GullFOSS
OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun
 
 
 
 
More Flickr photos tagged with openoffice

Today's Page Hits: 2699

Locations of visitors to this page
Main | Next page »
Tuesday, 06 Oct 2009
New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 3.2
Ingrid Halama

Interested in the new Chart features that will be available in OOo 3.2? Have a look:

Bubble Charts

The Bubble Chart is available as new chart type now. Bubble Charts are similar to the XY Charts, but in addition to the x-and y-value for each data point a third value is used to influence the size of the bubble.

This issue was one of the top voted feature request recently within the chart with something around 50 votes.

Filled Net Chart

 Another new chart type in OpenOffice.org 3.2 is the Filled Net Chart. The Filled Net Chart is similar to the regular Net Chart with lines, but the area between the lines and the origin is filled in addition.

Rotate Data Labels

The options for data labels have been extended further. It is possible now to rotate them. This is useful especially for column charts to avoid overlap between the different labels.

Display of hidden cells

Did you ever had a spreadsheet where some columns or rows are hidden? You now can decide whether those values from hidden cells should be included into a plot within a chart or not. Just set the check box in the properties dialog of the data series.

Chart Context Menu

The context menu within charts and parts of the menu have been reworked to address some usability issues.
For example the common entry "Object Properties" has been replaced by something more descriptive. The offered command in the context menu now shows the name of the selected object. So it says for example 'Format Legend...', 'Format Title...' instead of only 'Object Properties...'.
The commands 'Insert Titles...', 'Insert Legend' and 'Insert/Delete Axes...' have been added to the context menu in case the chart area, the chart wall /floor or nothing is selected.
Access to the data series properties is now also offered in the context menu of a single data point. So you are not lost anymore if you have clicked a second time on the same series.
A new entry 'Insert R2' is offered in the context menu of an equation in case R2 was not added so far. Otherwise 'Delete R2' is offered. In the context menu of a trend line a new entry 'Insert R² and Trend Line Equation' is offered in case no equation was added so far.

The behavior of the Insert menu within charts now is selection dependent. In case a single data series is selected or an element belonging to a single data series the additional elements ( like error bars, data labels, trend lines or mean value lines) are only inserted for this single series. Otherwise the additional elements are added to all existing series.

Chart Element Selector

A list box containing the chart elements was added to the formatting tool bar within the chart. Selecting an item in the list does select the according element within the chart. Pressing the new button named 'Format Selection' next to the list opens the properties dialog for the selected element and allows to manipulate the formatting

tags:

Posted by Ingrid Halama on 06 Oct 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[12]

Tuesday, 29 Sep 2009
List of features of OpenOffice.org 3.2
Thorsten Ziehm

As you could read with the last developer milestone ( DEV300m60) we reached the date to branch the code line for the OOo 3.2 release. The strings for translation were extracted from this milestone and were integrated into Pootle. Also the last features were integrated. So all teams can start to do their work to get released a full localized and stable build of OOo 3.2 at the end of November '09.

Some weeks ago I announced here that I will finalize the feature-list for this release soon after the last build with the last features is ready for use. I am ready and you can check the wiki page, if you are interested in all feature announcements for OOo 3.2. The list includes the issues numbers, the feature announcement, the specification, the test case specification and the CWS name. As you can see this isn't the 'What's New Guide'. This list should help testers and translators to identify the new features and check if it works as estimated and/or as specified. So please take a look at :

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_3.2

To get a deeper look at some features I collected some blogs about the new stuff in OOo 3.2 :

As I could read in the meeting minutes of the Release Status Meeting from yesterday it was approved to release a Beta version in some days. It should be the build OOO320m2, where some show-stopper issues are fixed. If you are interested to give feedback you can use the mailing list releases@openoffice.org. If you want to promote a critical issue for the final release do not hesitate to communicate it also on that mailing list – as soon as possible –. If you are interested in currently known show-stoppers you can check the list of issue 99999.

tags:

Posted by Thorsten Ziehm on 29 Sep 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[2]

Friday, 30 Jan 2009
New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 3.1
Ingrid Halama

Interested in the new Chart features that will be available in OOo 3.1? Have a look:


Flexible positioning of axes and axis labels

The axis line and axis labels can now be positioned more flexible. You can find the settings on a new tab page 'Positioning' in the properties dialog of the axis.

