Open office 3.0 preview

The 3.0 beta version of the most popular open source software, OpenOffice has been releasedrecently.  It remains the only document editor that I use to produce Word files. 

 The most significant added feature of this new release is the native support for Mac. Don't know how they did it, but it looks (and really is) just another cool Mac applications. It means no need to run X11 before using the older version of OpenOffice with my new shinny, white Macbook. Here are some snapshots, of the new OpenOffice center and look of the Spreadsheet program:

The biggest disappointment, still, is the problem with multiple, in consecutive copy and paste feature with the Spreadsheet. For instance, your data is in A1-A100. You want to select A5,A10,A15... to make another table. It's not possible with OpenOffice, as a lovely window popping up saying that Multiple Selection is Not Possible. This feature has been request from version 1.x, but no one seemed to pay attention. As far as I am concerned, this is the one that hold me back from completely abandon Microsoft Office suite.  And don't tell me Visio is the best drawing program out there. The truth is, it's totally inferior to xFig regarding producing quality EPS pictures, which can be bring straight to laTex documents. 

It is a smart move from OpenOffice to have native support for Mac. However, interesting questions were raised on how much the Mac community going to contribute to the development of the OpenOffice, or the Linux open source community in general. The common perception is that Mac developers are not as open as their fellows on the Linux world. For one thing, they are not very keen make the applications cross-platform compatible.