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Inside OpenOffice 3.2

Posted on 23 Jun 2010 at 15:19

Simon Jones gets down and dirty with the latest version of OpenOffice

In February, OpenOffice released version 3.2 of its eponymous software suite, which brings quite a few new features and improvements in speed, reliability, file format support and ease of use. It isn’t a total revolution, but another small evolution that should please existing users of the suite.

The developers have improved the cold start time for the applications from around ten seconds in version 3 to six seconds in 3.2, without the assistance of the QuickStart applet that loads many key DLLs when you start your PC so that OpenOffice will start up even faster when you want it.

If you do deploy QuickStart then application startup time drops to between two and three seconds, although timings vary depending on your operating system and the speed of your PC. It’s a pity, however, that the marketing people at OpenOffice trumpet this fast-loading feature using a chart for which they would have been rapped over the knuckles if they’d been taught by my maths teacher.

To illustrate the 46% reduction in load time they plot a line that descends from ten seconds to six seconds, but they start the Y axis of their chart at four instead of zero, which exaggerates the magnitude of the change.

OpenOffice can now output to ODF files that comply with the ODF 1.2 standard better than previous versions, and it warns you if you use any feature that’s outside that standard. This is certainly good news for people who expect to be able to exchange ODF documents with other people who are using different authoring applications, but you have to ask why OpenOffice still isn’t fully compliant with a standard that was basically defined by this application.

You can turn off the extensions and save to pure ODF 1.2 files, under Tools | Options | Save, but there are still worrying questions over the use of other file formats.

OpenOffice can read Microsoft Office 2007 OOXML files, but it can’t write them and it does a poor job of converting OOXML files if they contain anything more than very basic formatting – opening an Office 2007 document that contains complex formatting can cause it to crash.

It can read and write Microsoft Office files in 97/2000/XP format, and does a better job of interpreting these, but it may still introduce inconsistencies and aberrations that you wouldn’t know about unless you have access to the originating application (or a copy of the document printed by that application).

There’s now much better handling of cell borders in the Calc module of version OpenOffice 3.2. You can apply borders to any number of selected ranges with one click, and AutoFill will now work with user-defined lists of terms as well as numbers, dates, days of the week or months of the year.

These lists also allow you to sort their members into a user-defined order, rather than alphabetical or numerical. One feature whose tardy introduction will provoke cries of “at last!”, is an enhancement to the sorting of cells, which finally moves the formatting of those cells along with their data, and filtering can now cope with up to eight conditions, including “contains” and “begins with”.