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OpenOffice.org, now released in its long-awaited 3.0 version, is a free, open-source replacement for Microsoft Office—and the first and only application suite that can be seriously considered to be a substitute for the massive power and flexibility of Microsoft’s suite. OpenOffice.org used to look clunky and work slowly, but the 3.0 version, which I tested in its final Release Candidate version (RC4), is sleek and fast. It still retains the essential look and feel of Microsoft Office 2003 and earlier versions, instead of imitating the new ribbon interface of Office 2007, but that’s a plus for many users who want as much continuity as possible when switching to a new application.

OpenOffice.org doesn’t include all of Office’s features, but it adds some conveniences that Office can’t provide, such as built-in PDF export and a single interface for opening and editing word-processing documents, HTML files, worksheets, presentations, and drawings. Demand for OpenOffice.org 3 has been so high on its first day of out of beta that the official Web site crashed.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 has six basic components: Writer, a word processor and HTML editor; Calc, a spreadsheet; Draw, a graphics editor; Impress, a presentations program; Math, an equation editor; and Base, a database application. When evaluating the product, though, I wasn’t really aware of six separate programs, because all document types open in the same window, just with slightly different menus on the top line. The only exception is the Base application, where the form and query designer has created a separate interface—you work with the actual database forms, however, in the same window that you use for the other applications.

After using OpenOffice’s MS Word analog, Writer, all day, I can confirm that this update is worth it for the improvement in response and load times, if nothing else. The installation is still enormous, with an installer about 130MB for Windows users and 160MB for Mac, but the installation process is smoother. From start to finish, it clocked in at around 5 minutes, significantly faster than installing OpenOffice 2. People who use OpenOffice as their primary productivity suite should take advantage of the OpenOffice Quickstarter, which noticeably accelerates program launch times and has been made even faster in version 3.

Mac users will also be pleased to see that they no longer need to grab a separate installation of X11–the new installer will run natively on OS X, and Windows Vista users should encounter fewer problems than before.

Many of the new features are only noticeable depending on how much of the OpenOffice suite you use. If you’re a rebel and you use it in your work environment when everybody else is still on Microsoft Office, the compatibility with Office 2007/2008 file formats is hard to ignore. Finally getting native support for DOCX and XLSX, for example, is long overdue. If my tests jumping back and forth between XLSX and XLS files were any indication, though, the formats are now seamlessly integrated. However, OpenOffice can not yet save files in the new MS Office format.

For governments and corporations that don’t want to be dependent on Microsoft’s formats and don’t want to continue paying Microsoft’s prices, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is a serious contender. If you’re a private individual or small business already using Microsoft’s product, I doubt you’ll want to switch, but if your company or agency has been buying Office for thousands of desktops, or if you work for or with a government that requires open-source formats, download OpenOffice.org and don’t look back.

I like the way the interface hews closely to the familiar Microsoft Office 2003 standard, and it places some features more logically, so that, for example, headers and footers are on the Insert menu instead of the View menu. I’m less impressed with the word processor’s view options. These are limited to a Web view (in which the text fills the window and there’s no indication of what the text will look like on a printed page) and a full-page view, complete with top and bottom margins and a quarter-inch-thick gray bar between each page. There’s no equivalent of a Word option that that preserves page layout on screen but doesn’t waste space or add distractions by showing top and bottom margins. Nor will you find a matching capability for a powerful and little-known feature in Word that lets you view different parts of a document in two panes of the same window.

Upgrades to OpenDocument Format 1.2 were glitch-free.

Other improvements to the two most-used programs in OpenOffice include multiple page viewing, improved notes and commenting, and improved PDF creation and importation in Writer, and a Solver feature and spreadsheet sharing in Calc. As you can tell, though, most of these changes bring OpenOffice up to the new standard of MS Office. Besides the OpenDocument Format support, there’s little here that you can’t get in Office. Of course, the benefit of OpenOffice being freeware can’t be understated.

The new Start Center should appeal only to users who like having a landing page or only want to have one link on their desktop. It opens up a slightly redesigned window that highlights all of the OpenOffice tools with big icons. I find the Quickstarter to be a more effective and less intrusive way to do the same thing. Unfortunately, the interface within each program in the suite has gone largely unchanged. It looks fine when compared with MS Office 2003, but not so much when up against the Office 2007/2008.

One useful change involving the landing page is that it now shows up whenever you close a document but don’t exit the program. This streamlines the work flow when jumping between applications, as well as giving you something to look at besides a big gray expanse of nothingness.

Overall, though, the interface isn’t detrimental to using OpenOffice–it’s just not a selling point. If it’s the features that you use the suite for, then there’s no reason not to upgrade.

In OpenOffice.org’s spreadsheet, I missed the graphic flexibility of Excel’s conditional formatting, but I managed well enough with the low-frills, 20th-century conditional-formatting features. And I liked the simple elegance of the charting—it’s almost as elegant as the charting in Google Docs—but got frustrated by uninformative error messages that told me nothing more than “This function cannot be completed with the selected objects.” I was also disappointed that the charting feature was a lot less clever than Excel’s in figuring out which columns to use as labels and which to use as data, but the resulting problems were easy enough to fix.

Compared with earlier versions, OpenOffice.org 3.0 marks an impressive, though uneven advance in features and performance—with some features potentially far in advance of the corresponding features in Microsoft Office. For example, when you insert a graphic in a word-processing document or HTML, you can attach automated actions to specific events that are related to the graphic. Clicking on the graphic will cause some programmed action, such as typing some text or opening a new window, to be performed automatically. In the Release Candidate version I couldn’t get this feature to work reliably: Some of the supplied macros and some of my own recorded macros would run correctly, while others wouldn’t, and I couldn’t see any pattern to the success or failure.

Overall, I found performance to be impressively fast, on a par with that of Microsoft Office but with some limitations. On a Vista system with 4GB of RAM and a fast dual-core processor, I had to wait a surprisingly long time for the charting module to update a simple chart when I changed a display option. But file loading and saving, in all parts of the application, was almost instantaneous.

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