As shown in the example you now can have the axes crossing in the middle separating the coordinate system into the four quadrants, as many people are used to from school.

This issue was the most voted feature request recently within the chart with something around 80 votes.

Positioning of Axes


Plotting of missing values

Did you ever had spreadsheet data where some values were missing?

You now can decide how those missing values should be plotted: leave a gap, assume zero instead or simply continue the line (issue 65549).

Plotting of missing values

Right to left Charts & Bi-directional writing

For OpenOffice.org 3.1 Charts have been prepared to work proper in a right to left environment. So now when your Office runs in RTL mode new Charts are created in right to left layout.

If you want to do some fine tuning you can change all the involved options of course especially you now can decide explicitly about the writing direction of the various text elements inside a chart (issue 14365). Do not forget to enable enhanced language support for complex text layout, to show the additional setttings.

Bi-directional writing







tags:

Posted by Ingrid Halama on 30 Jan 2009  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[9]

Monday, 17 Nov 2008
Some Calc features for 3.1 from RedFlag 2000
Niklas Nebel

It was a great pleasure to meet RedFlag 2000's Calc developers at OOoCon in Beijing. Of course the successful collaboration continues, resulting in some cool new features:

The formula features are in CWS "odff05", the other features in CWS "calc47", both scheduled to go into 3.1.

tags:

Posted by Niklas Nebel on 17 Nov 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[16]

Friday, 08 Aug 2008
Writer's new notes: looking back and ahead
Mathias Bauer

Last week we had a face to face meeting of the “notes2” team in Hamburg. It was the first time where all members came together at one place – until then the work was completely done remotely in different parts of Germany. We started with a Google Summer Of Code project in 2007 and continued as a team that works together for quite a year now.

We think that our little project was very successful, but nevertheless we wanted to look back a little and talk about our “lessons learned”. Here's a short list of things that aren't new at all but that we consider to be important especially for remote team work:

  • While meeting agendas are a good thing to have always, they are indispensable for IRC meetings.

  • It's good to become acquainted with each other early and know more about everybody's background and motivations. This makes it easier to understand and trust each other. So if possible a face to face meeting in the beginning is desirable.

  • We should have used telephone conferences much more often; we used e-mail too much.

  • It was good not to plan for a fixed release and instead define the minimum feature and quality requirements for a first possible release.

  • Not all decisions can be made by the whole team, and so it shouldn't be tried. Instead of this the team members need common guidelines they have agreed to.

  • Use cases are a very useful way to define such guidelines. Personal preferences should be hold back as much as possible.

  • Discussions shouldn't be exhaustive in all cases, but it is important to point to technical limits and errors as soon as possible.

But of course the most important insight was that we all had a lot of fun working together and that we think that we created a considerable value for the product. That's what working in a community is about – and I hope that we can have more like this in the future. So if you know something you want to implement in Writer, but need some help – just let me know. :-)

Of course we also talked about future plans for the “notes” feature and the new notes sidebar we created for it. We want to start implementing them in OOo 3.1 and continue in the following releases. Here's what we came up with. You might be pleased to read that work on the first items is already in progress. :-)

As Christoph Noack happens to be the Co-Lead of the OOo User Experience team, we took the chance to meet with the User Experience team members Christian Jansen and Frank Löhmann in Hamburg also and made it a “ what we always wanted to discuss about Writer usability improvements” meeting. We identified some topics that we see important and that we want to include in the upcoming project review that is planned to happen in early September (right after my vacation ;-) ):

  • An "Insert page" function that frees users from dealing with several single steps just to e.g. insert a landscape page

  • "Insert page number" also as a one-step function

  • Improve other functions dealing with page styles (allow to describe which pages shall be influenced by the change etc.)

  • "Delete hyperlink" function in the context menu of text formatted as a hyperlink

  • “Accept/Reject Changes” in the context menu of changed text

  • Add (a) Landscape style(s)

  • Use transparent selection in Writer as in the other OOo applications

  • Add a Change Tracking option "don't show deleted text in track changes" and use it by default

  • Status bar improvements

The mentioned changes in the Change Tracking feature look even better if you add the planned “show change tracking comments in sidebar” feature from our list of “ notes” enhancements!

