LibreOffice Release Out

The Document Foundation’s LibreOffice, the OpenOffice office suite fork, is on a winning streak. No sooner than Ubuntu lets the world know that LibreOffice is its office suite of choice, than the next day the first full, shipping version of the program, LibreOffice 3.3, is released.

LibreOffice 3.3 includes numerous new features when compared to its OpenOffice parent. To my mind, the most important of these for modern office workers is that it has much better import and export tools for Microsoft Office 2007 and above OpenXML formats. Love them or hate them–I hate them myself–more and more businesses are using these formats and being able to work with them is becoming a business-critical feature. In addition, LibreOffice can also now import Adobe PDF, Microsoft Works, and Lotus Word Pro documents and has better WordPerfect document import facilities.

Screenshots: New features from LibreOffice 3.3

According to The Document Foundation, “LibreOffice 3.3 also incorporates all the new features of OpenOffice.org 3.3, such as new custom properties handling; embedding of standard PDF fonts in PDF documents; new Liberation Narrow font; increased document protection in Writer and Calc; auto decimals digits for ‘General’ format in Calc; 1 million rows in a spreadsheet; new options for CSV import in Calc; insert drawing objects in Charts; hierarchical axis labels for Charts; improved slide layout handling in Impress; new easier to use print interface; more options for Changing case; and colored sheet Tabs in Calc.”

The Document Foundation also states that it will add new features faster than OpenOffice because its “community of developers has been able to build their own and independent process, and stand on their feet in a very short time (in relation to the size of the code and the ambitions of the project).” Indeed, this in part why the fork happened. Regardless of how one sees Oracle’s management of Sun’s former open-source projects, OpenOffice was long known for being very slow to update compared to more agile open-source projects.

As Michael Meeks, Novell Distinguished Engineer and Document Foundation community member told me, “The growth and output of this community, in just a short period of time, underscores the need for and importance of a truly open project dedicated to creating the best office suite available–period. Now that we have gotten started we only expect the project to pick up steam and there is still plenty of work to do for everyone from developers to artists to translators. With new contributors joining every day, LibreOffice will continue to deliver the innovative features and functionality that users want. ”

Looking ahead, Caolan McNamara, Red Hat’s Desktop Engineer in charge of OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice, said in a statement, “We are excited: this is our very first stable release, and therefore we are eager to get user feedback, which will be integrated immediately in the code and released very soon. After February, we will be moving to a real time based, predictable, transparent and public release schedule, according to the desire of the Engineering Steering Committee and the requests of the users”. For further details, see the LibreOffice development roadmap.

LibreOffice 3.3 is now available for both direct and BitTorrent downloads. There are versions for Windows; 32 and 64-bits RPM package Linux distributions, such as Red Hat and Novell; 32 and 64-bit DEB package Linux distributions such as Debian and Ubuntu; and both PowerPC and Intel Macs.


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Is OpenOffice good enough?

Yes.

OK, obviously there’s more to this story than my tongue-in-cheek answer. This came up after one of our supercool, power user secretaries (who is an Office 2003/2007 wiz) ran a training session for the other secretaries in the district. The other secretaries are largely using OpenOffice (NeoOffice, actually, since OO.org for OS X still isn’t where it needs to be). It’s also worth noting that these secretaries have quite a spectrum of abilities from quite proficient to looking for the “any key.”

The training session actually centered on our student information system, but touched on OpenOffice as a tool for manipulating data extracted from the SIS. Whether it was for a mail merge or simply easy sorting and reporting of various fields, Excel (and OpenOffice Calc) is a necessary tool in most secretaries’ bag of tricks.

My uber-secretary leading the training had only recently begun using OpenOffice and really prefers the slick, polished interface of Office 2007 (and the utter simplicity of mail merges and labels that OpenOffice just can’t match). She raised the question of whether OpenOffice could fully meet the needs of a secretary or if it lacked the automation tools that they need to maximize productivity.

The other secretaries largely consider OO “fine.” They don’t love it, they don’t hate it, but they appreciate that I was able to buy an extra computer for what I saved in licensing costs among the secretarial and nursing staff. Of course, they simply aren’t as proficient as the secretary I had doing the training.

So there it is: Is OpenOffice good enough?

I still stick with my original answer: yes, it is. For the vast majority of users (students, teachers, and administrators, especially), OpenOffice is more than good enough. The price is certainly right, too.

Even for the most savvy power users, OpenOffice will suffice. However, secretaries, as we all know, run our schools. Anything we can do to keep them happy and make them as productive as possible should probably be a high priority for us. For some of them, Microsoft Office (especially its latest iteration which actually is a very nice piece of software) just might be worth the licensing if it meets their needs better.