Review: OpenOffice 3.0

• Article 61 of 89
• MacFormat, December 2008

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Whenever most people think of work software, they usually think of Microsoft’s outstanding suite of programs collectively called Office: Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or Entourage and the numerous other bits and add-ons that come with them, depending on which exact version of Office you’re using. Because there are plenty of versions of Office and they all cost money, ranging from roughly £100 to over £300, which isn’t exactly cheap.

The clunkily named OpenOffice.org, though, is an extremely powerful alternative that seeks to liberate the world from MS Office in the same way that Linux has tried to rescue Windows users from their Microsoft shackles. It includes a word processor (Writer), spreadsheet application (Calc), and presentation software (Impress) as well as a database manager (Base) and graphics creation package (Draw). And it’s all free: you can download it at no charge.

The trouble with free, particularly when it does so many things, is that it can be a bit rough-and-ready compared to the more expensive commercial alternatives, even when they have big backers like Sun and Novell behind them.

For a long time, OpenOffice.org has had that rough-and-ready problem, particularly on the Mac. In its earlier days, you had to compile it from source and patch it, making it inappropriate for virtually everyone but the most zealous and committed to getting things for free. Version two, still the latest available for Macs with PowerPC chips, requires you to have the X11 windowing system installed and that you inhabit X11’s Unixy, relatively un-Mac-like world.

Now version three – for Intel-equipped Macs only and not yet fully translated into British English from US English – takes OS X integration one step further. For the first time, OpenOffice.org is a proper program that installs and runs like any other Mac app: download the disk image, mount it, drag the app to your Applications folder, double-click it and you’re there, using the familiar standard menus and keyboard shortcuts. It also ties into OS’s accessibility frameworks, making it easier for people with disabilities to use.

The integration has come about through a migration by OpenOffice.org to Java, so the OS X look and feel comes from Apple’s own Java implementation. This makes OpenOffice’s OS X capabilities very similar but not identical to those of a native app: close enough for most things, but still not quite right for the observant.

All the same, to anyone who’s ever used MS Office, OpenOffice.org is a very familiar experience. Most of the menu options are the same; most of the same functions are there; there’s a new ‘Start Center’ just like Office’s Project Gallery; even the wizards look similar and version 3.0 includes new icons that give toolbars even more an Office feel, although they’re nowhere near as polished. Indeed, OpenOffice.org tries to be as MS-compatible and familiar as possible, although where it does differ from Office, invariably it picks a far less intuitive, more complicated, usually more Unix-like way of doing things. The two packages are not identical, but the learning curve for those making the switch isn’t as steep as with some applications.

Open standards
But OpenOffice.org is also proud of, well, being open. As well as being object-oriented, allowing you to embed presentations in word processing documents or vice versa, for example, by default OpenOffice.org saves files in the international Open Document Format (ODF), which is used by numerous applications and governments; version 3.0 includes support for the forthcoming 1.2 iteration of ODF. It also can import and save files in a variety of formats, including the familiar Microsoft Office.doc, .xls and .ppt files as well as, in version 3.0, the new Office 2007/08 .docx, .xlsx and .pptx formats.

These filters aren’t perfect, it must be pointed out. Although considerable time and effort has been put into making Visual Basic macros work identically in OpenOffice.org as they do in Office, there’s not 100% compatibility yet; the .docx importers do a fairly good job of importing, but there are occasional font and layout problems.

More importantly, since Office’s and OpenOffice’s feature sets aren’t identical, there are problems when OpenOffice.org tries to open a file that has Office-only functions. In particular, while OpenOffice.org does have some collaboration functions – Calc now has sharing features that enable others to work on a workbook while you’re working on it and Writers now supports column notes, rather than the easily missable in-text rectangle notes – none of the OpenOffice.org programs support the commenting and change-tracking of Office. So when you open an Office 2008 file that contains changes in OpenOffice, the comments, changes and original work all end up visible in the document. However, for more basic, day-to-day work, the compatibility is impressive and usually 100%.

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