OpenOffice 3.0 released, ready for download

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Monday, 13 October 2008 19:39

Opinion and Analysis

Finally out of the beta and release candidate versions, Sun Microsystems' OpenOffice.org 3.0 has been released for anyone to download and try for themselves. Here's my "first look" at this brand new Office suite!

Ok, so I'm writing this article in OpenOffice 3.0's “Writer” app, and aside from the nice new colourful icons in the toolbar, the first thing I noticed is that the red underline for misspelled words was not appearing.

Looking through all the settings, I could see that the spell check “as you type” was on, so I then decided to change the language setting from “English Australia” to “English USA” - and it worked.

Now, I didn't tell OpenOffice that I was in Australia, it obviously picked that up from my Windows Vista regional settings, so I guess I'm going to have to download an Australian English dictionary plugin for OpenOffice 3.0 to make it work, although it's a shame it wasn't included in the package.

The OpenOffice site seems to be playing up – trying to get to the News page took a long time, and the “Press” page still won't load at all, but actually downloading OpenOffice 3.0 was no problem. I guess if you're going to have site problems on the day of launching your new office suite, the download part is the one part you want working no matter what!

I can see that as I type certain words, OpenOffice will automatically fill the word in for me. This seems to work for longer words – every time I start typing in “the” I'm given the choice for the word “themsevles”.

You can see the rest of the word highlighted in blue, and if you want the choice OpenOffice is giving you, just press enter.

This also happens when I type OpenOffice – I just type Open, and “Office” is ready and waiting. Of course, if you press the space bar, the choice goes away. I don't remember seeing this in OpenOffice 2.0, and if you don't like it, I'm sure there's a way somewhere in the option to turn it off.

Everything seems quite snappy, and so far, it all looks quite impressive. I've had a quick look at the presentation and spreadsheet tools, although OpenOffice also offers a drawing program and a database, as longstanding OpenOffice users would know.

What are some of the key new features, which languages is 3.0 available (and for what platforms), and where can you download a free copy from? Please read on to page 2.