Here's a picture of the exhausted ;-) team after a long meeting:




From the left to the right: Christoph Noack (UX), Éric Savary (QA), Max Odendahl (Dev), Mathias Bauer (Dev)


tags:

Posted by Mathias Bauer on 08 Aug 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[5]

Thursday, 10 Apr 2008
What's up in OOo 3.0 Beta
Thorsten Ziehm

What's up in OOo 3.0 Beta?

Some weeks ago we reached the due date for Feature Freeze and now we are close to Code Freeze for OOo 3.0 Beta. It is planned to have all new features for OOo 3.0 in the Beta. Perhaps some of them needs some more polishing, but in general all new features should work well.

The Beta is very important for feedback on many of the general changes in OOo. One of the main changes is the 3 layer model. Beside this restructuring of the OOo installation you will find other new features in the applications. I want to highlight only some of them here.

A list of more features and enhancements can be found here : http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_3.0
This list is more technical orientated and includes all information about specifications, test case specifications, CWS names etc. You can use this list for checking or testing the new features. I was asked sometime if these lists should be the release notes. No, the release notes are based on such lists, but they are more polished by the marketing team and are more end user orientated.

The current developer snapshot (DEV300m5) is released and the next milestones will be released in a more regular time frame. Feel free to use these version to give us feedback before or after the Beta is released. Every feedback is welcome on qa@dev.openoffice.org or show-stopper issues can be discussed also on releases@openoffice.org.

The release map for OOo 3.0 can be found here http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OOoRelease30. It is planned to release the Beta end of April.

tags:

Posted by Thorsten Ziehm on 10 Apr 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[9]

Friday, 29 Feb 2008
OpenOffice.org 3.0 and cooperation with the RedFlag 2000 framework team
Carsten Driesner

Today I want to give you a new overview on what features and enhancements we are working on in cooperation with the RedFlag 2000 framework team.

We enhanced the “Change Icon” dialog again to enable user to import images more easily. Currently users have to scale their images to the two supported icon sizes (16x16 for small icons and 26x26 pixel for large icons) before they can import these images. Although this solution enables users to use their own tool set to scale images it sets a high hurdle for others. Sometimes users just want to import images and use them as quick as possible. The new import images implementation now automatically scales images, while preserving their aspect ratio.

The next picture gives you an impression how the new scaling implementation works.



The specification for this enhancement can be found here. If you want to discuss this enhancement, please use the user experience team mailing list.

The configuration data structure of some OpenOffice.org features are another topic where the RedFlag2000 framework team helped us. Especially the configuration data for pick list, history and help bookmarks are now based on separate configuration files with a clear structure. This enables developers to create extensions which can use these data structures to support new features. For example it will be possible to create an enhanced version of the pick list with options to clear the list, to change the number of entries. The access code of other configuration data has been rewritten to remove overhead, have a clearer implementation and to process data changes at runtime.

The cooperation with the RedFlag 2000 framework team is on a very good level and OpenOffice.org will clearly benefit in the future with more features, enhancements and bug fixes.

tags:

Posted by Carsten Driesner on 29 Feb 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this

Wednesday, 30 Jan 2008
New Chart features in OpenOffice.org 2.4
Bjoern Milcke

In the upcoming OpenOffice.org 2.4 release there will be some nice new features in the Chart. And here they are in an overview. You can get more detail on the Wiki page about Chart Features for OOo 2.4. Thanks to Tony Galmiche there are nice screen shots of the new features together with the corresponding dialogs to access them.

If you want to try out the new stuff you can download a pre-release version. See this announcement for more information about the latest developer snapshot.


Equation and Value of R² for Trend Lines

Now, it is possible to display the equation for a trend line (regression curve) next to it. The formula object can be moved around, formatted with a number format, font and graphical formatting.

Alternatively, or in addition, the correlation coefficient R² can be displayed in the formula object.

This has already been announced on GullFOSS.

Wiki

 Trend Line Equations


Reverse Axes

Axes can be reversed, i.e. they point in a different than usual direction. In the example the y-axis points down from the top, instead of the usual orientation.

You can also reverse the category labels of a category axis.

Wiki

 Reverse Axes

Display Bars on Different Axes next to Each Other

You can attach some bars of bar or column chart to the first axis, and some to the second one. As a result the bars are grouped for each axis and displayed one group before the other.

Now, it is possible to arrange the bars side-by-side even when they are attached to different axes.

