The first thing you'll notice about the new Open Office 3.1 is that it just looks better. Thanks to its use of antialiasing, the program menus, letters and images it displays are sharper and clearer. We tested the OpenOffice 3.1 suite on a 'Windows XP system and one running MEPIS ,a Debian-based Linux distribution. What really caught our attention after a few minutes of using the various OpenOffice.org apps was how much faster this version is than version 3.0.

This was especially clear on when we ran it on a Windows XP system. It used to take about 12 seconds to launch Writer; now it takes just over 6 seconds. We saw similar performance boosts when running the various other applications of OpenOffice 3.1. It's almost like running OpenOffice.org on a brand new machine.

Another 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 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. We couldn't do it. The file locking mechanism preserved the document from our best attempts to make a complete mess of it.

OpenOffice 3.1, like the Mozilla Firefox web browser, can use extensions to increase its functionality. For example, Writer's existing grammar checker framework can now be augmented with extensions like LanguageTool.

It won't significantly improve your writing, but it will save you from some of the more idiotic grammar errors. We've been waiting for this feature since OpenOffice.org first showed up.

In Calc, OpenOffice 3.1's answer to Excel, performance has been given an incredible boost. In the past, we kept a copy of Excel around for taking care of heavy-duty spreadsheet jobs. We won't need to do that anymore.


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