May 9th, 2008

First look at OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 12:05 pm

Categories: Software, Thoughts

Tags: Microsoft Office 2007, Document, Launch, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Corp., OpenOffice.org, OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel

Since I’m testing the viability of running Ubuntu on a number of platforms, and paving the way to shift from Internet Explorer to Firefox 3.0, I might as well take a look at the viability of abandoning Microsoft Office and making the leap to OpenOffice.org.

Check out the OpenOffice.org gallery.

Now, I’m a firm believer that the OpenOffice.org (OO.o) suite offers far more functionality than the average user needs or wants. However, an area of prime concern to me is backward compatibility with Microsoft Office. This is important to me for two reasons:

• I have a massive archive of old Word, Excel and PowerPoint files that I need to be able to have access to. Not only do I need to be able to open these documents, but the reproduction (both on-screen and print) needs to be faithful.
• I exchange Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on a regular basis with others. Most of the people and companies I work with use Microsoft Office (although some do use OO.o) so my solution needs to be compatible.

With that in mind I downloaded OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta and loaded it into a VMware test machine for experimentation. [See gallery for a close-up view.]

Here are some thoughts from the download and install process:

• The complete download is only 144MB.
• Installation was quick and painless, taking only a few minutes (less than five).
• No restart required.
• OO.o doesn’t seem to junk up the system much (compared to Microsoft Office 2007).

Once I had the application suite installed, I decided to have a look around.

• The first time loading any of the applications seems slow, much slower than the Microsoft Office 2007 equivalent. Subsequent launches are much faster (until you reboot).
• File loading times don’t seem that different to those the Microsoft Office 2007 equivalent.
• Once loaded, applications feel nice and responsive, same as the Microsoft Office 2007 equivalent.
• Occasionally I noticed odd screen artifacts when using menus or resizing windows. Not sure what’s behind this.

OK, but what about compatibility?

Word document compatibility

For this test I created three Word documents in .docx Word 2007 format:

• A simple one page document containing text and simple formatting
• A 217 page document containing text and simple formatting
• A two page document containing drop caps, SmartArt and Shapes

OpenOffice.org Writer beta handled the first two documents just fine with hardly any format differences (nothing that mattered at any rate).

The third document was a different matter. The formatting on the drop cap was wrong, the SmartArt didn’t show up and the Word Shape was rendered incorrectly.

Document displayed in Word 2007

Document displayed in Writer 3.0 beta

I then tool the three documents as displayed in Writer and saved them in the Word 97/2000/XP .doc format and tried opening these in Word 2007. All three files worked fine in Word 2007, although the two page document containing drop caps, SmartArt and Shapes was no longer formatted correctly.

Conclusion: Since I don’t do much with drop caps, SmartArt and Shapes, I think I could live with Writer instead of Word.

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