OpenOffice 3.0 is out
IT LOOKS LIKE OpenOffice 3.0 is right around the corner, but if you want to do a little digging, you can get it now. It was uploaded to the mirrors late Friday night, so it is ready for the grabbing.
According to Lifehacker, the release is scheduled for Monday, but you can grab it here now. We have been running it for a little while, and it seems quite stable, and a bit faster than 2.4.1 in cursory testing. In fact, this article is written on 3.0.
Several things have been changed and updated, most notably support for ODF1.2, and the competing 'standard' OOXML. Other notables are vastly revamped drawing tools and much better PDF support, not that the older one was lacking much. Translation for .PPT files, a fairly common SNAFU in 2.4.x seems to be much better, but still not perfect.
Overall, OpenOffice 3.0 seems like a great step forward, and for the low low price of free, how can you complain? Grab a copy and have at thee, it is everything you could need in an office pack without the $500 price tag, ever-changing UI, and forced file formats that people don't want. µ
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Its nice to know that if you waste time and money crippling your computers and organisations with office software you can do it on the cheap.
I use OpenOffice.org on GNU/Linux terminal servers so this should give an even greater improvement on AMD64 machines. Recently, the blogosphere has held shouts that OpenOffice.org is stagnant. I think this release just shows it is mature. Do we really need more features or do we need fewer bugs and better performance? I will never forget the day 1.0 was released. I had to hunt the world to find a server and the code was buggy but I had it installed all over the building in a few hours. Now, I have two or three niggling problems in the whole of 2.4 and it took me seconds to find a decent mirror for 3. I expect 3.0 will be superb. Congratulations to all who contributed. Thanks.
'Grab a copy and have at thee...'. You what? Obscure reference or bizarre typo?
New entry for Oxymoron of the day?
wow. I can now Read, MODIFY and resave PDF's on all of the OOo platforms (including Linux), with a really nice "office tool" which where I already know the commands. I don't need to spend $$$$ on Acrobat, or $$ on Windoze and a costly "security" add-on. I can my regular Office Suite to work on my PDF's, which are, after all *documents*. I feel this to have been an enormous enhancement.