OpenOffice 2.2 Released – Fixes Three Highly Critical Vulnerabilities

March 28th, 2007

3 Comments Written by Ryan

OpenOffice 2.2 was just released after about a month’s worth of delays. The official announcement has yet to be made on the homepage, but the downloads for OpenOffice 2.2 are currently available on their FTP.

This version actually fixes three highly critical vulnerabilities that were recently found. One of them only applies to a Linux/Solaris system, but the other two apply to all distributions:

WordPerfect Import Vulnerability – If a user opens an untrusted WordPerfect file his or her system may be compromised.
StarCalc Vulnerability – If a user opens an untrusted StarCalc document it can potentially run arbitrary code supplied in the file.
URL Handling Security Vulnerability (Linux/Solaris) – If a user running OpenOffice.org from a shell terminal in Linux or Solaris opens an untrusted URL, malicious code could be arbitrarily executed on the user’s computer.

Besides for the vulnerabilities being fixed, there are also some new things that are worth mentioning:

Improved text display throughout the entire office suite.
Enhanced PDF export functionality that supports user-definable form fields and bookmark creation.
Cosmetic changes in Vista (example: New File dialogue box).
Apple Mac Intel has several stability improvements.
OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet has received additional enhancements to its support for Microsoft file formats, including improved support for Pivot Tables and some specialized trigonometric functions.
OpenOffice Base, the database component, has improved SQL editing functionality as well as a new “Queries within Queries” feature.
OpenOffice Impress, the presentations component, offers improvements in the handling of hidden slides which has been made more intuitive.

Here is the What’s New page for the last release candidate of OpenOffice 2.2, which also happens to be what got released as the final product. There’s quite a bit of information on there though, and most of you probably won’t want to sift through it.

I briefly flipped through the OpenOffice forum to see what user’s first impressions were of the new release. One of the last comments on the forum says:

No new features that I have noticed with my daily use of Writer and Calc. I have reverted back to the 2.0.4 Novell Edition and actually ‘gained’ many new features.
…
I used to look forward to new releases of OOo with more enthusiasm. But lately there hasn’t been a whole lot to look forward to. In all honesty, the Novell Edition has been a pleasant surprise on Windows for me.

I actually feel the same way as that user. New versions of OpenOffice are being released every few months, but where are those awesome features that will help set it apart? I did find the page for the Novell version of OpenOffice that the person mentioned in the forum, and here are the special features that it is supposed to have:

Enhancements to Writer
Enhanced Support for Microsoft Office File Formats
E-Mail as Microsoft Office Document
Excel VBA Macro Interoperability
Improved Data Pilot Support
Enhanced Fonts
ODMA Integration
Multimedia Support in Presentations

Novell OpenOffice I haven’t tried the Novell edition myself because the regular version of OpenOffice has always done just fine for me. However, I do a lot of work with Excel VBA Macros and for that reason I think I will give it a shot. It will take a little while for me to download the whopping 440MB ISO image though.

The next release of OpenOffice is planned for June 5. They are typically on a 3–month schedule, but they have decided to change things up a bit by making every other release dedicated purely for bug fixes. That would mean the June 5 release will not have anything new included and will only be bug fixes. Then after that makes it out the door their focus will be on version OpenOffice 2.3 which is expected around September 4.

OpenOffice Homepage
Download OpenOffice 2.2 directly from an FTP server
Direct link to English OpenOffice 2.2 for Windows

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Tags: Freeware, Newly Released, Software, Apple, Downloads, Microsoft, OpenOffice, Screenshots

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March 28th, 2007 at 5:34 pm bloodsugarwilksm

Hey Ryan, I’m running Ubuntu Edgy now on my primary desktop (which I love Ubuntu now by the way) and I’m just wondering when you think they’ll have this new OpenOffice 2.2 in the repositories for installation on Ubuntu?

I’ve broken down and whenever possible I always try to wait to download and install programs and features through Ubuntu’s automatic methods like the Synaptic Package manager and apt-get etc. Installing things by downloading, especially with OOo is difficult, so just wondering how long it usually takes for Linux to update new software versions.

Thanks!
March 28th, 2007 at 7:09 pm bp1189

So, there aren’t any performance improvements in this release? If there was an improvement on start-up time then I would probably download the new version, but this release isn’t worth the download for me.
March 28th, 2007 at 11:24 pm Ryan (Author)

bloodsugarwilksm wrote:

Hey Ryan, I’m running Ubuntu Edgy now on my primary desktop (which I love Ubuntu now by the way) and I’m just wondering when you think they’ll have this new OpenOffice 2.2 in the repositories for installation on Ubuntu?

That’s a really good question. I’m not sure how quick they are to update repositories, but Ubuntu 7.04 will actually come with both Firefox 2 and OpenOffice 2.2 and that is scheduled for release in about 3 weeks. I’ll keep an eye out for ya though.

bp1189 wrote:

So, there aren’t any performance improvements in this release? If there was an improvement on start-up time then I would probably download the new version, but this release isn’t worth the download for me.

Actually, it does seem to startup faster. I might be imagining things though.