OpenOffice 3 ready to battle
Microsoft’s Office suite may dominate the desktop software market but OpenOffice is readying to launch its latest assault in the next few months, and based on beta versions it promises to be a real contender in this market.
OpenOffice has a number of things in its favour. For a start it is free and open source software. Which positions it nicely against a pricey Microsoft Office. OpenOffice also uses the ISO-approved Open Document Format (ODF) file format which gives it a degree of additional credibility in the market. Microsoft’s competing OOXML format, on the other hand, is still mired down in ISO controversy and is still some way off from being a usable international standard.
And, with version 3.0, OpenOffice developers have added an impressive range of new features that are likely to garner a lot more interest from home and business users.
One of the highlights of OpenOffice 3.0 is that it runs natively on Mac OSX for the first time. Although the Mac market is still relatively small it is growing in popularity. With an alternative to Microsoft Office available for Mac OSX there could be many users that will begin switching across.
And for those that still need to work with other Microsoft Office users, OpenOffice 3.0 includes a full array of Office 2007 format filter, so users can open, edit and save documents in .doc, .xls, .ppt formats among others. OpenOffice 3.0 also work with Office For Mac formats.
One of the cornerstones of an office suite is its spreadsheet and OpenOffice 3.0 has number fo new features on this front including worksheet sharing so users can collaborate. The spreadsheet can now also handle up to 1024 columns of data as opposed to the earlier 256 columns, which was one of the most requested changes from users.
The OpenOffice 3.0 interface has also had an overhaul and sports a cleaner look, new icons and zooming features that make it possible to display multiple pages side by side.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 has adopted a new extension approach to providing additional features that are not as widely demanded as others. The OpenOffice.org Extension Repository is home to many additional features that can be used to enhance OOo 3.0. Some of these include a mozilla calendar and email extension, and an import PDF extension.
The Sun-backed PDF import extension promises to be a big feature of OpenOffice 3.0. Wordperfect recently announced its supported full PDF importing. The PDF import extension works well at the moment although it is still only in beta form.
The OpenOffice 3.0 beta 2 was released this week. The final version of the office suite is scheduled to be released in September.
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