Planet Lowyat

Today, The Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit (MAMPU) officially adopts a policy to migrate to the OpenOffice.org open source productivity suite. This is in line with the Malaysian Public Sector Open Source Master Plan, which calls for government agencies to reduce costs, increase freedom of choice and interoperability.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is still under development and more than 150 days away, but who’s counting? Maybe the OpenOffice software developers are counting because they have a whopping 2,278 issues targeted for this release. Even though OpenOffice.org 2.4 is not yet release, let’s see how far they’ve come with OpenOffice.org 3.0.

Start center

When OpenOffice.org 3 starts without a document and without a module (such as Writer), it presents the new Start Center.

View multiple pages in Writer

One of the most ever voted issues is viewing multiple pages in writer. Notice the two new controls in the statusbar (bottom-right-hand corner) of the first screenshot: the “View Layout” mode selection and the zoom slider. The “View Layout” control switches between a single page, several pages side by side, and book layout.

Pretty notes in the margin

The much anticipated improvement called Notes2 is nearly ready. It will refresh the look, introduce rich formatting and spell checking, aid accessibility, and boost usability while displaying notes in the margin.

Microsoft Office 2007 file format support

Microsoft Office 2007 (also called Office Open XML) file formats include .docx, .pptx, and .xlsx. Despite the similarity in names, these formats are significantly different than the Microsoft Office formats used since 1997. OpenOffice.org 3 will offer native read and write support.

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