Filed under: Software, Open Source, Beta Beat
OpenOffice.org 3 for Mac Beta is available
If you've been cursing the big price tag and lack of VBA support in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac, OpenOffice.org is coming to your rescue. Last September, the OpenOffice.org dev team announced that they would be porting the suite to run natively on the Mac. Previous versions ran under the X11 environment, which not only hogged resources, but didn't have the Aqua look and feel we all love. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is still beta, but a quick test-drive of the application showed that it is almost ready for prime time. OOo is a full-featured office suite, complete with word processor (Writer), spreadsheet (Calc), presentation package (Impress), drawing app (Draw), as well as database tools (Base) that are sadly lacking in other office suites.
The feature set of OpenOffice.org 3 is impressive:
- Imports Microsoft Office binary (.doc, .ppt, .xls) and Office 2007/Office 2008 for Mac (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx) files
- A solver component for solving optimization problems, something lacking in Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac
- Spreadsheet workbook sharing
- Display of multiple Writer pages while editing
- MS Office-like comments in Writer
- Limited VBA macro support -- which is still better than no support
- Extensibility with Mozilla Thunderbird and Lightning, Sun Wiki Publisher and Report Builder
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 2)
Jesus Franco said 1:42PM on 5-08-2008
No screenshots?
Thanks anyway, I guess I'll just download it.
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goboColossus said 1:45PM on 5-08-2008
Click the read link and you can figure it out from there.
Or click the following link.
http://marketing.openoffice.org/3.0/featurelistbeta.html
adam said 3:22PM on 5-08-2008
Tried this on my MBP w/Leopard. Wouldn't get past registration screen, just beach-balled. Be warned.
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Steven Sande said 1:54PM on 5-08-2008
As with any beta-ware, YMMV. I've already seen a few comments / emails from readers who are downloading OOo3 and having it crash. On my iMac, it works fine, although it's even slower than MS Office 2004 when it is starting up.
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Temporal said 1:58PM on 5-08-2008
It's pretty much a UI abomination.
5cents said 4:28PM on 5-08-2008
UI abomination is right. I thought NeoOffice was a bit sketchy looking but compare to OO3, it's beautiful. Also, despite NeoOffice being java based, it loads and runs much quicker than OO3. Still, it's nice to see OO3 natively on OSX and the beta can only get better.
William Jackson said 2:20PM on 5-08-2008
I have been using a copy since 3/13 without a problem. Is this a newer version?
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Steven Sande said 2:21PM on 5-08-2008
This is Build BEA300_m2. Which build do you have?
jonas.wisser said 2:35PM on 5-08-2008
Intel only. Nothing to see here for PPC users.
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michas_pi said 7:12PM on 5-08-2008
I hope they make it PPC-compatible. My iMac G5 is desperate for an office suite.
William Jackson said 2:33PM on 5-08-2008
OO.o 3.0.0[30m(Build:9281)]
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droslovinia said 2:42PM on 5-08-2008
I've been stuck in PC hell for some time now. Being able to use OpenOffice (since version 1.4) has been one of the few bright spots.
Even though my current employer has popped for Orifice '08 for my MBP, I'll still follow the OO threads, because it is, at heart, a nice app that I'd love to use as my everyday word processor on all my machines- especially at the price!
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Andre said 2:40PM on 5-08-2008
I've waited for over 2 years for this. Hope the wait was worth it...
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Chad said 3:07PM on 5-08-2008
It's not exactly speedy... Actually from a bit of back to back testing, I think Office X under PPC emulation is faster...
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gadifer said 3:33PM on 5-08-2008
What's the difference between this and neo-office? I've been using neo-office now for several months mainly for imported excel spreadsheets. It's worked great. For someone so steeped in excel as me it's been much more intuitive than Numbers. I believe neo-office is a java version of open office but I'm not too conversant in that kind of thing.
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5cents said 4:26PM on 5-08-2008
NeoOffice is java based I believe. OO3 is a native app for OSX.
Tequila2 said 3:27PM on 5-08-2008
I was one of the (probably many) users that send in this "item". I ran it all day, but did notice my system slowing down tremendously. Eventually i had a look at my menubar and noticed that i was using 92% of my RAM. My main machine is a MPB 15" 2,33Ghz with 3GB of RAM. Big memory leak i'd say ...
Using it was very nice though. Apart from the UI which isn't what i would call aqua, yet, the suite performed very well. It looks like an X11 app, although it isn't. It is however a lot speedier than MS office 08 or X in rosetta.
Eventually i had to uninstall the whole suite. I had syslogd processes taking up 100% of 1 core all the time or 80% of both. Killing them only helped for a couple of minutes.
All is fine now, but this is definitely not ready for general use yet, hence the beta of course.
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Kevin Davidson said 4:08PM on 5-08-2008
NeoOffice does all of this now and has been a native Aqua app for ages and ages. It's a fork of Open Office that added native Aqua Mac support long before the OpenOffice crowd were ready to try it themselves.
http://www.neooffice.org/
It's good news that OpenOffice is finally going native, but don't expect it to ever behave much like a Mac application.
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Steven Sande said 4:18PM on 5-08-2008
Maybe it's just me, but I've always had huge problems with NeoOffice crashing. Has it improved? The last time I downloaded and used it was about this time in 2007.
blessingx said 4:12PM on 5-08-2008
I waited long for this, but it's already been passed up in the form of Google Apps/Zoho Office/Zimbra Suite.
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