What's your favourite OO new feature going to be?

[eclipsenow]

Hi all,
I've heard there are some big changes coming to OO. What's your favourite, most anticipated new feature going to be?
I'm a lay-person newcomer to OO, not an I.T. developer, so please try and keep it newcomer-friendly.

[RoryOF]

It would be interesting to know from whence you heard this and if the source speculated on new features.

[eclipsenow]

Hmmm, I thought I'd read it here, but this turns out to be a rather sympathetic review, not a forecast.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2332502,00.asp

Ahah! It was the wiki, talking all about how IBM's Symphony was to be merged with OO early 2013...

Besides working with the community on the free productivity suite's software, IBM will also leverage OpenOffice.org technology in its products" as seen with Lotus Symphony. Sean Poulley, the vice president of business and strategy in IBM's Lotus Software division, said that IBM plans to take a leadership role in the OpenOffice.org community together with other companies such as Sun Microsystems. IBM will work within the leadership structure that exists.[110] IBM also announced 35 developers would be assigned to work on OpenOffice.org, and that it would join the OpenOffice.org foundation. Commentators noted parallels between IBM's 2000 support of Linux and this announcement.[111] In January 2012 IBM announced that they have donated Symphony's source code to Apache, which will be merged in OpenOffice.org 4 and that they want to release an "Apache OpenOffice IBM edition" and upgrade their users in early 2013.[112][113]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_office#Partnerships

[RoryOF]

"IBM will leverage...."; IBM have donated the Symphony code to the AOO project and have now no official say in the matter.

[acknak]

Yes, I'd say most of that quote is badly out of date; for instance, Sun Microsystems is long gone now.

I'm sure the Symphony code will prove useful but I'm not aware of any major improvements in Symphony that we might look forward to. All I heard was that IBM had tweaked the interface (improved appearance and more logical menus & dialogs) and had added support for additional file formats (Lotus WordPro maybe?).

But I'd be happy to be wrong about that.

[eclipsenow]

OK, maybe I read too much into that wiki.

Were not IBM going to be supporting businesses that use OO? If so, I'm wondering if that might accelerate the development of OO? It's one of those 'feeling secure enough' things that some businesses long for. If they know they can call someone to fix a problem, or develop some new feature for a little $$$, then maybe that will give OO more corporate backing?

Sounds nice in theory, but I suspect the real world is a little bit more ...

[muddler]

I have not thought about new features, but there is one old feature I would not like to lose. What I have in mind is the way the filter works in Calc. I can click on the filter and type in whatever I am looking for. The filter then shows the instances of what I have typed. I can then just type "a" to show everything once again. This is really elegant. Please don't go the way of the LibreOffice filter - far too much clickety click on little boxes.

[Villeroy]

Please don't go the way of the LibreOffice filter - far too much clickety click on little boxes.

Like so many other anti-features they had to fix this several versions later instead of doing it right in the first place. According to the release notes, LibO 4 can auto-filter again.
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/4- ... -and-fixes

[Villeroy]

My favourite 4.0 feature would be an improved database connectivity similar to the consistent state in OOo 1.x.
No badly integrated database anymore, configuration in configuration files, data in databases, no misleading bullshit wizards, no Java dependency (except for jdbc connections of course).
Old embedded databases could be treated as what they actually are: installable extensions. Install old embedded databases and forms permanently under <profile_path>/databases/ and connect them to HSQL 2.3. Make forms and reports freely loadable stand-alone documents as they used to be in OOo 1.x with all the improvements and fixes of the past 7 years (which are not that many actually).

[JoKer]

I absolutely agree with Villeroy . My favorite new feature going to be an improved database connectivity similar to the consistent state in OOo 1.x .
I think it will be one of the best features for it .

[digdoug78]

Would a feature be: working properly after installation without hours of trouble shooting and reading message boards at 12:42 am?
That would be a cool feature...

Edit: Hagar (moderator): problem solved for digdoug78: [Solved] Selected JRE is defective message.

[Hagar Delest]

Do you still use OOo 3.1.0 (your signature)? This is rather deprecated now.

[Villeroy]

Would a feature be: working properly after installation without hours of trouble shooting and reading message boards at 12:42 am?
That would be a cool feature...

It is designed to be so and for me it used to work like this since version 1.

[peterroots]

I have never had OOo AOO or LO not work on first install on Windows XP, 7 or various flavours of Linux so I think that feature is already present.
I never used base in 1.x but like the sound of keeping all the bits of a database separate. The current all in one approach is a bit too much like a failed attempt to emulate Access. Keeping the data away from the frilly bits sound like a great way to encourage flexibility and portability. Develop something on a stand alone machine - looks useful so move the data to a networked server and still use Base to access and query the data from multiple machines without a total rethink on how it all works. Like the idea

[acknak]

I have never had OOo AOO or LO not work on first install ...

I have, but the problem was always solved by a clean OOo settings profile.

Of course, when you don't know that trick, it's a nasty roadblock.