[wellylug] OpenOffice.org 2.0 early impressions

[Rob Giltrap]

FYI

The new version of OpenOffice.org (v2.0) is coming up for it's early 
access realease in June so I thought I would take a sneak peak and 
downloaded build 680/m38 (from 3rd May).

The startup speed was slightly better again and the look and feel have 
slight improvements. The big change however was when I opened up a 
couple of documents from hell. These are MS Word docs with nested tables 
and other such nasties. They converted extremely well, much much better 
than OOo 1.1.1

Of course this is a pre alpha release and as such promptly crashed as 
soon as I tried to save any document! However, the experience showed me 
that as good as OOo is now, version 2.0 looks like it is going to better 
by a good margin by removing more barriers to adoption.

The roadmap highlights are as follows....

June 2004: OOo 2.0 EA (early access)
June/July 2004: UI freeze/feature complete OOo 2.0 Alpha
September 2004: Beta Release Candidates
October 2004: OOo2.0 Beta
December 2004: OOo 2.0 rc
January 2005: OOo 2.0

Cheers, Rob.