Almost a month after the release of OpenOffice 3.0, here at ULNG towers we've been playing around with the latest release of Microsoft Office's closest competition and it's time for a short ULNG review.
What's OpenOffice again?
Just in case you have had your head buried in the sand since 1999, Sun Microsystems released a free version of their StarOffice product to the open source community and called it OpenOffice. It has compatability with Microsoft's DOC, XLS and PPT formats and provides a full database system similar to Access called Base. The names of the compontents that make up OpenOffice are: Writer (the word processor), Calc (the spreadsheet), Impress (the presentation software), Draw (for vector graphics drawing), Math (mathematical equation editor) and Base (powerful database application). It has been famed for the quality of the product and it's ability to do certain things where Microsoft Office does not do natively, for example, exporting of PDF documents and ability to easily write mathematical graphics and formulas. OpenOffice is available to Apple OSX, Linux and Windows users.
What's new?
OpenOffice 3.0 brings a whole bunch of new features to the table. Here are the tastiest of the bunch:
- Import filters for new Microsoft Office 2007 .docx, .xlsx and .pptx formats.
- Improved support for older Microsoft Office document formats.
- Shiny new native application for Apple OSX, rather than the old X11 overlay.
- Collaboration feature to share spreadsheets.
- Support for new Open Document Format 1.2
- Ability to edit PDFs via a freely downloadable extension.
- Margin annotation feature available in Write.
- Solver for multivariable solutions in calc.
- Better embedding support within Impress.
- Improved picture cropping abilities in Impress.
How's it perform?
Pretty good, actually. Most Linux distros out there are still shipping OpenOffice 2.4 at the moment, so I would wait off until your distro offers an upgrade path to 3.0, rather than simply downloading the Sun version as you may find that it doesn't integrate as well with your desktop as your distribution vendor's version does. That aside, we installed the windows version on an 1.6GHZ 1GB portable XP laptop to try out the Windows version as well. After it feeling very strange to boot up a Windows PC for so long, using OpenOffice was the same experience under Linux as it was on XP, so thumbs up there.
I wouldn't say that the performance of OpenOffice 3 was any faster than 2.x releases, nor would I say that the interface had changed much, but none of those factors are negative. People don't like changing interfaces as was proved by the release of Office 2007, and as long as the speed doesn't get worse, punters should be happy.
As for the newer features, the promise of Office 2007 format support was too interesting to pass up on closer investigation. Regrettably, it's still in it's fairly early stages and you can see that anything more than a simple document can get screwy with the formatting pretty quickly, but I'm not surprised here. It's not all bad news though, because they really have improved support for the older MS Office formats. Office 2003 .doc files that used to break in OpenOffice 2.x seemed largely consistant with their display in their Microsoft counterpart. As the 97-2003 Office format is still by far the most popular office format, this will please advocates of OpenOffice no end.
I checked out the PDF editing feature as well, however that's still quite immature. It's not a big deal to me, but it's interesting to see how that will develop in the future. At the moment, only editing one line at a time is possible, and make sure you have a backup of the PDF before hand, because it can get confused and hose your file for editing elsewhere pretty badly, you have been warned! This is likely why this feature is not advertised as a default feature of 3.0 yet.
So, in summary, the features are promising and the main benefit to most will be a far more consistant Office 97-2003 office format support. I look forward to see the quirks in the newer features get maturity in a 3.1 or 3.2 release.
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