On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

Although this is not currently released until September 2008, I have been working with the latest working version of the upcoming OpenOffice.org 3.0 release.

So far my work has been squarely in Writer (the word processing component) which I have grown to really like over the past year. While some of its interface is a little sprawling in places, it can’t be accused of lacking features. I also happen to think that it works a lot better than Word. Two areas where Word always manages to drive me up the wall is complicated numbered lists and documents of any length with sections. It can get messy and frustrating when the section break doesn’t do as intended and often enough these problems are fixed by diving into Normal mode.

However Writer in its 3.0 iteration is looking very good. It has much improved note/reviewing features, a nice tidy zoom control in the lower right (clearly from MS Office 2007) and also supports multiple pages in the view when editing which I have never found a need for but that might be more in part due to me not owning a widescreen monitor or laptop. I could see some merit in two pages per view on a 1680 by 1050 widescreen display. However, on a 4:3 aspect screen at resolutions of 1280 by 960 or lower, it’s too small to look at comfortably.

The icons have also been a given a subtle touch up and they look nice.

I think OpenOffice.org has a bit of a dilemma here. It’s clearly become a very powerful alternative to Microsoft Office and I do genuinely feel that for the majority of uses in the enterprise or corporate environment would be served by OpenOffice.org very well; especially as its interface is much closer to pre-Office 2007 Microsoft Office products than 2007 is. The only exceptions are people with legacy Microsoft Access databases (which do get around a fair bit still), Powerpoint 2007 and very complicated and deeply workflow entrenched Excel spreadsheets.

The Access databases speak for themselves as they are often entwined in Visual Basic for Applications code and use a bunch of forms that are in the database itself. These don’t lend themselves for OpenOffice.org Base usage, but it’s not impossible for this situation to change if Microsoft does indeed drop VBA with the next release of Office for Windows, over time a replacement will need to be found. Invariably these databases tend to be small affairs on a desktop as most databases that are critical to an organisation’s functioning should now at least be on a dedicated database engine such as SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL etc. which is far in advanced of the scalability and reliability of Jet.

The second is Powerpoint. Up until 2007, it was a decidedly tired looking affair with naff slide styles, terrible clipart and it was a feature of dread in any meeting when someone beamed up their Powerpoint slideshow which could have been just as easily created on Powerpoint 4.0 from 1993. At least 2007 improved this by getting cool slide styles, excellent drawing functionality and generally it is harder to make a bad looking presentation now than before, although the Comic Sans risk always lurks in every company… Impress however whilst alright, isn’t that impressive. Generally the slide effects are very Powerpoint 4 and whilst OpenOffice.org 2.4 addressed this to a degree, there is always a chance that even a decent 128MB dedicated video card will grind to a halt doing a simple slide in transition. This has always been a huge problem with me adopting Impress as it is inexcusable. Even my old 14MHz Amiga 1200 15 years ago with Scala MM200 could exact smoother transitions. Sort it out, please. On top of this, Impress has for as long as I recall, has come with the crappest presentation templates in the world. They suck, all two of them. Sure you can install more and then have something great looking. However most users do not do this. After all, why have Powerpoint presentations looked the same since the dawn of time even when Microsoft offered templates to download. Please for the love of god sort this out for 3.0.

One good thing however that I hope is replicated into Writer and Calc is the table styles which give a nice professional look that Office 2007 offers to tables.

Finally Excel isn’t something I know a lot about but it’s clear that some organisations have Excel spreadsheets deeply embedded in the workflows they work with and a simple straight swap may not be just that. However for the majority of statistical analysis and chart functionality, Calc is great.

Essentially I am impressed with the quality of the current OpenOffice.org 3.0 beta and more is to come such as improved Office 2007 (OXML — formerly OOXML) import/export and other bits I am sure I have missed. However, it does strike me that many more companies shell out for Office licenses when probably 70-80% of their workforce doesn’t need all the functionality Office 2007 provides.

It’s even more mind boggling that a seven year old child would need Microsoft Word? Even Wordpad surely suffices for what they want most of the time. After all, us lot from the early 90s didn’t have this at all until 1993 when the Acorn Archimedes computers most schools had (a legacy of the BBC Micro programme) started getting a word processor called PenDown. It didn’t do masses but it was good enough. I do really think that so much money could be saved in education with suites like OpenOffice.org. Government is another good example.

This of course doesn’t detract from the fact that on the whole the MS Office ecosystem is great and has done a lot for the office but I am struggling to think why most people need Word when really they are using it as a glorified Wordpad application with most documents I see, no usage of styles or anything.

So what does OpenOffice.org 3.0 really need in my book to really sharpen its game?

• Some decent default slide templates for Impress. The current ones are bloody awful. Sorry guys.
• Tighten the interface up, try to introduce a bit more space in things, let the dialogs/windows breathe a bit more. There’s a lot of functionality, so don’t let that get hidden. I’m not suggesting a ribbon interface.
• Enhance Writer’s default styles to have nice suave styles like Word 2007 has with its nice colour schemes too

Perhaps also a leaf out of Firefox 3’s book is needed, skin the application to look more comfortable on the target systems. E.g. Luna style for XP, Aero Glass style for Vista, Aqua/Leopard style for OS X, GTK/QT look for Linux distributions. Sadly we live in a world where most people look at appearances first and that will often win them over rather than whether something is actually better. I’m currently using Live Writer (a Microsoft product) which looks great. Invest some time on aesthetics please.

Otherwise though, this is shaping up to be a good release. Let’s hope it becomes a fantastic release.