OpenOffice 3 has PDF import, native Aqua UI, and Tara Reid

There’s been quite a bit of buzz recently after it was announcedthat OpenOffice 3 was due in September. It seems, however, most peoplestill aren’t aware of what’s in store.
We love OpenOffice.org, hereby referred to asOpenOffice like normal people do. We like the fact it does pretty mucheverything we need for free, we like the out-of-the box PDF and Flashsupport, its better-than-Word ability to work with large documents, andthe joys of using a standard file format that’s actually, you know, astandard.
But the Openpoffice.org website is a rather scary place. We managed to find this conference presentation lurking in the shadows before running away in fear of mid 90’s web design. Here’s the best bits:
Native Mac OS X Aqua version
The Mac finally gets a native OpenOffice. This has been going on for a while - you can already download the native OS X OpenOffice 2.3 beta, but this time it’s official.
Sure, NeoOffice already does this, but OpenOffice 3 for Mac is new codethat will be released and updated at the same time as the Windows andLinux versions. Speaking of Windows, Vista users also get some kind ofunspecified ‘integration’ for 3.0.
New PIM
We love our Pimms with ginger ale, lemonade, citrus fruit, cucumber and ice. OpenOffice 3 has a different recipe:

Email
Calendaring with meeting invites and free/busy publishing
Task management
Server connectivity to CalDAV servers, Google Calendar and SunCalendar Server, as well as the obligatory iCal support. Alas, nomention of Zimbra.
Specifically touted by OpenOffice developers as an ‘Outlook replacement’

Support for Everything
Remember showing your mates the Flash export in OpenOffice 2Impress? Well drag them round again, as OpenOffice 3 takes it a stepfurther.

PDF files can be imported into Draw and edited with all their layout intact. Yum.
The whole Openoffice suite can save ‘hybrid’ PDF documents that can be viewed as PDFs or edited as OpenDocument files.
Edit wikis directly from OpenOffice without learning Yet Another Needless Wiki Markup Format.
WordPress and Movabletype blogs can be edited too.
Support for MS Office 2007 XML. Microsoft confusingly calls this‘Office Open XML’. We call it Stop Naming Your Unstable UndocumentedShitty Format To Sound Like Ours Thanks.
Math fetishists can enjoy enhanced Latex support.

Extension Manager
Openoffice 3 will have simple Firefox-like extensions. There’s a wide variety of existing OpenOffice extensions already available:

Fax support (both send and receive)
Google docs integration
Remote control for presentations via your bluetooth remote
Version control with Subversion
Voice commentaries for presentations

Reports
Beancounters and thier minions can now make pretty documents from databases using Base’s new reporting engine.
Tara Reid
This release marks the appearance of Tara Reid in OpenOffice.Witnesses report the anorexic booze hound stumbled into OOs buildsystem by accident, and will now live inside OpenOffice translatingdocuments into a language only spoken when you’ve drunk 8 bottles ofvodka.
Unfortunately in current betas, when this feature is enabled, OpenOffice smells vaguely of pee.
So that’s it for OpenOffice 3. Betas are arriving in the next few months, and the final should be done by September.
What else would we like to see?

Well, like a lot of Open Source projects, a decent website forpeople to see and download the damn software, and not look at picturesof skanky pidgeons.
You may have noticed that OpenOffice’s own templates are, well,crap. There’s a big market for Office templates out there, whichinevitably work just fine in OpenOffice too. Most of these companieswould be happy to Open Source a template or two for inclusion inOpenOffice in exchange for a link back to their websites as thetemplate author. OpenOffice gets some decent templates, and thetemplate authors get to show off their work.

What about you?