OpenOffice.org 3.0: What to Expect?

Published on July 6, 2008 in Apps by Rami Taibah

Around 3 month ago OpenOffice.org released its 2.4 boasting quite an impressive arsenal of advancements. However if you thought 2.4 was major release, then you have seen nothing! Come September, OpenOffice.org will release it’s 3.0 version! That must be quite a big jump! The upcoming 3.0 version is widely regarded as an important milestone in the project’s development. Here are some of the advancements I am most excited about:



Writer

With version 3.0 Writer comes with a plethora of interesting advancements. You will have the option of different views, either single page, multiple pages side by side, and book view. A zoom slider has been added on the bottom right corner of the screen, which is admitingly something we saw in Office 2007 first, but definitely a welcomed feature.


Slick new notes feature that lets you add colored notes and comments on the margins instead of the old inefficient notes method, which I never used!


Changing language spell check is now easily available in the menu, very handy for multi-language documents. Someone like me needs such flexibility with English/Arabic documents I alway have.

Mac OS X Support

Remember once a friend was complaining about Arabic integration in MS Office on his Mac (or lack of it), so I suggested OpenOffice.org. Little did I know that there were other packages that we needed to install (X11 and whatnot). We had to jump through a lot of hoops to get it working. With OpenOffice.org 3.0 this is not an issue anymore, OpenOffice will natively support Mac OSX!



Microsoft Office 2007 Import Filters

I used so simply loath recieving a document ending with x (docx, pptx, xlsx)! What a retarded extention, it sends shivers down your spine. Well not anymore, with OpenOffice 3.0 you can directly import them and start editing away! Although, up to now the importation is not perfect, but we know who to blame over there (read thousands among thousands of ambigous documentation)

New Theme in Calc

Now we get a much more polished glass theme and translucency! Here is a comparison between the old and new:

Presenter Different Screens

This always seemed logical to me, am not sure if is available in Office or not, but it’s great to see in OpenOffice 3.0. Basically in presenter you get to see a different screen than what’s on the projector. You get preview of the next slide, elapsed time, notes and comments.



Native Tables in Impress

Tables has been OpenOffices’s Achilles heal when compared to Microsoft Powerpoint. One had to resort to clumsy drawing of the tables! Not anymore!

Import PDF

Although still not implemented in the beta version I installed, this feature is expected to be up and running in the final release come September.


Conclusion

OpenOffice 3.0 is a major milestone for the project, there are tons of other new features. I also noticed a great improvement in speed, which has always a bane in previous OpenOffice.org versions.

If you can’t wait until September, why don’t you download the beta version and try it out, so far it has been very much stable for me. You can download OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta here.

If you are installing it on Ubuntu (or any Deb distro for that matter) you just need to do the following:

1-Extract the archive

tar xzf ~/Desktop/OOo_3.0.0beta_20080429_LinuxIntel_install_en-US_deb.tar.gz -C ~/Desktop/

2-Install the packages in the DEBS subdirectory

sudo dpkg -i ~/Desktop/BEA300_m2_native_packed-2_en-US.9301/DEBS/*.deb

3-It won’t install on your regular menu, instead you have to manually launch or create your own shortcuts

/opt/openoffice.org3/program/soffice

Thanks to the oooninja blog and the official OpenOffice.org websites for providing some of the pictures

About Rami Taibah

Rami Taibah the founder of The Linuxologist and a self proclaimed geek and Linux aficionado. This fall, he will be pursuing an MIMS degree at UC Berkeley, California. You can follow him on Twitter @rtaibah.

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  • paul
    never use them so why bother just use writer
  • paul
    never use them so why bother just use writer
  • Jack Brown
    I have to agree with previous comments OO is just not as good a Office 2007.
    Not far off but not quite there. The UI needs to be improved the office 97 style should be long gone. I don't mean copying the office ribbon I mean going one step better. People are quite fickle if OO get the same or greater feature set that Office and if the UI is prettier then people will move in their masses. Its a shame as I believe this is the only block preventing Linux becoming the OS of choice.
  • Jack Brown
    I have to agree with previous comments OO is just not as good a Office 2007.
    Not far off but not quite there. The UI needs to be improved the office 97 style should be long gone. I don't mean copying the office ribbon I mean going one step better. People are quite fickle if OO get the same or greater feature set that Office and if the UI is prettier then people will move in their masses. Its a shame as I believe this is the only block preventing Linux becoming the OS of choice.
  • I love the open file.....W open office.........
  • I love the open file.....W open office.........
  • Anonymous
    Version 3.0 ? Schmersion 3.0 !
    OO Impress since its very beginning has NOT been able to play a SINGLE piece of background music over the transitions of several slides. (eg. 3 minutes of music played as background to 20 slides. Each slide must have its own piece of music.)
    THIS ONE SINGLE FEATURE is the major difference why MS Office PowerPoint is a superior product.
  • Anonymous
    Version 3.0 ? Schmersion 3.0 !
    OO Impress since its very beginning has NOT been able to play a SINGLE piece of background music over the transitions of several slides. (eg. 3 minutes of music played as background to 20 slides. Each slide must have its own piece of music.)
    THIS ONE SINGLE FEATURE is the major difference why MS Office PowerPoint is a superior product.
  • Charles
    I have heard others make similar comments, but I'm curious... what specifically is Calc lacking that Excel has? Admittedly I'm not a heavy Calc user, I just do simply things with Spreadsheets, but from what I've read, there's not much that Excel can do that Calc can't - except use VB Macros...
  • Charles
    I have heard others make similar comments, but I'm curious... what specifically is Calc lacking that Excel has? Admittedly I'm not a heavy Calc user, I just do simply things with Spreadsheets, but from what I've read, there's not much that Excel can do that Calc can't - except use VB Macros...
  • Mike (Not the same one)
    I wrote my masters thesis with OpenOffice 1.x because Word kept crashing/corrupting etc. However, Excel is still a better spreadsheet and until OO spreadsheet is as good as Excel I'll still have to use Excel, don't really care about new themes/colours.
  • Mike (Not the same one)
    I wrote my masters thesis with OpenOffice 1.x because Word kept crashing/corrupting etc. However, Excel is still a better spreadsheet and until OO spreadsheet is as good as Excel I'll still have to use Excel, don't really care about new themes/colours.
  • KnowItAll
    Re just click and drag tables - you can select the table and drag it to a new location easy enough but it could be better. It works in 2.4.1 and earlier.

