It has been almost three years since the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. During that time we've seen community fragmentation and frustration resulting from Sun's heavy involvement with the office suite's development, and even a third-party online version that provides editing and collaboration features. Now, the open-source office suite is back with a new 3.0 beta release, ushering in a handful of major enhancements, broader file format support, and a solid batch of evolutionary new features. Ars Technica takes the new beta for a spin to see if our productivity increases.

Enhancements have been made across the board to OpenOffice.org's various components. A new Solver component makes calculating dependent spreadsheet cells much easier (a bonus for Mac users as Excel 2008 reportedly lost its solving component), and vastly improved cropping features in the Draw and Impress apps are indeed more intuitive. When working in Writer, multiple pages can be displayed at once for a bird's eye view of a document, and notes (or comments) on a document are now displayed in a sidebar, paralleling the same UI found in many other text editors.





Mac users looking for a feature-rich alternative to Microsoft Office can take another look at OpenOffice.org 3, now that it runs natively on Intel Macs



Speaking of Mac users, a significant enhancement to OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is that it now runs on Intel Macs without the need for the X11 Unix environment. Sorry, PowerPC Mac owners—this release is Intel-specific, and not a Universal Binary. Coming to the Mac in a native form also means that OpenOffice.org has received a bit of a facelift, though it still doesn't have the UI of a truly native Mac OS X application. Still, considering that this has been a long-anticipated release, Mac users interesting in using OpenOffice can't really complain much.





A PowerPoint slide saved in the PowerPoint 2007 format and opened in PowerPoint 2007



Another touted area of improvement for OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta is its support for the ODF 1.2 ISO standard, as well as the ability to open files created in Microsoft Office 2007 for Windows and 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). In our brief testing, however, we found this file format support to be a mixed bag. Most documents saved in the newer Office formats looked fine on both the latest Windows and Mac suites, but formatting quirks appeared in some of them when opened in the OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta.





The same slide in the same file format opened in OpenOffice 3.0 beta



Page breaks sometimes appear in documents where none are specified, and a number of text rendering and formatting issues appeared in PowerPoint documents. Excel files, however, fared the best in our testing, as we didn't notice any discrepancies between office suites.

We also had trouble with the intriguing new feature of spreadsheet collaboration. It's easy to switch on sharing for a document, but we weren't able to get other users on the network to see the document for editing.

Overall, OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta feels like a solid evolutionary update with a handful of new features that will be useful to various niche user groups. It certainly is still a beta, however, as the suite crashed at least once on both Windows Vista and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard during testing. If you want to put a copy of your own through its paces, though, compiled versions for Linux, Solaris, Windows, and Mac OS X (Intel Macs only) are available now from OpenOffice.org's beta download site.