OpenOffice.org 3 Release Candidate 3: No X11 Needed

I took a close look at the OpenOffice.org 3 Beta release back in May (OpenOffice 3.0 Beta with Native Mac Aqua Interface (Finally!)). Ooo 3 is now in a Release Candidate 3 stage. Since, it should be close to production quality by this stage, I decided to revisit it. I tested it on a first generation MacBook with a 2GHz Core Duo processor and 1GB RAM.

OOo 3 looks like it starts faster than OOo 2 since it doesn't require starting X11 first. However, opening any kind of document file (even a simple HTML file) seems to take a bit longer than I expected at this stage of the game (Release Candidate 3).

Although I never use word processors to edit HTML or XML files, I brought in this blog item into the OOoeditor. Why? I simply wanted to see what its HTML editor looked like. I was shocked to find that it behaved like Microsoft Word and the now defunct Microsoft Frontpage by actually modifying even the simplest tags like the paragraph tag without asking. Then, it automatically saved the changes to the file, again, without asking. I had a backup of this file (which happened to be this blog entry). So, it wasn't a disaster.

The main point of OOo 3 from the Mac point of view is that it is now a native application using the native graphical interface style. You can see the OOo Presentation view with an old PowerPoint 2003 slide deck opened. As you can see, it has the general look and feel of other Mac applications.

OOo 3 does, however, give you the option to switch conventional OOo dialog boxes instead of the familar Mac style dialogs. If you are a long time OOo user or switch between a Mac and Windows or Linux, this might be a desirable option.

The conversion issues I noted in the OOo 3 Beta release remain in RC2. For example, you can see the result of importing a relatively simply formatted Word 2007 DOCX file. The bullets used in Word were the default bullets but did not translate in OOo 3. This paricular document also had a number of comments between me and the article's editor. OOo does not provide editorial commenting features. So, the comments were simply added as ordinary text on each page.

However, I'm not going to dwell on compatibility with Word, Excel, or PowerPoint. The main points is that it looks like OOo 3 is nearing a production release and that its long awaited native Mac interface looks good and seems to work well after a couple of weeks of use (I started with RC2 and then updated to RC3 after its release).