    Three ways to do that: 1) select the table by hovering just outside the top-left corner of the table (a 45 degree arrow will appear) and click, then inside the table click and drag to a new location. Unfortunately this leaves an empty table in the original location that must be deleted. I don't know why we can't just select and press Delete to do this. 2) starting from end of last paragraph before the table, click-drag through the table to select and then move it as in (1). 3) copy the table by using method (1) or (2) but hold the ctrl key down while you click-drag the table after selection to the new location.

    Re copy tables from spreadsheets - forget "how Word does it" - what is wrong with how OOo does it? Select and copy in Calc then paste into Writer. You get an embedded Calc table with whatever formatting is in the original, or other formats if you use "Paste Special". And back again works fine too.
  • KnowItAll
    Re just click and drag tables - you can select the table and drag it to a new location easy enough but it could be better. It works in 2.4.1 and earlier.

    Three ways to do that: 1) select the table by hovering just outside the top-left corner of the table (a 45 degree arrow will appear) and click, then inside the table click and drag to a new location. Unfortunately this leaves an empty table in the original location that must be deleted. I don't know why we can't just select and press Delete to do this. 2) starting from end of last paragraph before the table, click-drag through the table to select and then move it as in (1). 3) copy the table by using method (1) or (2) but hold the ctrl key down while you click-drag the table after selection to the new location.

    Re copy tables from spreadsheets - forget "how Word does it" - what is wrong with how OOo does it? Select and copy in Calc then paste into Writer. You get an embedded Calc table with whatever formatting is in the original, or other formats if you use "Paste Special". And back again works fine too.
  • Looks great
  • Looks great
  • Mike
    Not to pile on to Chris, but jeez, I've been using OOo since version 1.1 and it has hardly ever crashed on me. Sure it may lack the polish of Microsoft Office, but it works brilliantly for me and 3.0 is certainly going to take care of some of the lack of polish. However, I notice that there is still no grammar checker in 3.0. Wasn’t that one the features that we were to get in 3.0? I was also one of the people who voted for a tabbed view a la Firefox, and I don’t see it. All the same, I still think OOo 3.0 kicks ass!
  • Mike
    Not to pile on to Chris, but jeez, I've been using OOo since version 1.1 and it has hardly ever crashed on me. Sure it may lack the polish of Microsoft Office, but it works brilliantly for me and 3.0 is certainly going to take care of some of the lack of polish. However, I notice that there is still no grammar checker in 3.0. Wasn’t that one the features that we were to get in 3.0? I was also one of the people who voted for a tabbed view a la Firefox, and I don’t see it. All the same, I still think OOo 3.0 kicks ass!
  • bitsnpieces
    "huge documents in an enterprise environment" - is the kind of statement that shows how little this person knows. Let's see, I think Sun qualifies as an enterprise and they manage. As for the huge factor, how big is that exactly ? And exactly how did you come to the conclusion that it was file size that was the problem (please point me to what you found out) ?
  • bitsnpieces
    "huge documents in an enterprise environment" - is the kind of statement that shows how little this person knows. Let's see, I think Sun qualifies as an enterprise and they manage. As for the huge factor, how big is that exactly ? And exactly how did you come to the conclusion that it was file size that was the problem (please point me to what you found out) ?
  • Charles
    Oh...

    And Openoffice.org Writer has actually RECOVERED (fixed) Word documents that Word CORRUPTED...
  • Charles
    Oh...

    And Openoffice.org Writer has actually RECOVERED (fixed) Word documents that Word CORRUPTED...
  • Charles
    @Chris:

    Thats total crap. We have been using Openoffice EXCLUSIVELY on over FIFTY machines in our office for over 3 YEARS, with VERY little trouble.

    Yes, there are the occasional and MINOR formatting issues - and yes, a few of the Powerpoint gurus make it clear Impress has a ways to go to even come close to Powerpoint's capabilities, but to say it 'crashes CONSTANTLY on both Windows XP, Visat, etc' is pure FUD.

    Maybe your sys admin doesn't know how to keep machines in good working order?
  • Charles
    @Chris:

    Thats total crap. We have been using Openoffice EXCLUSIVELY on over FIFTY machines in our office for over 3 YEARS, with VERY little trouble.

    Yes, there are the occasional and MINOR formatting issues - and yes, a few of the Powerpoint gurus make it clear Impress has a ways to go to even come close to Powerpoint's capabilities, but to say it 'crashes CONSTANTLY on both Windows XP, Visat, etc' is pure FUD.

    Maybe your sys admin doesn't know how to keep machines in good working order?
  • Chris
    OpenOffice has failed us SPECTACULARLY in our office environment and we have had to move back to Word!

    There was a formatting bug that prevented us from evening opening the file again as it always crashed.

    Open Office CONSTANTLY crashes on both Windows XP, Vista, Slackware Linux and Ubuntu Linux and on varying machines.

    Anybody who claims it can fully replace MS hasn't used it for huge documents in an enterprise environment.

    I say all this reluctantly as an Open Source zealot, but BEWARE of Open Office. :(
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