Windows 7 Software Compatibility Testing - OpenOffice.org 3.1

As we have seen in a previous article, OpenOffice.org is an incredible free office software suite which offers word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and much more. Version 3.0 of this popular free and open productivity suite has been downloaded over 52 million times since its release in October last year. Incredible figure isn't it? But it its certainly not by chance, because it brings all the features needed to make of this piece of freeware a really interesting and competitive alternative to other paid sites like Microsoft Office. The current version is 3.1.0 so, I downloaded, installed and tested it and in this article I'm going to tell you about the way it behaves and integrates in the Windows 7 environment.

Installation & Run
Of course, the first thing that matters when it comes to testing a piece of software under a new operative system is to have a clean and smooth setup process, and OpenOffice accomplished that mission with honors (as a matter of fact I'm writing this article on OpenOffice.org Writer). No delays, no warnings, and no "Not responding" warnings at all, just unpacked the archive asked if I wanted to make a Complete or Custom setup and started right away.

After selecting setup mode I was also asked to enter a user name, I did so. To my complete surprise, unlike on previous installations of OpenOffice that I performed in the past, this time I was not prompted to install Java in between the setup progress (apparently it is a mandatory item for OpenOffice to run properly, however, it was already there). So the process was a bit quicker, and finally after that, installation was successfully completed. The whole process took no longer than a couple of minutes. Smooth and easy, couldn't ask for more!

Functionality & Integration
To make sure everything works perfectly I tried the three major and most used apps that come with OpenOffice.org: Writer, Calc and Impress. As a result of this I got that opening, creating and saving word documents, spreadsheets, presentations worked well and without any kind of malfunction, or delay.

In the next screenshot you can see how OOo Writer worked in.

Just the same happened with OOo Calc, the spreadsheet. In order to see how it works I created a new spreadsheet and saved and I must say that it went without any kind of trouble. In the next screenshots you will see the results of such actions.

OOo Impress worked perfectly as well, opening and viewing a .pps file I already had in my PC presented no trouble even in full screen mode.

Integration
Regarding integration, there were no signs of the slightest inconveniences at all, I can positively state that it was perfect, Quickstarter also integrated in a good manner within Windows 7 taskbar and system tray, thus providing quick access to all the applications bundled in OpenOffice.org. It also worked well regarding the Aero features, next you can see how it works with Aeropeek.

Bugs Report
As you can imagine, I'm going to leave this section completely empty, not only because I did not find any bug myself, but also searching for bugs, malfunctions, troubles or incompatibilities for OpenOffice.org running under Windows 7 in the Web in general or in specialized forums produced not a single report or complaint.

Final Words
As far as I can see, a lot of users are recommending it as the perfect office suite for this operative system (and many others including Linux-based ones too). I can also tell you that this new version brings quite a lot of improvements that not only fix some bugs but also add new capabilities and make a better user experience, here you can see a complete list of new features and improvements.On the other hand, there are serious complaints about MS Office 2007 tools (e.g. MS Word) crashing too often.

If you tried this awesome free office suite on your Windows 7 machine, we would like to read your comments about your experience using it.