In the example, the blue series is attached to the left axis, while the orange and red series are attached to the right axis.

Wiki

 Bars of Different Axes Side By Side

 

Number Format for Data Labels

You can set individual number formats for the value displayed in a data label, as well as for the percentage. (Wiki)

Display both, the Value and the Percentage

It is now also possible to display the value and the percentage at the same time. You can choose a separator like a comma, semicolon, space or newline. (Wiki)

 Number Format and Combination of Data Labels
 

Flexible Placement of Data Labels

Data Labels can now be positioned at different anchor points of the data point objects.

In the example you can see that in a bar chart there are the absolute positions above, below and center. In addition, it is also possible to set a position depending on the sign of the value. So, outside means below for negative values, and above for positive ones.

Wiki

 Data Label Positions
 

Best Fit Data Label Positioning for Pie Charts

In addition to the before-mentioned positions for data labels, there is a best-fit algorithm for pie charts that tries to place labels without overlapping. Especially for smaller segments overlapping happens quite frequently, which can now be avoided.

Wiki

Best Fit for Pie Labels 

tags:

Posted by Bjoern Milcke on 30 Jan 2008  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[8]

Wednesday, 19 Dec 2007
last feature release on openoffice
Thorsten Ziehm

What's up?
Last feature release for OOo?
No!
It's the last feature release on code base 2.x!

The next release will be the last release with features and enhancement based on OOo 2.x code line. In the very next days the way will be opened for OOo 3.0 with opening the code line for integration (better to say, the code line for OOo 2.4 will be split to tag OOH – but this is the technically point of view).

What's new in this feature release? It's a mass. There are more features and enhancements integrated than in the past releases. Round about 50 Features and 150 enhancements are integrated. Some of them are more visible others are smaller changes which aren't important for everyone.

I want to highlight some areas

This is a very small collection. You found some feature announcements There are many many more enhancements in all applications of OOo. If you want to have a technical introduction of all these new features and enhancements, you can find them in the OOo-Wiki at http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Feature_Freeze_Testing_2.4. Feel free to use this list for testing and checking the new features. This list isn't the release note, because OOo 2.4 isn't ready until now. Code Freeze for OOo 2.4 is in mid of January '08 and the final bits are estimated for begin of March '08. So take the developer snapshots and identify the critical issues before the release.

tags:

Posted by Thorsten Ziehm on 19 Dec 2007  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[6]

Monday, 22 Oct 2007
OpenOffice.org 2.4 features implemented in cooperation with the RedFlag 2000 framework team
Carsten Driesner

Today I want to report about features that were implemented with the help of the RedFlag 2000 team. They will be part of OpenOffice.org 2.4. Liang Weike, a member of the Open Source Framework team from RedFlag 2000, helped me to implement a persistent user image list. It can be used to import your own icons into OpenOffice.org and use them to change toolbar icons. Importing icons was possible with previous OpenOffice.org versions, but now the imported icons are stored persistently within a user image list. Users are not forced to import the same icons again and again, but can create their own icon repository for later use. The “ Change Icon” (see the image below) dialog, the central dialog which supports changing and importing icons, has been reworked to also support the deletion of user icons.



I think this is a successful story how we, the community, can make OpenOffice.org better. Big thanks to Liang Weike who worked hard to implement the feature and fixed all other issues related to the “Change Icon” dialog.
You can find more information about the “Change Icon” dialog in the toolbar specification located at the OpenOffice.org specification project here.

The second enhancement is related to the “print file directly” toolbar button, which resides on the standard bar (next to the PDF export button). Some community members proposed to enhance the quick help text to show the name of the printer which is going to be used when clicking on the button. See the following mock up.



The community wrote the specification, thanks to Kirill Palagin who is a very active member, for the enhancement. Implementation was done by Liang Weike with the help of the framework team. The CWS will be built and provided to the community to make the necessary tests. You can find the specification for the enhancement here . Everybody who thinks that this little enhancement could help him/her is welcome to help us testing. Installation sets are located here . If you have questions or comments to the enhancement you can contact me using cd{at}openoffice.org.

tags:

Posted by Carsten Driesner on 22 Oct 2007  |  PermaLink |  Bookmark to Delicious To Delicious |  Digg this Digg this  |  Comments[40]

Main | Next page » GullFOSS