Finally, the long-awaited Ooo office suite, the best and most popular open source office suite sponsored by Sun Microsystems, has released an official beta of Openoffice.org.
Image from the softpedia screenshot archive
Version 3 has got a bunch of new features, these are my favourite improvements:
- Full Mac OS X Cocoa support (no need to install the Neooffice port anymore!), which means Mac users finally got an official Openoffice version! GoodbyMicrosoft Office for Mac!
- OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now able to open files created with Microsoft Office 2007 or Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, file formats).
- Impress, the PowerPoint alternative, supprots multiple screens
- New, fresh icons
And lots more.
Download it you guys, obey the Internetling!
Most of my readers probably know I’m not very fond of Microsoft. Although, sometimes, an extremely rare thing happens: it’s when the talented people working at Microsoft actually get a chance to create something cool. In this small patch of cool between all the other Microsoft un-coolness is also the idea of making Microsoft Office more Web-capable.
Office 14, the next Desktop Office Suite (coming first half of ‘09), will feature more online power than the previous versions, which had the online capabilities of a dead frog with a 28.8k modem duct-taped to it.
Of course, Office Live Workspace already provided basic collaboration and synchronization for Word, Excel and PowerPoint (I wonder why people still use this piece of fecal matter for presentations), and there’s always Groove, but we still don’t have that for Access and other additional programs. So Gates said that this is about to change in Office 14.
Hooray for those still struggling with Windows, I guess.
InfoPath Services and Groove Services are fine, sure, but who has time to setup a server?
What I’m trying to say here is not that Microsoft should become Google Docs, but that there are easier ways to do it, for people who do not have the money and/or time for investing into servers. That’s what Google does right.
