OpenOffice 3.0 Beta with Native Mac Aqua Interface (Finally!)

One of the first things I did while waiting for my Mac mini to arrive back in 2005 was to get a copy of OpenOffice.org. As a Mac-newbie, I was surprised that I had to run it under X11. That didn't seem right. So, I went web-hunting and found NeoOffice. Quite honestly, I never understood why Sun didn't just fund and support that project. In any case, here we are three years later and we finally have a native Aqua version of...

OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta

Beta??? NeoOffice has been running with the ball for years and OpenOffice with a native Aqua interface is still in beta? I don't know what took so long. But, the good news is that Mac users won't need to fire up X11 just to use OpenOffice 3.0. Here's a brief commentary on what I noticed after playing with OOo 3.0 Beta.

I ran into an interesting surprise right away. Microsoft's own Excel 2008 displayed this unusual error message when I opened up a standard Office 2003(Windows)/Office 2004(Mac) XLS spreadsheet. OpenOffice 3.0 Calc not only opened the same file without complaining but it seemed to start the application and load the file much faster than Excel 2008.

The default font size OpenOffice uses was larger and much easier for me to read. You can see a side-by-side comparison of cells as displayed by Excel 2008 (left) and OpenOffice 3.0 Spreadsheet (right) in the adjacent figure. I did not rescale either screencap. Those are the actual relative sizes.

There are compatibility issues with OpenOffice 3.0 and Microsoft Office 2008's new file types though. The figure here shows an example of PowerPoint 2008's SmartArt feature at work in the slide on the left. The slide to the right shows OpenOffice 3.0's Presentation component's rendering of the same slide. The rendering problem wasn't restricted to just the SmartArt graphics though. You can see that the boldface red title word was converted to some kind of gothic looking font with no bolding.

OpenOffice 3 Beta's Writer also seemed to start up and open a Microsoft Word DOC file much faster than Microsoft Word 2008 did.

We may have had to wait a long time for a native Mac Aqua version of OpenOffice. And, although this is just a beta release, it looks like the wait may have been worthwhile. OpenOffice 3.0 Beta for Mac runs quickly (at least quicker than Microsoft Office 2008). To be honest, I'm not going to abandon Microsoft Office 2004 or 2008. But, OpenOffice 3.0 will probably earn a place on my hard drive as a quickstart alternative to Microsoft Office for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations that do not wander into uncharted Office 2008 formatting areas. OOo for Mac gets a thumbs up from me.