Review: OpenOffice 3.0
- Article 61 of 89
- MacFormat, December 2008
It’s powerful, it’s free, but is it as good as Microsoft’s Office?
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Indeed, Visual Basic macros may have stopped working in Office 2008, thanks to Microsoft’s decision not to port Visual Basic over to Intel on the Mac, but OpenOffice.org carries most macros forward pretty much seamlessly and there are some big corporate players like Novell working on improving compatibility even further – shame Microsoft can’t do the same for its own software.
There are other areas where OpenOffice.org exceeds MS Office. Excel may have lost its ‘solver’ in Office 2008, but OpenOffice.org now has a solver component that can calculate optimisation problems where the best value of a particular spreadsheet cell has to be calculated based on constraints provided in other cells. OpenOffice.org also, of course, includes both a graphics package and database package, neither of which are available in Office for Mac and do a pretty good job, even if Base uses a HSQL engine rather than something more standard.
New features
Like most open source projects, OpenOffice.org updates frequently and often, so version 3.0 isn’t as laden with new features as a commercial 3.0 would be. The list of new features is reasonable though, particularly if you add in some of the functions available from previous .x upgrades since 2.0, such as support for PDF/A and a new charting component. In Calc, it’s now possible to draw error bars based on error ranges provided in spreadsheet cells. You can also display regression equations as well as correlation coefficients and use up to 1,024 columns per spreadsheet. Impress supports native table editing, rather than simply embedded Calc objects, and the crop function in Impress and Draw now works like other programs’. Lastly, there’s improved XHTML export and a slider in Writer that allows you to display multiple pages on-screen.
For anyone who can’t afford MS Office or doesn’t want their Mac contaminated with anything Microsoftian, OpenOffice.org is fantastic. It’s free, does the majority of things that MS Office can do as well as a multitude of things it can’t, and is reasonably compatible with ‘the taint’ as well. It’s still a little raw and some of its functions are unintuitive or hard to find, but for anyone needing a proper office package, OpenOffice.org is more than up to the job.
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