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The future OpenOffice 3.0 – new look and feal

Submitted by _Sman_ on Wed, 05/07/2008 - 08:40.
I am using OpenOffice instead of MS Office as often as I can. There are many reasons of doing this - but most important is that it is open source. I am great fan of free open products. Personally me - I think OpenOffice reached great professionalism comparing to commercial alternatives like Microsoft Office. Now when I am writing - Latest stabile OpenOffice release is ver 2.4 which is already great and fits all my needs. But hey - OpenOffice 3.0 is nearing. Right now there is a great chance to fell its power by testing development snapshots. So what's new in future OpenOffice?
  • First thing that is different is a Start Center. Start center will open as new document. Here you can choose where to go further (create new document, open, etc.);
  • Viewing multiple pages in writer with various controls including zoom, layout mode selections(single page, multiple pages, book layout);
  • Notes in margin. This will be great change because notes will help in formatting, editing. Notes will allow marking of selected text areas. But seems to be Notes will not track changes what I thing is a big drawback. But who knows - maybe later it will...
  • Of course OpenOffice 3.0 will support Microsoft Office 2007 "Office Open XML" file format;
  • Improved math solver in calc;
  • Better calc theming with better color rendering;
  • New table design panel in Impress which will allow easy to apply desired colors to tables;
  • Improved charts. Error bars will be added. Other features will include: new data label options, display equations for regression lines, reversing of chart axis.
  • Calc will have more columns. The number is increased from 256 to 1024.
  • Official support for Mac with pretty Aqua interface
  • Improved performance;
  • Simultaneous editing of spreadsheets by multiple users;
  • Cross-references to headings;
  • Updates to embedded fields in mail merges from Calc;
  • Displaying PostScript OpenType fonts on Linux and Solaris;
  • Titles for secondary axes in charts;
  • OpenDocument Format 1.2;
  • ...and much more! Issue Tracker: Issues marked fixed for 3.0;

But there will be still missing some important things like:

  • Importing standard PDF files;
  • Presenter viewer in Impress;
  • Dictionaries as extensions that would replace DicOOo;
  • Macros in Base documents.

But I think overall improvements will be great. If you are anxious to test early development version you can do it by downloading snapshots from here. Jus keep in mind that releases are still in deep alpha, so they are not intended for everyday use. [More Info]

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