Real World Computing

The OpenOffice database will now connect to Access 2007 (ACCDB) files and has an improved query designer. Calc, the spreadsheet component, can now convert text to columns, a feature that's much missed by people moving from Excel to OpenOffice Calc. Filtering and sorting are now more logical, and there's better performance when using the VLOOKUP and MATCH functions. Interestingly, you can now start formulas with "+" or "-" and not just "=", a feature copied from Excel 2007. Charting has improved markedly in some areas: regression curves and reverse axes are now possible, and data point labels are more flexible for formatting and placement, including the ability to display a percentage and a value. The Chart wizard is improved, as is the overall look of the charts, although they remain way behind what's possible in Excel 2007.

Impress, the presentation graphics component, hasn't changed much. The What's New blurb on the OpenOffice website claims "Thrilling 3D effects in slide transitions", but the small print reveals that this in fact only means an ability to add extensions that employ OpenGL to perform such transitions - they're not actually built into the application, and all its built-in transitions remain resolutely 2D. Writer hasn't changed, except for some minor UI tidy-ups and the ability to select a rectangular area of text by holding the Alt key while dragging. There are more than 40 performance improvements and several memory leaks are fixed.

If you're currently using an earlier version of OpenOffice, it's just about worth upgrading to this new release. Although it may appear a little dated and cumbersome in places, and doesn't have all the features or ease of use of Microsoft Office, it's nevertheless a competent package in many ways - and, of course, it's free. If you prefer to wait, however, OpenOffice 3 isn't that far off.

OpenOffice 3

Version 3 of OpenOffice will introduce many new features, including a Personal Information Manager (PIM) akin to Microsoft's Outlook that will give OpenOffice users email, calendars and task lists for the first time. It will be based around Mozilla's Thunderbird email client, with the Mozilla Lightning calendar and tasks extension, but initially there will be little in the way of integration between the PIM modules and the rest of the OpenOffice suite.

OpenOffice 3 will be able to read Office 2007 files, but its default file format will be ODF 1.2 - we'll have to wait to see whether the next six months allow file format conversion to be made as good as the developer hopes. OpenOffice 3 will also be offered for the MacOS X platform for the first time, using the Aqua interface.

Extensions are planned for creating blogs and wikis, for importing PDF documents and for creating reports from databases. You'll be able to display multiple pages side by side in Writer, and show notes in the margin of a document. There'll be a Solver for linear equations in Calc, and it will use a translucent-blue selection region in place of the current, dated-looking solid inverse. The maximum number of columns increases from 256 to 1,024, and charts will be able to include error bars. Impress finally gets tables of its own, making it easier to lay out information on slides. The developer is also thinking about a shake-up of the user interface, perhaps to make OpenOffice look more like IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is based on the OpenOffice code. To be honest, I hope they do a better job than IBM did; the new Lotus Symphony UI is horrible: inconsistent and confusing.

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