OpenOffice.org Releases 3.0 Beta, Looking Good So Far

Popular office suite OpenOffice.org has just released it’s first 3.0 public beta, and Ars Technica takes a quick look. The new version revamps the application as a whole, updating the look and feel, and essentially making it more of a competitor to Microsoft’s Office 2007. That’s helped by the fact that Office 2007 documents (.xlsx, .docx, etc) are now supported, although with somewhat poor results so far.

I have no doubts that Office 2007 document support will encourage more people to make the shift to a free office alternative. The fact that 2.4 does not is one of the few reasons I need to reboot my main machine into Windows, so having great support there would be hugely welcome, for many. The initial results are not THAT impressive, as fonts show up different sizes, alignments are a little off and other minor issues arise, but at least it’s on the right track. If it gets better from here on out, that’s all we can ask for.

So far the beta looks great, but bear in mind that it’s a beta for a reason. Bugs are evident, such as crashes, so it shouldn’t be used for real production work. Not much sucks worse than losing work in a document randomly for no reason. For those willing to take the plunge, download the beta here.

Enhancements have been made across the board to OpenOffice.org’s various components. A new Solver component makes calculating dependent spreadsheet cells much easier (a bonus for Mac users as Excel 2008 reportedly lost its solving component), and vastly improved cropping features in the Draw and Impress apps are indeed more intuitive. When working in Writer, multiple pages can be displayed at once for a bird’s eye view of a document, and notes (or comments) on a document are now displayed in a sidebar, paralleling the same UI found in many other text editors.

Source: Ars Technica