Skip to Content

OpenOffice.org 3 for Mac Beta is available

by Steven Sande May 8th 2008 at 1:30PM

OpenOffice.org 3.0 on MacIf 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
The price of OpenOffice.org 3 is, as always, free! If you're up to test-driving beta ware that may not necessarily be as stable or fast as your other office suite(s), click here to be transported to the beta site.

View Tags

Related Stories

Categories

Software Open Source Beta Beat

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....
 

Add a Comment

Sign in »
*0 / 3000 Character Maximum

25 Comments

Filter by:
k

Too bad it still doesn't support Option-Left/Right to go Left/Right one word, ctrl+a/e for beginning/end of line, and all those other marvellous keybindings that Mac users get in almost every other Mac program.

If it did, I might even consider _using_ this bulky hog of a program.

June 04 2008 at 7:42 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Raven88

i put it on yesterday on a fresh install of Leopard and it seems to be working ok (it seems to be faster than Office2008 which i tried on my previous tiger install). The only problem i had was when playing a slideshow - the transitions were sloooooow.

May 09 2008 at 1:25 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Guillermo

Well, I hoped it to be better than NeoOffice but it is just the same (or worse). It's slooower and uuuglier than NeoOffice (I know, hard to believe). It's a beta so it just can get better but I don't think this is the kind of office suite I'm looking for.

May 08 2008 at 6:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Fritz Laurel

The only thing I want MS Office for is Entourage. Why are there no great mail clients for Mac??

May 08 2008 at 5:24 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Ric

I waited long for this, but it's already been passed up in the form of Google Apps/Zoho Office/Zimbra Suite.

May 08 2008 at 4:11 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Ric's comment
Steven Sande

Agreed. In this day of ubiquitous connectivity, web apps are the way to go. They sure make shared access and editing a lot easier.

May 08 2008 at 4:19 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Kevin Davidson

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.

May 08 2008 at 4:08 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to Kevin Davidson's comment
Steven Sande

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.

May 08 2008 at 4:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
teqst

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.

May 08 2008 at 3:27 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
gadifer

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.

May 08 2008 at 3:23 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
1 reply to gadifer's comment
5cents

NeoOffice is java based I believe. OO3 is a native app for OSX.

May 08 2008 at 4:26 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Chad

It's not exactly speedy... Actually from a bit of back to back testing, I think Office X under PPC emulation is faster...

May 08 2008 at 3:06 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
effzehn

I've waited for over 2 years for this. Hope the wait was worth it...

May 08 2008 at 2:39 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Buy an ad here

Hot Apps on TUAW

Tweets

© 2012 AOL Inc. All Rights Reserved.