Review: OpenOffice.org 3.0

Version 3.0 of OpenOffice.org's free office productivity suite was launched

in mid-October and, while not a ground-breaking release, it builds on an already

mature software package to provide even tougher competition for Microsoft's

Office suite in the office productivity suite market.

OpenOffice

3.0 offers native Mac OS X support without users having to use the X11

Window System implementation for Mac systems, which means that it behaves like

any other application running under Apple's Aqua GUI. There are also OpenOffice

versions for Linux distributions and Solaris.

The six applications contained in OpenOffice are the Writer word processor,

the Calc spreadsheet, the Impress presentation program, the Base database

package, the Draw vector graphics application and the Math formulae editing

tool.As well as support for the newest version of the Open Document Format, 1.2,

there is also some integration with Microsoft Office 2007 through new import

filters.Spreadsheet functionality has been improved with the ability to collaborate

on spreadsheets through workbook sharing. Calc Users can now use 1,024 columns

per sheet in the spreadsheet application, a big improvement over 256 in earlier

versions. Enhanced XML support and updated XSLT-based filters have also been

added.We downloaded the

131MB

OpenOffice.org executable and installed it on a variety of systems running

Windows XP Professional and Vista Ultimate, giving a system disk footprint of

323MB.

Users migrating from Microsoft Office 2003 systems will be pleased that

OpenOffice still keeps with the Office 2003 layout, rather than the updated

Office 2007 interface.The first screen users see is the Start Center, from which users can create

or edit text files, presentations, databases, spreadsheets, drawings or

mathematical formulae.Enabling a spreadsheet document for collaboration involves a ticking a box on

the tools options, and checking that the right name is down in the 'user data'

fields in the 'Tools/Options' option.It was easy to collaborate on the spreadsheet, providing that any remote

network connections and network shares were enabled and active. However, not

everything in the shared spreadsheets can be changed.OpenOffice warns that changing attributes like fonts, colours and number

formats won't be allowed, and collaborating users will not be able to edit

charts or drawn objects that exist within the shared document.However, the major problem was that, although we could write new data into a

shared spreadsheet, the changes weren't reflected in users' spreadsheets who

were sharing the document in real time. Only when any user reloaded or refreshed

the document did the changes take effect.We did find it easier to crop features in the Draw and Impress components of

Draw and Impress, but other graphics packages, like CorelDraw for instance, have

a much more natural way of cropping images and vector graphics.The addition of new functionality to insert tables into presentations

natively is a long overdue feature.While compatibility with Office 2003 application formats is very good,

OpenOffice.org 3.0's compatibility with Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint

formats isn't fantastic, especially for complex documents.Whether this is a major problem depends to what extent Office 2007 is used in

your company and whether the extra features in Office 2007 are used fully.We looked at PowerPoint presentations saved in Office 2007 format and opened

with OpenOffice.org's Impress presentation application. Comparing Office 2007

PowerPoint presentations with the same file opened with Impress threw up a fair

amount of problems with Impress' depiction of the PowerPoint file.Exporting to Office 2003 format from Office 2007 and then opening the

presentations with Impress cured these problems.With Office 2007 Excel spreadsheets opened with OpenOffice.org's Calc

application, we found fewer problems, maybe due to our use of less advanced

features, but there were deviations which could still preclude firms deciding on

a full migration from Microsoft Office 2007 to OpenOffice.org 3.0.Two other welcome additions in OpenOffice.org 3.0 are the ability to view

multiple pages side by side in the Writer application, and being able to add

regression bars to graphs in Calc.

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