With all the bad press around MS Windows Vista and the frustrations of many users with the user interface of MS Office 2007 OpenOffice.org 3.0 looks to many like the white knight in the office productivity battle. OpenOffice 3.0 (currently in Beta) comes with a number of new features that make it an even better competitor to MS Office than the versions before. It opens MS Offic 2007 files (e.g. ldocx, .pptx) and it offers enhanced compatibility between the different operation system platforms (e.g. Mac OS, Windows, Linux). So the key goal is to allow more people to collaborate, regardless of their platform and their office suite they are using. Interesting for many could also be the new collaboration features when working on the same spreadsheet files with other people or the Solver functionality that MS Office users may know and Microsoft apparently doesn’t offer for MS Office 2008 for Mac OS any more. Many other changes have been incorporated into OO 3.0, from better PDF support to enhanced charting and better compatibility with MS Office. So it could well be that with these recent changes OO 3.0 will receive an even higher rating on EOS Directory than before. And it’s clearly time for enterprises looking for alternatives to investigate again.

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This entry was posted by Bruno von Rotz on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 4:10 am and is filed under Open Source projects. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.