October 13th, 2008
There is a reason that the OpenOffice.org 3.0 servers are struggling to keep up with demand. OO.org 3.0 really is a serious upgrade over version 2.4 and makes NeoOffice irrelevant for Mac OS X users (previously, OpenOffice only worked within X11; While NeoOffice did a great job porting OO.org to native OS X, OO.org 3.0 works out of the box in OS X as a native Aqua application).
Last week I asked if OpenOffice was good enough. The general consensus? OO.org is good enough to start a flame war, but we’re not really sure if it’s good enough to be a serious competitor to MS Office.
Now that OO.org 3.0 is out, I’m having a much tougher time seeing both sides of the issue here (I actually like Office 2007/2008, by the way; I think they’re slick, well-polished, and highly functional). I had never liked the OpenOffice equation editor; this version brings a very nice graphical and text-based hybrid editor to us math teachers. Mail merge was clunky in OO.org; this version brings a mail merge wizard and improved label templates. Outline numbering tended to be a bit kludgy for notetaking in OO; this version improves the stability and interface of outlining.
Annotations are now incredibly easy to add (Insert, Note) and Office 2007/2008 formats are supported across the board. While Microsoft has dumped VBA support in Office 2008, OO.org users can run Visual Basic scripting, as well as Python and Javascript.
I’m not actually bashing MS Office here. It’s a great suite and they still have something that OpenOffice lacks: Publisher. However, Publisher was lacking on the Mac platform anyway and *nix users haven’t had access to MS Office (including Publisher) without some serious Wine work. Speaking of Access, OpenOffice continues to bring a solid database offering to all platforms. Is it as powerful as Access? I don’t think so (let’s face it - Access 2007 rocks). However, Mac, *nix, and Windows users can all interchange databases and use OO.org Base as a front end to a variety of data sources (including MySQL).
OpenOffice.org is not a clone of Office 2007 (good call, Sun). It’s a full-featured suite that gives us everything we need from MS Office and the world of productivity software while keeping the bottom line quite a bit more reasonable (you don’t get any more reasonable than free).
Yes, OO.org has been good enough for a long time; the latest release should leave little doubt for any users who had been on the fence.
OpenOffice 3.0 comes with new features and performance enhancements.
Sun Microsystems released version 3.0 of its free and open source (FOSS) office suite Openoffice.org on Monday. It has been reported that the new version comes with a number of performance enhancements and new features. Openoffice.org 3.0 now claims to work out of the box in  Mac OS X as a native  Aqua application.

News sources report the official download servers of OpenOffice.org crashed soon after the release due to heavy downloads. Downloads are however available from a number of mirror sites.



Openoffice.org 3.0 suite includes  spreadsheet,  word processor,  equation editor,  presentation tool,  relational database and  vector drawing software. Full interoperability is available for  Microsoft Office 98/XP formats, but offers read only support for  OOXML file formats. This version supports the new  ODF 1.2 document format. The software is available for many platforms including  Linux,  Microsoft Windows and Mac, as well as in multiple languages.

Users report OpenOffice.org 3.0 has introduced a new graphical and text-based hybrid equation editor, a  mail merge wizard, improved label templates and better interface for outlining. Solver, a spreadsheet add-on for  combinatorial optimization problems is included in this version.

Other enhancements highlighted by enthusiasts include collaborative options that allow multiple users to edit documents at the same time and improved drawing and charting tools. OpenOffice.org 3.0 can now display multiple pages during editing and workbooks up to 1024 columns in each spreadsheet.

The download size of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is 163 MB for Mac and requires OS X Tiger or later and an Intel Mac. The installer for Windows is about 145 MB in size. 

"As government after government, enterprise after enterprise adopt the Open Document Format, they frequently adopt OpenOffice.org and love it. With 3.0, the application is more interoperable with MS Office, more capable, more extensible. It frees the desktop from vendor lock-in," claimed Louis Suárez-Potts, community manager of OpenOffice.org.