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?
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%.
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.