Calc Collaboration

OpenOffice's collaborative functionality is limited to Calc only. This isn't Google Docs, after all.

Google users have enjoyed this for some time now, but OpenOffice now integrates spreadsheet sharing into its Calc application. Letting other users into your spreadsheet is as easy as clicking on the Tools menu, then Share Document. From that point forward, anyone on your network can access your spreadsheet and make changes to its elements. Only formatting attributes and drawn objects remain unavailable for editing. The program protects against simultaneous editing of the same cell by throwing up a friendly conflict window. If you edit the same cell as someone else, you’re given the option to keep either your edits or your friend’s—or for the true overlord, the option to keep all (or remove all) of either person’s edits entirely.

Crappy Crop

Nobody likes using a ruler to make digital crops -- not unless it's a digital ruler, we suppose. Either way, dragging to a desired crop window is the much preferred technique for image manipulation.

This one’s a small change, but anyone who has used the basic photo manipulation tools in either OpenOffice Draw or Impress knows just how archaic the programs’ cropping functionality used to be. If not, here’s a quick peek. Unlike your common graphic editing tool, OpenOffice came with no real-time cropping function. You couldn’t just drag a window’s dimensions to whatever you wanted. You actually had to get elbow-deep in a measurement window and specify, exactly, what you wanted the dimensions of the new photograph to be, including how far away from the image’s borders you wanted the pictured snipped. Yuck.

OpenOffice’s cropping feature now joins the 21st century by allowing you to dynamically adjust the size of the crop yourself. You can still type in the numbers if you really want to, but we much prefer the ability to just drag out the image size that we want. It’d be even nicer if we could drag the photo around inside of the newly cropped dimensions. OpenOffice 4.0, perhaps?

More, More, More

It's a spreadsheet.  If nothing else, spreadsheets should be able to support super-massive quantities of data, right?  With OpenOffice 3.0, that wooden puppet has finally become a boy.

Finally, hardcore data enthusiasts will appreciate how OpenOffice 3.0 now supports 1024 columns in a spreadsheet instead of its previous (and paltry) 256. For the math nerds, that’s a difference of 16,777,216 cells to 67,108,864—just enough room to plot star clusters, track your card collection, or… do whatever it is one would do with just over 67 million data inputs. Yikes.

The list of updates doesn’t stop there, however!  We could fill a book with all of OpenOffice 3.0’s new functionality. Check the list out for yourself while you’re waiting for this 142MB update to finish downloading.