Open Office 3 on Mac – First Look Review

open office 3

Office suite Openoffice has launched its new release openoffice 3 today. The open office aqua project has been fledgling for over six months and the release moved out of alpha this morning. This is quite a significant move to the mac community because this release of openoffice will be the first to be a native mac application suite.

While the mac community has been blessed with the best of software when it came to multimedia, i should accept that the office suite on the mac is quite lagging behind. Iphoto, iweb, imovie might find no parallels in any other operating system, they are simply the best, further enhanced by its integration. But when it came to office suite, the mac community was left with “not the best of its nature” and it was so unlike using a mac. The various office suite for mac and their advantages and disadvantages.

open office 2

1. OPEN OFFICE 2.X

While this software was legacy and was open source, it required X11 as a platform and i must say there were a lot of bugs. The startup time was one of the worst. I remember my mac (2.4Ghz 2GB RAM macbook) sweating every time to open a powerpoint presentation. It still was open source, and had a lot of features like pdf export. Though the processing speed was not bad, occasionally the openoffice thread would suck a lot of memory and i often encountered frequent crashes. If you use GIMP and openoffice together, both would crash. (GIMP also required X11)

2. MICROSOFT OFFICE for MAC

microsoft office for mac

The first and the foremost thing that strikes me here is that it is from MICROSOFT. I have a strong penchant for not using MS products, until recently i discovered that only windows was crap and not all other MS products. I visited the apple store and i tried MS word, excel and powerpoint. The start up time was average, and the performance pretty good (there were no other applications running and it was a macpro ). The guy at the apple store suggested me to buy iWork instead of MS office, quoting “iwork is from apple” with a huge grin on his face. “Oh! I am with you, dude!!” Oh! This software costs $150 for a student edition and $400 for the business version. OK, its from microsoft and its too Costly!!

neo office

3. NEO OFFICE

Open office software built on the openoffice engine. I should say this lacked a lot of features and formats and i doubt if they could cope up with the latest versions. But this software could run without the X11, which really made me happy. Adding to the fact that is free, it is also native mac and open source, but lacks features and future releases are not guaranteed.

4. iWork 08

iwork

Having bathed in the luxury and style of mac products, i should say i was disappointed with the way iWork worked on my system. Keynote was very good and had a boatload of features like virtual present and convert to swf. The integration with other products was also good. I downloaded a trail version of iwork and i should say Numbers and Pages were created in a hurry and so not of “apple quality“. There were a lots of bugs and numbers was sweating, literally. I have never seen my mac freeze before. I was literally paying only for Keynote (which is lovely).The price tag reads $79.

If you use presentations a lot, you should buy keynote. But you cannot purchase keynote as a separate software, you need to buy Iwork.

5. OPEN OFFICE 3.0

open-office 3 aqua

This software seems to have freshened up a lot. So, we have decided to come up with a open office 3 review mac. The first impression – the startup time was amazing, relative to the older version. It is still taking up a lot of space. (With mail, ichat , itunes and firefox runing along with open office, this was a more than decent performance). It does not require X11, which makes it not struggle. With a cold start, open office 3 seems to open up in 17 seconds. I reopen openoffice3 and it pops up in 3 seconds, cool!!

The performance is pretty good and so far no crashes. I move down to the second page and pages seem to stick together, may be lack of memory space.

OPEN OFFICE 3 – Improvements / features

• Huge improvement in startup time
• Works without the X11.
• Native mac app from open office for the first time
• Aqua cool blue, more evident in dumber operating systems (read windows)
• Works faster and takes up lesser memory (see activity monitor below)
• Support for Microsoft 2006/2007 formats (read only)
• Cannot use with documents created with iWork
• Better features and plugins

A lot of formats are supported, including the latest word document formats from microsoft used in office 2007 formats. These documents will however be only read only. What is even worse is that openoffice3 cannot even read documents created with iwork. Write is obviously out of question. For a list of supported formats, see the open office 3 screenshot below. Support for office 2008 is not evident in this release.

Open office 3 screenshot mac

open office 3 mac screenshot

open office 3 supported formats

Here are a few screen shots. I am yet to play with calc yet, but impress looks good. With the leopard style menubar fixed to the top, almost all operations are at the mouse click in the toolbars.

With the release of open office3, at the time of this writing, it seems that the website is dragged by numerous users. Here is a screenshot.

Its ok openoffice, your apology is gracefully accepted.

When you comment, please leave your mac configuration, if you are quoting performance.

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