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OpenOffice.org 3.0 Is Officially Here

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the who-needs-office-anyway dept.

SNate writes "After a grinding three-year development cycle, the OpenOffice.org team has finally squeezed out a new release. New features include support for the controversial Microsoft OOXML file format, multi-page views in Writer, and PDF import via an extension. Linux Format has an overview of the new release, asking the question: is it really worth the 3.0 label?"

2 of 284 comments (clear)

  1. Great ... err ... by Selanit · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Or it will be once the openoffice.org sysadmin fixes their server. Major egg on the face there.

    Anyway, this release has one feature that I've been longing after for years now: proper support for marginal comments.

    While OO.o has long been capable of opening documents with comments in them, the user interface for reading those comments sucked HARD. The presence of a note was indicated by a tiny, light yellow rectangle at the end of the sentence. Easy to miss. And then if you wanted to actually read the comment, you had to hover your mouse over it to trigger a small yellow pop-up box containing the comment text (which would be cut off if it was a long comment). Basically, actually READING a commented document in OO.o was not practical.

    This new version is much, much better. I tried it out using one of the copies that hit the mirrors before the official release, and it's soooo much better. Comments now actually show up in the margins, they've got little lines connecting them to the section of the document they apply to, and they're color coded by author. Hallelujah! Now I can finally quit depending on Word for grading student papers.

  2. PDF by ledow · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The only thing of any interest, then, is the PDF import/editing/export. Ironic, considering that the ad's on /. for this article seemed to consist mostly of Adobe Acrobat ads...

    But if it really *can* import any PDF, allow basic editing and export, that could really be a boon. Other apps that allow that are either incredibly expensive, horrible to use or just too out-of-date. Does it support "encrypted" PDF's if you have the passwords, etc.? Does it allow image/text editing/extraction from a PDF? If so, then this update would be worth it for that alone.

    The rest is just eye candy and basic bug fixes (e.g. >256 columns in Calc).