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OpenOffice 3: a preview
 OpenOffice
is quite popular in BFSI and ITES as well as in some government bodies that
are pro-Open Source. This free and open source alternative to Microsoft Office
has traditionally been feature-packed. Where it has fallen short has been on
ease-of-use, which is where Microsoft Office has scored big time particularly
with the advent of Office 2007 with its revolutionary Ribbon UI. That said there
is a lot to be said for OpenOffice. The reason most large BFSI and ITES concerns
use it for 90% of their employees who do not need 100% compatibility with Microsoft
Office or do not need the bells and whistles of PowerPoint or Excel is simply
because using OpenOffice can help a company dramatically trim the cost of acquiring
an office suite for most of its employees.
The reason for my picking OpenOffice as the topic for this week’s edit
is simple, version 3 has been in the works for several months now and it’s
moved out of beta and the second Release Candidate (almost final) just came
out. Guess what, it’s pretty good.
Let’s look at the improvements first.
General improvements
- Better compatibility with Office: OpenOffice
3 RC2 opens Office 2007 native file formats without a hitch. This is important
as Office 2007 introduced new file formats for Word, Excel and PowerPoint
and with OO3; OpenOffice has caught up as far as compatibility goes. Please
note that while styles and formatting in reasonably complex documents are
imported well, extremely complex documents with frames and what have you may
not import as well.
- Better OS integration: The suite supports
native Vista dialogs now which is a big plus if you’re running it on
that OS. Earlier it looked like an XP application. Integration with Mac OS
is also supposed to have improved considerably.
- Performance improvements: OO3 RC2 runs faster
than OO2.x although some early milestones were faster still. Hopefully this
will be addressed before the final version is released.
- Easy migration from 2.x: The suite now imports
all your settings including macros from OO2.x. I cannot stress this enough,
this is fabulous. OO3 is the first office suite to offer this feature. Till
now, the only applications I knew which did this were Firefox and Windows
(I know, Windows is an OS, but it does retain settings from the previous version
if it is installed over it. Of course, such installations never run as well
as clean ones, but that is another story).
Now that we’ve looked at the general enhancements, let’s look at the
specific applications.
Writer
Writer is OO’s answer to Word. It still lags Word in
some areas notably usability but there are some nice touches in the latest version
of this powerful word processing tool.
- Grammar checking: There’s a menu item
for integrated grammar checking using LanguageTool but the feature doesn’t
work in this particular milestone. Screenshots of the feature on earlier builds
look interesting. I expect this to be sorted out before the final release
and it addresses a long-standing shortcoming in OpenOffice.
- Minor flourishes: As in Word 2007, the slider
in the status bar lets you zoom in and out of your document. Earlier the Notes
feature wasn’t particularly usable. That’s all changed now and the
notes sit to the right of your document and are quite readable.
Calc
Calc is the open source alternative to Excel.
Excel is arguably the best of the Microsoft Office applications
and so Calc has its work cut out trying to compete.
- Revamped Chart Engine: Charts in OO2 used
to look downright amateurish. OO3 has a tooled up chart engine that renders
nice looking charts that are quite attractive.
- Collaboration: Calc supports collaboration
now; Writer always did, but now you can share a spreadsheet created in Calc
with other Calc users and approve or reject changes made by others on your
team.
- Solver: There’s a solver component for
optimization problems. Basically, you can calculate the optimum value of a
cell based on constraints provided in other cells. As I’m not a financial
wizard, I didn’t test this one out. Any accounting mavens reading this
are invited to test this feature out and let me know what they think of it.
Draw
While Microsoft Office integrates drawing tools into the applications, OpenOffice
has a separate drawing tool appropriately named Draw. Draw is quite powerful
now and pasting a draw object in Writer works a treat. Better still, save the
Writer document with the pasted Draw object in Word and it can be edited using
Word’s drawing tools. Lovely!
Shortcomings
As I said, there aren’t too many drawbacks in this suite now barring the
interface, which needs an overhaul. The OO team has tried to do this with a
new icon set called Galaxy and a Start Center that links to all the tools but
I’m not impressed. The Start Center reminiscent of MS Works and that’s
not meant as a compliment. The Galaxy icon set looks crayonish. Thankfully,
Tango’s still available as an option.
The UI hasn’t been revamped in a while and it’s long overdue for a
radical overhaul like Microsoft did with Office 2007. In that department, IBM’s
Lotus Symphony suite is probably more interesting. That suite also has a new
release, v1.1, which runs a bit faster but Symphony, is still a resource hog
compared to either OO or Office.
Overall, there is much to like in OO3 and I strongly urge
anybody running 2.x to migrate once the final version comes out. Broadly speaking
I’ve found that you can replicate pretty much any content that you can
create in Office 2007 in OpenOffice 3. The difference is that it’s easier
to use Office 2007 thanks to the Ribbon UI and general user friendliness. That’s
where OpenOffice needs to catch up. However, OpenOffice is free and for organizations
that want to stay legal and yet provide an office suite to all their workers,
it is an excellent solution and a mixed environment with power users on Office
2007 and the rest on OpenOffice works well as some of India’s biggest banks
and BPO outfits have found out to their advantage.
prashant.rao@expressindia.com
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