I downloaded the new OpenOffice release and played around with it a bit. I don’t use office style software that much, but it’s occasionally useful to have around. The first impression is that the installer (on windows, anyway) is much more modern. It looks like it’s using NSIS.
Firing it up for the first time, the interface is a lot more modern and fits well into the windows desktop. It no longer looks like Office ‘97. There’s still too many toolbars, but they’re easy to turn off.
I had a look at the new OpenOffice Base application. It was really quite easy to get connected to my PostgreSQL server using JDBC (just drop the jar in the jre/lib/ext directory first). About half a minute later, I was looking at my web server logs in the database. It works reasonably well, and appears to be moderately intuitive to use. The bits I still need to play with are Forms and Reports. B ut then again, I’ve never used those in a Microsoft Office environment, so I’ve got no experience to go on.
The one thing that I was really curious to see was the XForms support. It’s lauded as a great new feature, but I found it very difficult to figure out what was going on. Some kind of tutorial would have been a great idea. Actually, I didn’t look hard enough. I need to spend some time over at documentation.openoffice.org.
Overall, there’s a lot in here that I need to spend some time with to get the full benefit of. But I’m looking forward to it.
Jabbering Giraffe 