OpenOffice.org have just released the first public beta of OpenOffice 3, a Microsoft Office like suite of programs that works across all platforms.
While the current beta of OpenOffice 3 doesn’t support PDF editing yet, it does include lot of new feature including the ability to read and edit Microsoft Office 2007 files formats.
Calc now supports upto 1024 columns per spreadsheet while Writer can display multiple pages during editing. The new version is also compatible with Windows Vista.
OpenOffice.org has also said that PDF editing features will become available soon via a PDF Import extension that’s currently under development – now this would be a real free alternative to Acrobat.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 | Release Notes | Public Announcement
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/software/download/openoffice-org-3-reads-office-2007-documents-download/3207/
Tags: acrobat, feature, openoffice, pdf writer, Downloads, Software
Reader Comments
Performance? At least comparable to Word 2007?
Written by Venkatesh Nandakumar on 05.07.08
So, would you rely on this as your “go to” and only office app? I don’t have any right now—well, a now out of date copy of TextMaker—but i just can’t hack the tariff on Office Suite and i had heard OPEN is rather resource hungry. Would you comment, please?
Written by David Gray on 05.07.08
This is good news for all, the new 3.0 must be having some more new features, downloading it right now. :)
Written by Vaibhav on 05.07.08
Surely , OpenOffice is getting more powerful , But Indian users need more awareness about it and its free status .
Written by ArpitNext on 05.07.08
> Performance? At least comparable to Word 2007?
The performances compared to office 2007 was the thing that made me switch to open office.
I work often with a lot of relatively big files (>50 pages with a lot of drawings, formula, and so on)… in such cases, with word 2007, every scrolling or jump to another page is *painfully* slow (with my PIV 2.2Ghz and 2Gb of RAM, on XP) while using more than 2/3 of my memory (I can’t even imagine what it would be with vista).
With openoffice2… everything goes really smoother.
But the one thing that made me switch it’s probably Calc… As soon as you try to do a graphic in Excel from a 10×1000 data array, 2007 it’s just no more usable for me. Once again, with Calc, there is almost no slow down at all when scrolling and dealing with large groups of cells.
But yes, OpenOffice is still a big piece of software and will use a certain amount of ram, but there is no comparison with 2007 and the entire slowdown it causes to my system…
There is also other things I like… Especially the styles/formating managment (eg. Page Styles, Conditional Styles, Frames, etc.) which are juste great and well designed.
OpenOffice is also definitevely the best for dealing with recto-verso document… You can specify style that will be automatically adapted depending if you’re on a recto or verso pages and the Page style. For example, you can draw a colored frame containing the page number that will be always placed at the external side of the sheet with only one style.
Globally… I found openoffice way more powerfull… The only disavandages are on a ergonomic point of vue… With Impress in particular (power point equivalent), but haven’t tested version 3 yet…
nb: I’m a student in chemistry, with no specifics computer science skill
Written by Marc Blanc on 05.08.08
I and others I know have to agree with last post. I have found Open Office to be a FAR better performer especially with longer documents. Pages scroll much quicker. And as noted with Styles and Formatting you have a great way to design documents for quick editing. This helped me to structure my documents for complete control, something I never seemed to get to learn in MS Office (since MS Office design. emphasizes inefficient formatting). And to top that I use OpenOffice on Ubuntu Linux.
Written by Lance St on 08.05.08