OpenOffice.org 2.3 Review

Peace Frog writes passed us a link to an in-depth review of the newest version of OpenOffice. Instead of just the normal bug fixes, 2.3 has added several new features. Examples include: "A bunch of new and enhanced features like restoring the user-defined movement path in Impress and applying better default print settings in Calc. Check the release notes for complete information from OpenOffice.org. A significantly different chart tool. New extensions provided by Sun and other vendors. You will need to run 2.3 for the extensions to work. Read more about the new extensions on the OpenOffice.org web site." The general impression from the review is that the OO team is doing an excellent job of responding to feedback from previous releases.

Comments

Incompatible rendering

[tom17]

So I love OO and have started using it as my primary office suite at home. But it still falls short when it comes to rendering and printing docs and having them look the same as in MS Office.

It's not a huge issue I guess, but it's certainly the reason that I still need to have MS Office installed in a VM. Highly over the top but a necessary step until OO can render stuff faithfully. My wife, for one, will not switch until it displays word docs correctly.

Is this just me having this problem as I never see other people complaining about it.

Re:Integration to 3rd party still nearly inexistan

[betterunixthanunix]

OOo provides an API for programming Java OLE objects. The problem is not OOo, it is a lack of third party developers actually using this feature. A lot of applications suffer from this problem, actually. Hopefully, with the opening of Java, somebody will write OOo KDE and OOo GNOME wrappers for OLE objects.

Personally, I hold out more hope for KOffice, which is built on KParts. If KOffice 2.0 is as good as the developers say it will be, I will be switching.