What Does Open Office 3.0 have?
The Open Source community is celebrating another major achievement with the recent release of the final version of OpenOffice 3. OpenOffice has been very successful since its introduction.
The hype surrounding OpenOffice is understandable because it is long touted as the software which could potentially challenge the dominance of one of the most profitable business softwares ever produced – Microsoft Office.
OpenOffice has several major advantages over Microsoft Office.
- It is a free software and can be used for any purposes without licensing fee obligations.
- It is available for various platforms such as Windows, Linux, Solaris and even Apple Mac.
- Due to its open source nature, anyone can participate in its development and improvement, making it easier to eliminate bugs and request new features.
OpenOffice 3 is a suite consisting of 6 applications: word proccessor Writer, spreadsheet Calc, presentations program Impress, database program Base, equation editor Math and graphics program Draw.
OpenOffice supports many common file formats, notably OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, PDF files and file formats supported by Microsoft Office 2007.
OpenOffice 3 has many new features. The notable enhancements and new features include Mac OS X support, ODF 1.2 support, chart enhancements, enhanced XML support, PDF/A support, multiple monitor support in Impress and further improvements in file formats support as well as internet integration and easy publishing.
OpenOffice’s ease of use is also one important reason contributing to its rapid rise in status to be one of the preferred application business suites in the market.
Each application come with user-friendly wizard, which walks the users through creating presentations, spreadsheets and other documents in a few minutes.
Although OpenOffice may be a godsend to most average users, some critical users maintain that OpenOffice is not good enough, yet.
Among the main complains are its unattractive interface, lack of templates, and allegedly problematic database and .docx extension supports.
