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Review: OpenOffice.org 3.0 |
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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.
Taken from here
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