I installed Open Office 2.0 RC3 on my iBook on Monday. First impressions - this is a very nice step up from 1.1.2 (the last version I had installed). They are still developer builds for Mac, as opposed to stable for PC, but I found it reliable enough for my needs. Features I anticipate using most are Base and the new bibliographic manager in Writer (embryonic, but a good start. I’ll still need to use Endnote for now unfortunately). I do have Cocoa MySQL on my mac for development, but it’s always nice to have another front end to try out, especially for creating and manipulating databases that I intend to keep on my computer rather than uploading to the web. I’m very intrigued by the OASIS OpenDocument format in Writer and plan to use it as much as I can.

All up, well worth upgrading, or installing for the first time if you haven’t already. I remember using Open Office on an old Red Hat box when it was first released, and I was impressed then. With all the new features it has now, I can really forsee dropping Microsoft Office entirely on my Mac soon. I will be able to drop it once and for all once bibliographic is complete.