Everyone’s favourite underdog in the office productivity suite game, the open-source OpenOffice.org just upped its game with version 3.0 version. This release is going to totally change the way OpenOffice is going to be perceived on the mac. For the first time, OpenOffice.org is completely native on the mac.
Since the site has been downgraded from it’s colourful self to a simple message that they cannot cope up with the extra traffic, there’s no way to read up on new info. So we’ve got our features list from The Apple Blog:
- A new splash screen upon launch
- The ability to import Microsoft Office (.doc, .ppt, .xls) and Office 2007/Office 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) files (though it still isn’t possible to save to these formats)
- Support for sharing Excel workbooks
- Support for Excel sheets with up to 1024 columns
- A solver component for solving optimization problems
- Better polished crop and drawing tools
- The display of multiple Writer pages while editing
- Inclusion of Office commenting / change tracking in the document margin
- Some support for Visual Basic macros (a feature dropped by the Microsoft Office team)
- Enhanced support for PDF exporting, including password protection
- Support for Open Office extensions, allowing further features to be created by developers (similar to Firefox)
- No more reliance on X11
The 160MB download includes Writer (word processor), Calc (spreadsheets), Impress (presentation), Draw (drawing) and Base (database), and is available for Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris and Windows. However, this release is for Intel Macs only, with PowerPC users having to do with version 2.4.1. That’s just evolution I guess.
Since OpenOffice.org website is getting hammered right now and clearly cannot handle the load, you could either use the official direct download link, or use another mirror for the purpose. Let us know if you have any problems getting a good download source.
Look out for an extensive review of OpenOffice.org right here on Smoking Apples. We’ll be testing it against the likes of MS Office 2008 and iWork 08.
