eWEEK - February 21, 2011

New OpenOffice.org suite: It’s adequate, but uninspiring

come up with significant faults in the OpenOffice.org suite. It’s polished and user friendly, runs on a wide range of platforms, and is well-suited for any organization that doesn’t want to commit itself to Microsoft’s ecosystem of Exchange, SharePoint and related tools.

REVIEW: The open-source office productivity
suite appears doomed for mediocrity.

By P. J. Connolly

The OpenOffice.org suite may be in danger of becoming an also-ran among office pro- ductivity suites, but not for any lack of capabilities or features. The 3. 3 release of the suite debuted at the end of January, shortly after the release of its fraternal twin, LibreOffice 3. 3. It’s as polished as one might expect in a set of applications that have been under development in one form or another for about 20 years.

To view a slideshow on the new OpenOffice suite, log on to tinyurl. com/47a327n. For further details of the schism between the two open-source office suites, see the review of LibreOffice 3. 3 in the Feb. 7 issue of e WEEK, or online at tinyurl. com/4jqbvmn.

It should be no surprise—given the relatively recent forking of the code base—that most, if not all, of the improvements in OpenOffice. org 3. 3 are also available in the LibreOffice package. These shared elements range from the mundane (the new search toolbar and overhauled print interface) to the exotic (the added locale options and developer features that include new grid-control types and the ability to extend database drivers).

No significant faults

Aside from the debates over
community control and the right
of ownership, it’s hard for me to
One of the more interesting fea-
tures in OpenOffice.org 3. 3 that I
haven’t discussed is the ability to
assign custom document proper-
ties that include absolute date and
If OpenOffice.org 3. 3
fails to gain traction,
it will be because its
potential users decline
to be dependent on
the whims of Oracle,
which assumed leader-
ship of the project with
the acquisition of Sun

time, as well as duration. Document creators and editors assign these as pairs of names and corresponding values.

Another appealing feature is the redesigned thesaurus dia-Microsystems last year.

It didn’t have to be this way: Had Oracle chosen an uncharacteristically conciliatory path, the LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org projects would not have forked. Instead, three of the leading Linux distributions (Canonical, Novell and Red Hat) have rallied behind LibreOffice, leaving Oracle as the only significant supporter of the OpenOffice. org project.

Top: When enabling a filter in OpenOffice.org’s Calc spreadsheet, selections automatically fit to the data columns that are actually used. Right: Password protection for Writer documents and Calc spreadsheets has been extended from merely locking unauthorized users out of a file to granting designated users the ability to make changes.

log, which offers multiple language choices for a synonym. Also new, as part of the context menu, is the “ Synonyms” submenu, which allows a user to replace the currently selected word with an appropriate alternative.