PCs and Macs will now be able to run OpenOffice 3.0 (beta) on their machines, as Sun Microsystems yesterday released the public beta of the same, compatible with the two operating systems. With this new version, developers are aiming to offer users significant improvements in the much-loved open-source office application suite.
Evident new features of OpenOffice 3.0 are "Start Center", new icons, and a new zoom control in the status bar. Other changes include a new solver component, support for spreadsheet collaboration through workbook sharing, and an increase to 1024 columns per sheet.
The Writer has an improved notes feature along with displays of multiple pages while editing. There are several Chart enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress.
With this new version, OpenOffice.org will behave like any other Aqua application, allowing it to run on the Mac OS X without the need for installing X11.
OpenOffice.org now also supports VBA and the Solver feature, which Microsoft has chosen to miss in its office application suite. In addition, OpenOffice.org integrates well with Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 developers claim that people are accepting the open-source application for Mac OS X because it has good stability and performance. Developers also say that OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). This is in addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.).
I have been using Open Office (1.0 and later 2.2) for more than 4 years now and highly recommend it as an option to MS Office.
by Gurdas
from vadodara
on 09/05/08 12:59 PM
I have personally used OpenOffice 2.0 and found it very stable and useful.
I recommend to it people who cannot afford Microsoft Office suite and don't want use a pirated copy of the same.
by Ravi
from Pune
on 08/05/08 04:07 PM
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