I think this would be great for everybody, because OpenOffice 3.0 has A LOT of improvements that will help people that uses this kind of program constantly to migrate from MS Office to OpenOffice.
Support for MS Office 2007 documents and PDF editing are two good examples.

I know that Intrepid will be released in 15 days, but I think there aren't going to be a lot of crazy bugs to be fixed in "only" 15 days by developers if this program gets upgraded in Ubuntu repositories!

Think about that and let's do this now, instead of waiting more six months (Ubuntu 9.04) just to get this great program by default... you know, if more good programs comes by default, more the newbies and veterans will like!

We do understand about the usablity of Writer,

I do suggest that the opening window of the writer should not have the page border set by default.

It looks different and causes the new user to panic.

Hence it should have less factors of "differences" but have its own identity.

Regards

OpenOffice Writer and Calc are becoming quite good, but it is difficult to switch from PowerPoint to OpenOffice Impress because the ppt import module lacks many functions (for example, date in header and footer).
Having a usable presentation program in Ubuntu would be a great improvement.

Opening OpenOffice program takes way too much for normal use. I have been using Microsoft Office, but it starts way faster then OpenOffice. Can't OpenOffice be made to quickly start-up. It probably starts up too many features that no-one needs.

Problem:
The default install of Abiword comes without .odt support (and misses many other formats). The user has to install the abiword-plugins package to work with .odt files.

If I had not explicitly sought for Abiword's .odt support I would have reverted to OpenOffice.

Spending extra time to make Abiword compatible is quite a high barrier for normal users (=users that expect an application to work out of the box).

Solution:
Abiword should support .odt by default. Either recommend to install the abiword-plugins package when installing Abiword or integrate the plugins into Abiword (means they cannot be removed).

At least integrate .odt support somehow BY DEFAULT.

Replace the awfull NWF by GTK. (like NeoOffice with Cocoa) NWF is often unstable and inconsitent. A clean GTK version will also run on multiple plattforms like OSX or Win32! In addition it might be more portable for mobile devices like OpenMoko based ones.

Tracker is a useful tool for fast finding file contents even in heaps of tens of thousands of files in hundreds of subdirectories. Last year the program seemed to have been able to index ODF files (see http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-459959.html) but today it does not.

Without ODF support Tracker lacks a big part of its usefulness. Neither my text documents nor my spreadsheets are indexed at the moment. If I understand the forum posting correctly, there once was a packet named O3read which did the translation into plain text for Tracker, but this package is not included in the repositories any longer.

How can the ODF support become implemented into Tracker again?

I use evolution, however when i need to look at a calendar i have to use sunbird. This is because evolution is basically stagnent, and does not support modifying web calendars hosted outside of the local server. i know there are a few work arounds for getting it to work, but i would really love to have a simple calendar program built into gnome/ubuntu(default) which links between the desktop clock (evolution calendar display) and a web based calendar, which supports bi-direction changes and updates.

I don't like having to open sunbird each time i need to change an alarm.

Ubufox is very clever at wrapping the Firefox extensions and add-ons feature with the Ubuntu package manager.

A similar thing should be done with Open Office extensions - so that installing an extension with the Open Office package manager integrates well with Ubuntu.

One thing that surprised me once I was testing the alpha 2 of Ubuntu 9.04, was that it included OpenOffice.org 2.4 - What?!?! It's an alpha! it should be bleeding edge and include the latest software! (correction: yeah, alpha is not about bleeding edge software, it's about bleeding edge OS)
Even sister (daughter?) distros like Super Ubuntu and so already include it!

I really hope we get OO.org 3 in the final version!