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 Channel Futures

Open Source


Initial Thoughts on OpenOffice 3.0

  • Written by Christopher Tozzi
  • November 13, 2008


OpenOffice 3I recently decided to upgrade to OpenOffice 3. As many users know, the Ubuntu developers made the controversial decision not to include OO 3, released in mid-October 2008, in Ubuntu 8.10 (a.k.a “Intrepid Ibex”), out of concerns that it would not be stable enough and would disrupt the Intrepid development schedule (which is strange given the decision to ship 8.04 with Firefox 3 beta as the default browser). But I still made the move to OpenOffice 3.

Luckily, it’s not very difficult to replace Intrepid’s default OO 2.4 with OO 3.

The Good

My first impression of OO 3 was that its interface looks exactly like OO 2’s. There’s nothing wrong with that, and interface consistency is important to many users, as anyone who had to struggle through the nightmare of learning MS Office 2007’s “ribbon” interface will agree. Nonetheless, I found the similarity surprising, since the OO 1 interface was completely revamped for the release of OO 2 a few years ago.

Some of the most noticeable new features in OO 3 are a sliding scale in the lower-right corner to zoom in and out, and much-improved ‘Notes’ functionality for commenting on a document. Both of these ideas appear to be all but ripped verbatim from Microsoft Office, but they’re useful nonetheless.

The ability to view and edit multiple pages of a document side-by-side is also eerily similar to functionality introduced, if I recall correctly, by Microsoft in Word 2007, and makes me concerned that the OO developers focused more on imitating than innovating.

OO 3 also seems much zippier, both in loading and in response time to user actions. While I don’t have any scientific data and can’t be sure that the improvements aren’t merely due to better optimization in Ubuntu or the packages that I used, it certainly “feels” like OO opens up from a cold start much faster than OO 2, and the lagginess that I used to experience with certain parts of the interface has been resolved.

One of the major criticisms leveled at OpenOffice was that it took so long—up to ten or fifteen seconds on older hardware—to load and could be a bit choppy while open, while Word was faster and smoother (whether this was thanks in part to Windows’ shady pre-loading schemes is another debate). With OO 3 out, this is no longer the case, especially when compared with memory-hogging Word 2007.

The Bad

The biggest problem that I encountered was compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 documents. Admittedly, I only tested one file, but it was relatively standard—all normal text, no embedded files or weird formatting—with the exception of several comments made in Word 2007. OO was able to handle the main body of the document properly, but instead of displaying the comments in the margin, it inserted them directly into the document, completely butchering it.

This is disappointing, because it means that I will still need to fire up Word 2003 in wine whenever someone sends me a .doc or .docx file with embedded comments. This is also a deal-breaker for enterprises and professionals who absolutely need 100% compatibility with Microsoft Office.

In a perfect world, no one would create documents with comments in Word and send them to me. But people do, and I need to be able to read them. Until this serious flaw is resolved, I can’t in good faith tell friends that OO can meet all of their word-processing needs all of the time.

Overall, OO 3, while not revolutionary, brings some attractive new features to the table, albeit ones that are disturbingly similar in design and appearance to those of Microsoft Office. Poor support for Word 2007 documents, however, is a major letdown that I hope will become the subject of serious focus by the OO developers for the 3.1 release. Nonetheless, most Ubuntu users have no reason not to upgrade to OO 3, which should be pushed out via the backports repository soon enough.

Admittedly, my experience with OO 3 has hardly been extensive, and I haven’t even touched Impress, Calc or Base yet. Comments on aspects that I’ve missed are most welcome.

WorksWithU Contributing Blogger Christopher Tozzi is a PhD student at a major U.S. university. Tozzi has extensive hands-on experience with Ubuntu Server Edition and Ubuntu Desktop Edition.

WorksWithU is updated multiple times per week. Don’t miss a single post. Sign up for our RSS and Twitter feeds (available now) and newsletter (launching January 2009).

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8 comments

  1. Avatar jonabyte November 14, 2008 @ 11:52 am
    Reply

    I think more will be coming like this issue you are having since it will not even save in the 2007 format.
    But it is a big step since my users can open and edit the 2007 format and save it in the older format.

  2. Avatar aussiebear November 14, 2008 @ 12:16 pm
    Reply

    I don’t get it, is it hard to tell people to save it in Office 2003 format?

    Why not save the Office 2007 document in Office 2003 format, and open that document in OpenOffice? The option is there, why not use it?

  3. Avatar Dragonbite November 14, 2008 @ 12:46 pm
    Reply

    “There’s nothing wrong with that, and interface consistency is important to many users, as anyone who had to struggle through the nightmare of learning MS Office 2007’s “ribbon” interface will agree.”

    Actually, once you get used to the ribbon it isn’t so bad.

    OpenOffice’s interface, though, has largely been clunky to me and takes up a lot of real-estate.

    I’ve recently been using IBM’s Symphony for Ubuntu and the interface is better, but otherwise it’s slower. Merge the two (OO 3’s “zippiness” and Symphony’s interface).

  4. Avatar Christopher Tozzi November 14, 2008 @ 1:52 pm
    Reply

    aussiebear: I certainly wish people would save in Office 2003 format–or, better, install plugins into Word that would allow them to save in open-document format. But the unfortunate reality is that, at least in my experience, a lot of people don’t really know the difference. They use .docx because it’s the default. That isn’t OpenOffice’s fault, but it’s ultimately OpenOffice that needs to deal with it in order to be a competitive word-processing platform.

    Dragonbite: thanks for mentioning Symphony. I hadn’t realized that anyone was using this in appreciable numbers, but some googling suggests that it’s more popular than one would think. It’s important to remember that OO is not the only product out there.

  5. Avatar Vadi November 14, 2008 @ 3:03 pm
    Reply

    I’m a picky person, and I don’t like how when I move the mouse over a button in OOo the image goes away for a moment and then comes back. The whole interface doesn’t behave like other desktop programs also.

    :

    I’ve been slowly switching to adobe buzzword lately.

  6. Avatar Dragonbite November 14, 2008 @ 3:55 pm
    Reply

    Christopher Tozzi:
    Symphony has been around, I believe, for a while in one incarnation or another and has just been resurrected for their office suite which is based on OpenOffice.org.

    They were talking about it being a fork of OpenOffice.org, then about trying to bring it back in-line with OpenOffice. I’m not sure what their current status and direction is.

  7. Avatar LAS November 14, 2008 @ 4:14 pm
    Reply

    I don’t know anybody using Office 2007 at my University or elsewhere in Asia. I also don’t believe many are going to make the 2007 switch in my area. If someone sends me a document in .docx I will politely tell them they must resend in 2003. It’s just stupid that someone would expect others to be using that incompatible format. BTW There are more than 100 Ubuntu users nearby too.

  8. Avatar Dragonbite November 21, 2008 @ 2:11 pm
    Reply

    At work I get to run Office 2007 before everybody else so I can offer support when they are all moved over.

    Not long after it was released, some of our clients were sending us documents in .docx format and while I may have Office 2007, the recipient got some add-on to be able to read 2007 in 2003.

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