OpenOffice.org Grows Up

The marketing materials at the OpenOffice.org project site describe the PDF import option as a resort for making small changes to PDFs for which the editable originals have gone missing; in other words, users should keep their expectations for this feature fairly modest.

Indeed, after spending a bit of time testing the suite’s new PDF import function, I’d be hard pressed to imagine many circumstances in which I’d find the feature useful. Imported PDF documents open within the suite’s presentation appli­cation, Impress, and text is editable on a line-by-line basis.

I was able to import a PDF I had created using OpenOffice.org with fairly good fidelity, but when I opened one of eWeek’s production PDFs created in Adobe InDesign, the result was too mangled to be exported again into PDF form and pressed back into service.

Calc Spreadsheet

In addition to the formula com­patibility enhancements made pos­sible by the new ODF 1.2 format, OpenOffice.org 3’s spreadsheet application, Calc, packs a hand­ful of useful new features aimed at bringing the application more closely in line with Microsoft Excel’s feature set.

One such new feature is the Solver, a tool for analysing multivariable solu­tions that’s been available for a while in Excel as a standard add-in. I located a sample spread­sheet configured for use with Excel’s solver, and ana­lysed the data using both Excel 2007 and OpenOf­fice.org 3. With the excep­tion of a difference in the way the two applications defined non-contiguous fields in their respective solver tools (Excel used commas between field labels, and allowed me to control-click on non-con­tiguous variable cells, while Calc used semicolons and made me type them in), both solver tools performed the same.

The version of OpenOffice.org 2.4 that ships with Ubuntu and other Linux distributions already includes a solver tool, but licensing issues have kept it out of Sun’s official OpenOffice.org build. I tried the same test with this earlier solver version and couldn’t get the tool to work with non-contiguous cells.

Also on the feature parity and file compatibility front, the version of Calc that comes with OpenOffice.org 3.0 now supports custom error bars in charts, and a boost in the number of columns a sheet can hold from 256 to 1,024. To compare, Microsoft raised its column limit in Excel 2007 from 256 to 16,384.

Calc also now includes a spread­sheet collaboration feature that enables multiple users to work together on spreadsheet documents.

Other Applications

Beyond its PDF import functional­ity, OpenOffice.org 3’s presentation application, Impress, includes a cou­ple of promising new enhancements, chief of which is support for embed­ded tables in Impress documents. Previously, the only way to embed tables in Impress was to paste in a spreadsheet object from Calc.

Impress also sports a polished pic­ture-cropping tool, which abides by the typical, corner-dragging interface metaphor that you would expect to see in an image-editing application.

The OpenOffice.org 3 word processor application, Writer, now comes with a much-improved document-annotation feature, which places inserted notes in the margin of a document, with a line that traces back to the annotated por­tion of your document. What’s more, notes from different editors appear in different colors.

In previous versions of OpenOffice.org, inserted notes appeared as tiny yel­low boxes in the document that you had to click on to read. As implemented, the feature was practically worthless, and it complicated collaborative editing with those taking advantage of Word’s much-better-implemented notes feature.