View this article at: http://www.macnn.com/articles/08/10/14/openoffice.30/
Tuesday, Oct 14, 2008 12:00am
First Look: OpenOffice 3.0, office suite
If you need an office suite for the Mac, your choices used to be limited to Microsoft Office 2008 or Apple’s iWork. Unfortunately, neither option offered a complete solution. Office 2008 can share the latest file formats with Office 2007 for Windows, but the Mac and Windows versions of Office neither look nor work exactly alike. If you’re already familiar with Office 2007 on Windows, Office 2008 for the Mac will seem different enough to frustrate and confuse you. Apple’s iWork is the only other office suite solution, but it lacks a Windows version. For a true cross-platform office suite, you can now rely on the open source OpenOffice 3.0.

This office suite offers true compatibility across multiple platforms, running on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X. In fact, version 3.0 is the first version that finally offers native support for Mac OS X (previous versions required X11 to run on the Mac).

More importantly, this suite also offers file compatibility with the latest Office 2007 file formats (such as .docx) along with the newest Open Document Format (ODF) file standards. In addition, you can directly export files to PDF format as well although it cannot read or write to the native file formats of iWork.

Where Office 2008 and iWork fall short is that both suites only offer a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program (while Office 2008 also offers Entourage as an e-mail client and organizer). In contrast, this suite offers a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, vector drawing program, and a relational database.