Apparently Open Office 3.0 is a giant step forward for the massive open source replacement of Microsoft’s Office. OO 2.0 was an impressive product – I tried it and liked it, but I do some obscure things with my documents – spreadsheets in particular – and it didn’t quite support all that I was working with at the time. At that time I was using a lot of VB; I reprogrammed in OO’s Basic language, but it wasn’t quite as full-featured as VB and the reiterative calculations weren’t functioning properly.

Ars technica has published a review of OO’s version 3.0 beta in early May and spoke highly of it. The support for MS Office specifically is getting closer and closer to 100%, including the new ‘docx’ format (which is starting to bite people on older versions); having drawn to the end of the catch-up phase, OO will now able to begin implementing its own improvements beyond MS Office. In a sidebar they also indicate that IBM is handing over the venerable Lotus Notes to the Open Office group, although I’m sure it will take a long time before it’s effectively integrated.

I should think that the best time to implement it (once it’s out of beta, of course!) is the time the church plans to upgrade from MS Office 2003 to 2007. Since the 2007 user interface is different anyway, the church can save about $275 per upgrade license by switching, and staff will only have to get used to one set of changes. If new people and new PCs are being added (as a result of staff expansion, for instance), the church can save $420 per seat by not having to install a complete new version of MS Office 2007.

I’ll be recommending that our technology team spend some time testing the product once it’s out of beta. If it works as well as I expect, we may have a winner. You can download the latest version here.

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