For governments and corporations that don't want to be dependent on Microsoft's formats and don't want to continue paying Microsoft's prices, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is a serious contender. If you're a private individual or small business already using Microsoft's product, I doubt you'll want to switch, but if your company or agency has been buying Office for thousands of desktops, or if you work for or with a government that requires open-source formats, download OpenOffice.org and don't look back.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 has six basic components: Writer, a word processor and HTML editor; Calc, a spreadsheet; Draw, a graphics editor; Impress, a presentations program; Math, an equation editor; and Base, a database application. When evaluating the product, though, I wasn't really aware of six separate programs, because all document types open in the same window, just with slightly different menus on the top line. The only exception is the Base application, where the form and query designer has created a separate interface—you work with the actual database forms, however, in the same window that you use for the other applications.
I like the way the interface hews closely to the familiar Microsoft Office 2003 standard, and it places some features more logically, so that, for example, headers and footers are on the Insert menu instead of the View menu. I'm less impressed with the word processor's view options. These are limited to a Web view (in which the text fills the window and there's no indication of what the text will look like on a printed page) and a full-page view, complete with top and bottom margins and a quarter-inch-thick gray bar between each page. There's no equivalent of a Word option that that preserves page layout on screen but doesn't waste space or add distractions by showing top and bottom margins. Nor will you find a matching capability for a powerful and little-known feature in Word that lets you view different parts of a document in two panes of the same window.
In OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet, I missed the graphic flexibility of Excel's conditional formatting, but I managed well enough with the low-frills, 20th-century conditional-formatting features. And I liked the simple elegance of the charting—it's almost as elegant as the charting in Google Docs—but got frustrated by uninformative error messages that told me nothing more than "This function cannot be completed with the selected objects." I was also disappointed that the charting feature was a lot less clever than Excel's in figuring out which columns to use as labels and which to use as data, but the resulting problems were easy enough to fix.
Compared with earlier versions, OpenOffice.org 3.0 marks an impressive, though uneven advance in features and performance—with some features potentially far in advance of the corresponding features in Microsoft Office. For example, when you insert a graphic in a word-processing document or HTML, you can attach automated actions to specific events that are related to the graphic. Clicking on the graphic will cause some programmed action, such as typing some text or opening a new window, to be performed automatically. In the Release Candidate version I couldn't get this feature to work reliably: Some of the supplied macros and some of my own recorded macros would run correctly, while others wouldn't, and I couldn't see any pattern to the success or failure.
Overall, I found performance to be impressively fast, on a par with that of Microsoft Office but with some limitations. On a Vista system with 4GB of RAM and a fast dual-core processor, I had to wait a surprisingly long time for the charting module to update a simple chart when I changed a display option. But file loading and saving, in all parts of the application, was almost instantaneous.
One attractive feature of OpenOffice.org is that it's the only major application suite that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux with almost exactly the same feature set on all platforms. Microsoft stripped out support for Visual Basic macros when it created Microsoft Office 2008 for the Macintosh, but OpenOffice.org now offers limited Basic support in all versions, including a shiny new Macintosh one that runs natively as an OS X application. Earlier versions of OpenOffice.org for the Mac required the user-unfriendly X11 environment. A third-party OS X port called NeoOffice is also available, but it's always a few minor versions behind.
Earlier releases of OpenOffice.org used annoyingly cramped and uninformative dialog boxes better suited to the limited screen real-estate of nineties-era computers than today's generous screens. Version 3.0 tends to use more spacious and informative dialogs, but they're still not informative enough. For example, I had to dig deep into the help file to figure out what "Register-True" means in the Paragraph Format dialog (it means that the bottom of each line of type will be aligned to an invisible page grid). The Help system looks as if it's rich in details, but in fact, some cross-references lead nowhere. The help page about the new version's very limited support for Office-style Visual Basic for Applications programming has a promising-looking link to a page on the "Basic IDE" (Integrated Development Environment)—but when I clicked on the link, it took me to a page containing a few sentences about programming OpenOffice.org and nothing at all about the Basic IDE. No doubt some of this will be fixed in the shipping version or in future updates. For anyone thinking of switching from Office to OpenOffice.org, the biggest question is, How well will OpenOffice.org handle your old Office documents and worksheets? The answer is, astonishingly well, even with the new Office 2007 formats—but only when the original document includes no features that OpenOffice.org doesn't support. For example, I was deeply impressed by the way OpenOffice.org retained all the complex formatting and embedded images of a newsletter that I had originally created in Word. Every page break and column break was exactly where it belonged—a feat I hadn't seen in any other Office alternative. Inserted graphics in formats like JPEG and BMP imported perfectly. But OpenOffice.org ignores any Office 2007 Smart Art or any of the scalable line-art created by Office's drawing feature. Similarly, OpenOffice.org managed to open most—but not all—the features in my spreadsheet-killer worksheet, a prize-winning monster created by former PC Magazine technical editor Ben Gottesman. OpenOffice.org displayed the complex chart and data without a hiccup, although it choked on the complex Excel pivot table in the original, and it didn't even try to convert it into the OpenOffice.org equivalent, called DataPilot. PowerPoint presentations opened equally well if the original files were in the Office 2003 file format. OpenOffice.org could open presentations in the Office 2007 format, but Office 2007 presentations aren't officially supported, and the Office 2007–format presentations that I imported into OpenOffice.org had defective formatting and missing data. When I exported the same 2007-format presentations from PowerPoint 2007 into the Office 2003 format, OpenOffice.org opened them perfectly. I don't plan on switching to OpenOffice.org 3.0 anytime soon, if ever. But for the first time, I'm ready to recommend this new version as a viable alternative to Microsoft's offering. It still has rough edges, but it has an impressive feature set, a generally lucid interface, pure open-source credentials, and—in the current economic climate—the decisive advantage of being absolutely free.
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