There's no equivalent, for example, of Office's Smart Cut & Paste, which will move text with a regard for the adjoining spaces and punctuation.Īnyone who writes for publications will also miss the live word count. While there's no shortage of features in Writer, and they're mostly well handled, it's the little things that are missing. Though not as heavily orientated towards layout as iWork's Pages, Writer does provide all the layout facilities you might reasonably expect from a word processor. In addition, there's a built-in equation editor that enables you to insert mathematical formulas. You can embed graphics, spreadsheet tables, text frames and other objects into a page and flow text around them. There are also facilities for revision tracking and for attaching notes to any point in a document. More advanced options such as indexing, bullet lists, footnotes, tables and columns are all supported. The word processing module, known as Writer, provides a choice of page-based or window-based views with the ability to display multiple pages on screen.įormatting relies on a system of styles with all the usual options for controlling character, paragraph and page properties. It can open, but not save, documents in the new XML format that's used by Office 2007 and Office for Mac 2008. By default, saves in Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2, but can also handle Office binary formats up to Office 2004 as well as the common generic formats such as RTF or CSV. Toolbars are held within each window, so the appropriate ones are always available. You can have documents of different types open simultaneously and the menus will change to suit the currently active window. Unlike Microsoft Office, which is a bundle of separate apps, launches as a single app with all its modules contained in that. The official release is expected in September, but this beta version is stable enough for serious appraisal, if not yet for critical business use.

Now, for the first time, we have a version that will run natively on the Mac (Intel-based models only).

Openoffice org 3.0 review