OpenOffice 3 has PDF import, native Aqua UI, and Tara Reid

OpenOffice 3 has PDF import, native Aqua UI, and Tara Reid

There’s been quite a bit of buzz recently after it was announced that OpenOffice 3 was due in September. It seems, however, most people still aren’t aware of what’s in store.

We love OpenOffice.org, hereby referred to as OpenOffice like normal people do. We like the fact it does pretty much everything we need for free, we like the out-of-the box PDF and Flash support, its better-than-Word ability to work with large documents, and the joys of using a standard file format that’s actually, you know, a standard.

But the Openpoffice.org website is a rather scary place. We managed to find this conference presentation lurking in the shadows before running away in fear of mid 90’s web design. Here’s the best bits:

Native Mac OS X Aqua version

The Mac finally gets a native OpenOffice. This has been going on for a while - you can already download the native OS X OpenOffice 2.3 beta, but this time it’s official.
Sure, NeoOffice already does this, but OpenOffice 3 for Mac is new code that will be released and updated at the same time as the Windows and Linux versions. Speaking of Windows, Vista users also get some kind of unspecified ‘integration’ for 3.0.

New PIM

We love our Pimms with ginger ale, lemonade, citrus fruit, cucumber and ice. OpenOffice 3 has a different recipe:

• Email
• Calendaring with meeting invites and free/busy publishing
• Task management
• Server connectivity to CalDAV servers, Google Calendar and Sun Calendar Server, as well as the obligatory iCal support. Alas, no mention of Zimbra.
• Specifically touted by OpenOffice developers as an ‘Outlook replacement’

Support for Everything

Remember showing your mates the Flash export in OpenOffice 2 Impress? Well drag them round again, as OpenOffice 3 takes it a step further.

• PDF files can be imported into Draw and edited with all their layout intact. Yum.
• The whole Openoffice suite can save ‘hybrid’ PDF documents that can be viewed as PDFs or edited as OpenDocument files.
• Edit wikis directly from OpenOffice without learning Yet Another Needless Wiki Markup Format.
• WordPress and Movabletype blogs can be edited too.
• Support for MS Office 2007 XML. Microsoft confusingly calls this ‘Office Open XML’. We call it Stop Naming Your Unstable Undocumented Shitty Format To Sound Like Ours Thanks.
• Math fetishists can enjoy enhanced Latex support.

Extension Manager

Openoffice 3 will have simple Firefox-like extensions. There’s a wide variety of existing OpenOffice extensions already available:

• Fax support (both send and receive)
• Google docs integration
• Remote control for presentations via your bluetooth remote
• Version control with Subversion
• Voice commentaries for presentations

Reports

Beancounters and thier minions can now make pretty documents from databases using Base’s new reporting engine.

Tara Reid

This release marks the appearance of Tara Reid in OpenOffice. Witnesses report the anorexic booze hound stumbled into OOs build system by accident, and will now live inside OpenOffice translating documents into a language only spoken when you’ve drunk 8 bottles of vodka.

Unfortunately in current betas, when this feature is enabled, OpenOffice smells vaguely of pee.

So that’s it for OpenOffice 3. Betas are arriving in the next few months, and the final should be done by September.

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