Nearly a week since the launch of OpenOffice.org 2.0, and the first reviews are being forged in the shadows. One reviewer sent us a draft of his article, which was either kind of him (giving us a chance to correct factual errors) or downright lazy (he’d written a pile of cobblers and knew we’d sort it out for him). You choose:

• OpenOffice.org doesn’t allow you to past unformatted text – err, so why did we provide the Edit -> Paste Special… feature in 1.x – and make it even easier to access with a keyboard shortcut in 2.0?
• We likely will modify if not withdraw our statements that OpenOffice can read MS Office files and write MS Office files. (RTF is a Microsoft Word format.) - err, so why use .rtf when OpenOffice.org reads MS-Office .doc etc files natively?
• We believe that OpenOffice should be able to read PDF files. – err, our users haven’t exactly been clamouring for that feature… What is important is that OpenOffice.org does read and write OpenDocument files – the vendor-neutral, open-standard format approved by OASIS. This important new feature wasn’t mentioned at all in this review…

Now I know that it takes time to do a full review, especially the comparative reviews that readers appear to favour. Let’s hope that this particular review matures a bit before seeing the light of day.

For comparison, the PCPro Review back in October 04 was a solid piece of writing, and gave OpenOffice.org fair treatment.Let’s hope that we don’t have to wait too long for a follow-up, particularly since 2.0 has addressed PCPro’s biggest complaint – the one area where [OpenOffice.org 1] does look amateur is its appearance. Very much the ugly duckling of office suites, OpenOffice (and StarOffice) looks like it was put together five years ago.

Not in version 2 it doesn’t.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 at 7:58 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.