Software Free

OpenOffice.org has continuously pumped out new features in the "minor" releases since 2.0, but 3.0 is exciting from a lot of perspectives. Everyone will have their own view on what's important in the OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta release, but here's my list of favourites:

• Native MacOS X support - a fast, stable, accessible free productivity suite on the platform that "thinks different" - what's not to like?
• Vista support - that's one less reason to hate Microsoft's flashy but slow and incompatible downgrade to Windows XP
• Even More Microsoft Compatibility - Microsoft Office 2007 (and 2008 Mac) Document Filters - keep sharing docs with the folks who are still paying Microsoft for upgrades, limited VBA support (probably enough for a lot of useful documents to work flawlessly)
• Improved Usability - Intuitive image cropping in Draw, Writer notes appear on the side with colours for each user, drag and drop rows and columns in Calc, paste CSV directly into a Calc cell
• See More - Impress can display on a second monitor (an upcoming extension will also let presenters see their notes and the next slide), Writer can edit multiple pages across and down the on screen (now if only there was a mode optimised for reading, like in Acrobat Reader and MS Word)
• Collaboration - spreadsheets are used for capturing and sharing all kinds of information, now multiple users can edit one simultaneously, a wiki extension for editing Wikipedia itself and both public and in-house MediaWiki deployments
• Size Matters - up 1024 columns in Calc, images up to 300x300 cm in Draw
• Format Upgrades - ODF 1.2 support, better HTML export from Calc and (coming soon) import PDF documents!

Of course it's not all good news - OpenOffice.org has also gained a "Start Center", one of those useless dialogs to ask what you want to do. Silly, that's what menus are for. OOo, please don't take the next step and add a talking paperclip, but keep on delivering features like the above!