provide a faster ergonomic experience than their 2004 counterparts. Which means that even users of a G4 could see some benefits using it ☞.

No more Wordfast ! Scripting options ?

The major problem for Mac translators is that since Office 2008 drops VBA support they won't be able to use WordFast anymore, at least the current versions that are basically a Word macro written in VBA.

Office 2008 supposedly adds better AppleScript support and OSX integration but it is unlikely that such features will be of much use for tool developers who relied on the relative compatibility with Office for Windows to deliver their "mutliplatform" tools. Still, people who want to start converting their VBA work to AppleScript should take a look at MacTech's transition guide.

According to Nadyne, MBU member and Ars Technica's Jacqui Cheng, Office 2008's Automator support does not come as a default option: it is not in the "Home/Student" edition, only in the "Standard" and "Special".

Automator support comes along with "full Exchange support" for an extra cost of $250 ("Home/Student" at $150, "Standard" at $400)... ☞

Pricing ?

Also, it looks like MS is sticking to its funky Vista-like pricing options (or maybe Vista only made that worse)... Why is it so hard to simply have a 1 license vs 3+ licenses pricing pattern?

No multi-license scheme for "Standard" and 3 "non-commercial" installs for "Home/Student"...

Last but not least ?

Here is a good reason to wait until a few updates are released... Microsoft has published a list of know issues with the new software. MacOSXHints makes a short summary and has links to the relevant page at Microsoft. You wonder what they've done of their time in 4 years of development... Another case of the Vista syndrome? Some issues seem to have been addressed in the first update of the suite though. ☞

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Links

Ars Technica's Office 2008 review:
First Look: Microsoft Office for Mac 2008
By Jonathan M. Gitlin, January 2008

MS does not respect its own format:
Microsoft Office XML formats? Defective by design
By Stéphane Rodriguez, August 2007

MacTech's VBA to AppleScript transition guide:
Moving from Microsoft Office VBA to AppleScript: MacTech's Guide to Making the Transition
By Paul Berkowitz, April 2007.

MacTech's Office 2008 Benchmarks Preview:
How well does Office 2008 run compared to Office 2004?
By Neil Ticktin, Editor-in-Chief, January 2008.

Mac My Day, Nadyne's blog at MBU:
today's top five questions in the Office 2008 booth
By Nadyne, MBU member, January 2008.

Ars Technica's Infite Loop
Microsoft announces Mac Office 2008 pricing, upgrade details
By Jacqui Cheng, September 2007.

MacOSXHints' summary of known issues
A list of known issues with Microsoft Office 2008
By user davidfoster with addendum by manager robg, January 2008.

Microsoft's first update details
Description of the Office 2008 for Mac 12.0.1 Update
By Microsoft, March 2008

Paperless office, PDF, XML, Zip...

From the Mac Dev Center, "My paperless office" by Gordon Meyer.

Gordon writes about how he used a Fujitsu ScanSnap scanner to archive all his paper documents to digital form. He also mentions DevonThink, a digital document managing system, and 2 PDF utilities: Skim, a PDF reader and note taker for OSX released under the Modified BSD License, and hence Free software, and PDFPen, a tool to organize and overwrite PDFs.

Considering the Leopard version of Preview, it looks like Skim as well as PDFPen are becoming obsolete, as some comments seem to confirm...

The other day there was a link on Slashdot pointing to Jim King's "Inside PDF" blog, about the fact that PDF 1.7 was becoming an ISO standard.

I've been reading a number of Jim's posts and here are a few that may interest some of you. They are all a little theoretical but give very interesting insights on a number of existing major documentation formats.

Quotes from the respective pages.

PDF by Design

I named this blog "Inside PDF" because I anticipated telling you a lot about PDF technology – what is inside of a PDF file and why. I have spent most of the time so far talking about PDF and standards. So, I thought it was about time to do an entry about PDF itself. I believe that PDF has been so successful because of the caldron out of which it was brewed. By 1990 Adobe was quite successful with PostScript. By then we had helped over 60 other companies make printers, image setters, and other imaging devices that used PostScript. We had also shipped Display PostScript and the Steve Jobs NeXT machine was a computer whose operating system's imaging model was Display PostScript. So Adobe had had considerable experience in displaying documents on a screen...

XML Documents

Today I hope to tie together two previous blogs about OOXML and about XML For ....

I am sure you have often heard the term “XML Document.”  I hope you realized that that term is nearly meaningless just like the term “XML.”  We should never use either in polite conversation. Let me tell you some of the totally different uses for the term “XML Document” which render it a useless term, and maybe you will agree with me to banish it from our vocabularies...

Archiving Documents

Archiving is a rather loaded word since doing it can be a widely varying activity. In many situations, archiving PDF files is a very good solution. In fact it was so attractive to some US Government agencies that they encouraged their personnel to work on an ISO committee/working group to define a special subset of PDF called PDF/A that meets their needs better than plain old PDF might...


ZIP Archives and Portable Directories

This is a topic that is dear to my heart and I would love to spur some interest in creating an open source project or something like that. Since about 1999 I have been talking to my colleagues about a concept that I call "portable directories." It is a simple idea once you "get it."

File systems, organized around the notion of directories or folders in which to collect files and other directories, have been the staple for how we save computer material on our hard drives, data CDs and DVDs, etc. I suppose it had its invention from an analogy with a file cabinet, but on the computer we can nest folders inside folders to any depth, something hard to do with real physical folders...