Last month saw the latest release of OpenOffice.org 3.2, the first version of the open-source, cross-platform-friendly office suite to ship under the stewardship of Oracle. The new release is a modest update, marked primarily by improvements to the suite’s compatibility with Microsoft’s Office file formats, and by continued improvement in startup speeds and overall bug-squashing.
After testing OpenOffice.org 3.2 on both Windows XP and Ubuntu Linux systems, I found the new release to be a worthwhile upgrade. The suite is freely downloadable, and version 3.2 contains no changes that would require retraining. It’s in the next version of OpenOffice.org, 3.3, that the project is planning on beginning the interface overhaul envisioned in its Project Renaissance with a new look for the suite’s presentation application, Impress.
Elsewhere on the OpenOffice.org road map are the changes that Oracle has begun to discuss, which involve a Web-based interface for the suite and greater integration with other products in the Oracle family. As I found during my tests, OpenOffice.org already is proving more amenable to integration with sister products-such as MySQL-through the suite’s Firefox-style extensions library, which has progressed slowly but with promise since its debut.
For a look at OpenOffice.org 3.2 in action, check out this slide gallery
As a rival to Microsoft Office, OpenOffice.org 3.2 stacks up well, although Microsoft’s is the more polished and feature-packed suite. The biggest advantages that OpenOffice.org has to offer are its price-free-and its capacity for running on multiple operating systems. I’ve found that OpenOffice.org and Microsoft Office play well enough together to co-exist in the same work environment with little issue, although particularly complex documents can still pose problems.
The best way to find out how well OpenOffice.org 3.2 can work for you is to download it and give it a try-the Web address for the product is conveniently encoded into the product’s name. OpenOffice.org 3.2 is available in versions for Windows, 32- and 64-bit Linux, OS X and Solaris.
File Format Compatibility
For most organizations, sufficient file format compatibility is the feature that makes or breaks a productivity suite upgrade, particularly when considering a shift from one software maker to another. The success of OpenOffice.org in displacing Microsoft Office installations has long turned on how well the open-source suite has handled Office formats, and the importance of format predictability isn’t limited to challengers, either. Microsoft, for its part, held firm to its binary Office file formats for close to 10 years before changing things up with the XML-based format that took over the default format mantle in Office 2007.
Microsoft’s file-format shift moved the goal lines back a bit for OpenOffice.org, creating new compatibility gaps where features that worked well with the older Office formats became unusable with the new default formats. One such gap, which version 3.2 closes, is support for password-protected documents. With OpenOffice.org 3.1, I was able to open password-protected .doc files, but could not open similarly locked down .docx documents. In tests with 3.2 using the same new-format Word documents, I had no such trouble, and I experienced similar success with password-protected Excel and PowerPoint files as well.
I did, however, note that I could not unlock with OpenOffice.org a password-protected Excel document that I’d created with a beta copy of Office 2010. This spreadsheet opened as expected with Excel 2007, but wouldn’t work with Microsoft’s free Excel viewer application. At this point, I’m chalking up the compatibility regression to the beta state of Office 2010, but we’ll be keeping an eye on the issue as Office 2010 moves toward release.
More Work Remains
Finally, more work remains for OpenOffice.org’s password-protected document support-while I could open documents saved in Microsoft’s OOXML formats, I could not create password-protected documents in the new formats. For instance, when I opened a password-protected .xlsx document using the suite’s Calc application, the spreadsheet opened in a read-only mode. I create a second copy of the document by clicking an “edit file” toolbar button, but the password protection check box in the app’s file dialog was grayed out. I could, however, save password-protected files when using Office’s older, binary formats.
Elsewhere on the file format compatibility front, version 3.2 of OpenOffice.org adds support for OLE objects, form controls and Pivot Tables embedded in Excel spreadsheet documents. I opened an Excel spreadsheet with an embedded Pivot Chart in both OpenOffice.org 3.1 and 3.2-in the earlier version, the embedded bar chart appeared, but without any bars, numbers or labels. With version 3.2 of Calc, the chart information came across intelligibly.
Among the other spreadsheet enhancements included in OpenOffice.org is support for copy and paste of non-contiguous cell ranges, which is a feature gap that’s annoyed me while using previous versions of the suite. For instance, in version 3.1, it’s possible to highlight a series of non-contiguous rows, but it’s not possible to copy those rows into another sheet. In OpenOffice.org 3.2, this feature now behaves as I’d expect: I was able to select a series of arbitrary rows, copy them to my clipboard, and paste them in a new sheet, where Calc consolidated the rows into a single range.
Extensions
Beyond the file format improvements I noted above, one of the few places where the 3.2 update touches the suite’s word processor component, Writer, involves the removal of a feature: The project has migrated Writer’s support for exporting documents in MediaWiki markup format out of the core of application and into an OpenOffice.org extension.
Extensions for OpenOffice.org work a lot like Firefox extensions-they’re developed separately from the central OpenOffice.org project, but once installed, they can integrate well into the suite’s component applications. With the Wiki Publisher extension installed, for instance, the MediaWiki export option in version 3.2’s file dialog looked and worked just the same as that in version 3.1.
Another extension added to the OpenOffice.org library since I last reviewed the suite is a MySQL Connector, which provides a native MySQL driver and an easy way to configure MySQL databases for use across the suite. Without the driver, setting up a link to a MySQL database takes a lot of steps, and the process is different on each of the operating systems that support OpenOffice.org.
With the extension installed, MySQL appears among the options in the “connect to existing database” drop-down menu in the database creation wizard of the suite’s database component, Base. Rather than direct the wizard to a previously configured ODBC or JDBC data source, as was previously required, I was able to opt for a direct connection and key in my database name and IP information or socket as I would in a typical SQL browser application.
I was able to shuttle the Base database file I created while setting up the connection between machines running OpenOffice.org with the connector extension, register the database file with that instance of the suite, and have all the tables and views in my MySQL database available for analysis from Calc. I was also able to save my SQL queries within the Base file or create new ones using the application.
eWEEK Labs Managing Editor Jason Brooks can be reached at jbrooks@eweek.com.