The Register has a decent overview of the new features, too.

The full technical release notes containing a list of features and integrated child workspaces can be read here. There are lots of new improvements in this latest release, and while it’s not a night-and-day improvement over previous iterations, it is a sufficient improvement to justify an upgrade.įrom the 3.1 New Features list: The OO.org team keeps plugging away, and the fact that they’ve released such a comprehensive office suite is a real testament to the power of open source development. It seems like only yesterday I was downloading StarOffice, what later became OpenOffice. The file-locking mechanism preserved the document from our best attempts to make a complete mess of it.OpenOffice, everyone’s favorite free software office suite, released version 3.1 recently. We tried to mangle a shared document (that existed on a Windows Server 2008 file server) by editing it from our Linux desktop and also from the XP desktop. Now Jack in marketing, who uses a Mac, can't overwrite a change that was just made by Jill in the (Windows-based) comptroller's office. It's almost like running on a brand new machine.Īnother good feature, if you're considering OpenOffice 3.1 for office use, is that it now has its own OS-independent file-locking system. We saw similar performance boosts when running the various other applications of OpenOffice 3.1. It used to take about 12 seconds to launch Writer now it takes just over 6 seconds.

This was especially clear on when we ran it on a Windows XP system. What really caught our attention after a few minutes of using the various apps was how much faster this version is than version 3.0.

We tested the OpenOffice 3.1 suite on a Windows XP system and one running MEPIS 8, a Debian-based Linux distribution. (You can see examples at Sun's engineering blog.) 3.1.0 May, 8th 2009 - 134.28 MB - Open Source Features Screenshots Old Versions Latest Version: Apache OpenOffice 4.1. Thanks to its use of anti-aliasing, the program menus, letters and images it displays are sharper and clearer.

The first thing you'll notice about the new OpenOffice 3.1 is that it just looks better.

Openoffice 3.1