OpenOffice 3.1 deep dive

Posted on 12 Aug 2009 at 17:36

OpenOffice 3.1 brings some welcome new features and some much needed polish, says Simon Jones

OpenOffice.org has recently released version 3.1 of its eponymous software suite, a minor upgrade that brings some welcome features and some much needed polish to the nearest thing Microsoft Office has to a competitor.

Chief among the "fit and finish" improvements are anti-aliasing of graphics, which greatly improves the clarity of charts and drawings, and the showing of shadow objects while dragging, rather than just wire frames or outlines. They may have taken five years to achieve, but these two features alone make OpenOffice look much more professional.

In OpenOffice 3, the spreadsheet application Calc was given subtle highlighting to indicate that a cell was selected, and now in version 3.1 that subtle highlighting is present in Writer too. It’s far easier on the eye than the previous “reverse video” effect, which is stark white on black.

They may have taken five years to achieve, but these two features alone make OpenOffice look much more professional

A feature that’s migrated the other way from Writer to Calc is a zoom control on the status bar that mimics the one in Microsoft Office 2007. Calc also gets a new ability to rename a spreadsheet by double-clicking its sheet tab, as well as the more convoluted right-click and choose "Rename" from the context menu.

Hints about the syntax of functions are now displayed as you type them into a formula, and the function names will auto-complete themselves if you type a few letters and then press Enter. Sorting is now more logical and consistent, which makes for a big improvement in usability. There are a couple of new functions and changes to existing functions to do with statistical analysis. Also welcome is the removal of some performance bottlenecks that until now had affected the calculation speed of some large and complicated workbooks. Charts now allow flexible positioning of their axes and a choice of how to handle missing data – leave a gap, assume zero value or continue the line through the missing value.

Improved comments

Writer received a commenting feature in version 3 and this has further improved in 3.1 to include the ability to reply to comments and search for text within comments. You can also integrate with third-party grammar checking tools, although no grammar checkers actually ship in the box, so you’ll have to download and install them as Extensions.

OpenOffice 3.1 now implements its own file locking, so that it can reliably tell you if a file you want to open is already opened by someone else, even if that person is using a different OS from you.

There are virtually no changes to Impress (the presentations application), but there’s a myriad of small technical changes to Base (the database application), the most visible being syntax highlighting for SQL statements. Unfortunately, one of the changes – namely, moving code from sub-documents up to documents – may cause compatibility warnings when opening Base 3 documents in version 3.1.

While there’s a Migration wizard to help you upgrade your apps, it can’t do all the work for you and you may have to recode some portions of apps you’ve written using Base 3. You’ll have to test any applications thoroughly to check they still work as expected, as there may be some unintended consequences of the migration process.

OpenOffice 3 and 3.1 both save their documents by default in ODF 1.2 format, despite the fact that ODF 1.2 isn’t finished yet, and therefore hasn’t been ratified by OASIS or submitted to ISO for approval. (OASIS has approved ODF 1.1, but it wasn’t submitted to ISO for consideration – only ODF 1 is an ISO standard.)

There’s a setting – Tools | Options... | Load/Save | Default file format and ODF Settings | ODF format version – that switches over to employing ODF 1/1.1 file formats, but it’s a global switch so you can’t easily choose between ODF 1.1 or 1.2 for each individual document.