"I'm not embarrassed to admit it: I'm a big fan of Office 2007. I think Microsoft got a lot right with its latest release, starting with the ribbon interface and including any number of tweaks and improvements that make my day easier. I can't say I'm thrilled about the price of the suite, however; nor the countless SKUs to choose from. Plus, I'm also a big Linux fan. That's why I always try to keep my eye on the current state of OpenOffice.org, the open source office suite founded by Sun Microsystems.
OpenOffice.org 3.0 has just entered public beta, and it promises plenty of improvements from the previous version. Mac users, in particular, will be pleased with the new native Aqua UI. Unfortunately, however, the one feature that I was really looking forward to on the Windows side-- compatibility with the Office 2007 XML file formats-- could still clearly use a lot of work.
As an experiment, I saved a simple Word 2003 document in Word 2007 format. Office 2007 opened it just fine, but OpenOffice.org Writer only got as far as the first two lines of the text; instead of skipping the next line, the rest was truncated. An Excel 2007 template fared no better. OpenOffice.org Calc preserved labels, numbers, and formulae; macros, embedded graphics, and page layout options disappeared. A plain.xlsx file created with the same template yielded identical results."
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