The global changes affecting the whole suite are considerable. Impress has also improved - although to a lesser extent than Writer and Calc - by the introduction of native tables for slide shows, along with predefined color themes. Charting accuracy has improved with the introduction of error bars designed to show discrepancy in a more scientific way. Spreadsheet size has greatly increased from 256 x 256 to 1024 x 1024 cells. The cell selection rectangle is now translucent, which is more attractive compared with the old way of inverting colors to signify a selection. Calc now has a built-in solver designed to optimize linear functions in line with user-defined constraints. These improvements make Writer a significantly better product, but I still sorely miss the document splitter feature in Word that allows a user to work on two portions of a document simultaneously.Ĭalc, OO3's spreadsheet module, has also been improved in a functional sense. However, comment changes still can't be tracked.

Writer differentiates between users via colors. Commenting is now much more elegantly done, with comment balloons placed in the right margin of a document - much like Microsoft Word. The comment feature in Writer has also been improved. Some sort of an automatic magnification tool to quickly zoom in on a particular page would be helpful. This useful feature could be improved, since, at small sizes, the text is very difficult to read. The number of pages displayed as well as the page zoom can be controlled via the view-mode toggle and slider in the lower right corner of the status bar. One notable feature is multiple page view.

Writer, OO3's word processor module, has been significantly improved, with several new features added in response to users. For this review, I tested OO3 in a virtualized Windows XP environment. Many of the shortcomings present in older versions of have been fixed to some extent. At first glance, the suite seems like a more polished 2.0. Sun Microsystems this week announced the release of the latest version of its open source office suite, 3.0 (OO3).

Openoffice org review