Open Office and its companion product Star Office are continuing to make headway towards becoming real, credible Microsoft Office alternatives. With version 7 of Star Office (maps to version 1 of OOo, I think), the product was finally actually usable. Certainly not perfect, but light years from the buggy, confusing package it was years ago. One of the package’s biggest obstacles, in fact, is convincing users of prior version to give it another shot, so poor was the experience.
I finally got a chance to run through the Beta this morning, and I must say that on initial review, it’s a substantial upgrade. The most noticeable difference is load time; OOo 2.0 now loads for me in a time comparable with Windows Office, rather than a good 15 to 30 seconds. Much attention has been paid to the UI, and I’m told handling of formatting has improved.
Unfortunately for RedMonk, OOo has not improved to the extent that it can read our publication Word template format – those are still garbled when opened. Better, but not usable. Our template is a standard Word document, but with numerous nested and formatted tables to give margins, margin sections, etc.
But the most interesting new feature for me is the added database functionality, pictured in the screenshot. One of the most common complaints I’ve heard about OOo in the past has been from small business that are heavily reliant on Access, to which the open source offering had no credible alternative. I’ve only played around with the Open Office Base functionality a bit, but it seems very comparable to my admittedly outdated experiences with Microsoft Access. Unless there are migration options I’m not aware of, that won’t help those with substantial existing implementations in Access, but it will undoubtedly help meet the ticklist requirement of “database” on simple RFP’s.
OOo’s still got a ways to catch up with Microsoft’s package in overall polish and reliability, but as a “good enough” offering, it’s really pretty solid. If you’re interested, you can check out a beta here.
Update: Fixed typo, and clarified comments around our template in response to a query.
