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Technology news and Jobs arrow Our Blogs arrow Core Dump arrow OpenOffice.org readies Mac-native release
OpenOffice.org readies Mac-native release PDF E-mail
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by Stephen Withers   
Tuesday, 13 May 2008
One of the main barriers to the wider adoption of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) suite by Mac users is its dependence on X11, as few of them are comfortable working in that environment. If that requirement vanished and OOo took on the familiar Aqua look and feel, would you give the open source office suite a try?

If you're keen, a public beta of OOo 3.0 complete with Aqua goodness is now available for download. While the beta is primarily aimed at existing users, I can see other adventurous members of the Mac community giving it a go.

This is the first official Mac-native version of OOo. Two people previously associated with the OOo project broke away to create NeoOffice , a Mac port of OOo with support for features such as QuickTime and the system-wide grammar checker, as well as an 'Aquafied' user interface.

Ed Peterlin and Patrick Luby originally split from OOo for licensing reasons, but they continue to maintain NeoOffice as an OOo derivative in order to spend their time on fixing bugs and delivering support rather than on coordination with the rest of the OOo project team.

But back to the OOo 3.0 beta.

Where Microsoft Office 2008 dropped support for VBA and the Solver feature found in earlier versions, OOo 3.0 introduces limited VBA support and a Solver component.

Features common to versions for all operating systems include support for Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 as well as read compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007/2008 documents, larger spreadsheets (1024 columns) and improvements to charting, image editing, and word processing.

OOo 3.0 is scheduled for release in September.

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