OpenOffice 3.0 Revealed: All the Features You Don't Want to Miss!

David Murphy — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 13:45:37 -0500

A new version of OpenOffice is upon us and it’s worth your while to check it out. We’ve long recommended this suite of programs as one of the must-have open-source applications on your PC. Simply put, it’s as close to Microsoft’s Office suite as you’re going to get without plunking down a small fortune. It doesn’t contain any unpleasantries in design and functionality that the idea of a “free office suite” might conjure up. And its newest 3.0 incarnation—all of .6 somethings greater than the last full OpenOffice release—adds even more versatility to the suite.

We figured now’s as good a time as any to introduce you to some of our favorite new features of OpenOffice. This isn’t a Microsoft Office 2007-style reinvention of the application. You can expect to see the same general user interface and layout as before—no scary launch button, we promise. A number of the tweaks and additions occur under the suite’s surface. But they’re every bit as important, adding bits of functionality that we sorely missed in OpenOffice 2.4.1. Come with us as we take a walk through the newest bits of OpenOffice 3.0!

Office 2007

Try to open up a .docx file in OpenOffice 2.4.1 and you get this: an ugly conversion screen, with none of the options ever able to open your poor document.

One of the biggest changes to OpenOffice isn’t so much a change as it is an addition. OpenOffice now supports the import of documents created in Microsoft Office 2007 for both the PC and Mac. Previously, you had no recourse: you had to convert .docx files back to .doc before you could pull them up in OpenOffice. But those days are no more. The software suite can handle documents, charts, and presentations that contain that finicky “x” in the extension, no worries.

Launch Window

It's a little gimmicky, but at least OpenOffice's launch window serves as a constant reminder to check for new template and OpenOffice extensions. We still wish the application would better integrate these options into the respective programs, a la Firefox's extension support.

The change is more aesthetic than practical, but you can now start up a base OpenOffice window and be treated to a prompt that asks you where you want to go next. It’s a helpful little launching screen for all six of OpenOffice’s native applications. More than that, the screen also lets you open files directly, load templates, and search for new OpenOffice extensions and templates. You can also click up to the File menu and launch any of the suite’s helpful batch of wizards, including simple Web page design and currency conversions.

Multi-page view

Microsoft Office 2007 still squeaks out the win for having more viewing options for documents than OpenOffice. It sure took the latter long enough to incorporate the common multi-page viewing standard.

Borrowing a page from Microsoft Office 2007—literally—OpenOffice 3.0 now supports the viewing of multiple pages at once. Previously, you were stuck to a one-page-only design regardless of how large your viewing area was. But those days are now gone. You can now view pages side-by-side either sequentially or organized in an even-odd fashion. OpenOffice 3.0 also comes with a sliding zoom bar that makes it easy to adjust the screens’ overall sizes. That noise you hear in the distance is the sound of 30-inch display owners cheering with delight.

Since we’re talking aesthetics, we should also mention that the OpenOffice icons have been tweaked ever-so slightly. These new designs freshen up the look of the entire program but keep the original icon themes pretty intact. We are pleased by this, as the last thing users want to do is mouse-hover their way across the functions of a new-looking toolbar.

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.