Go-OO is a fork of OpenOffice that has quite a few impressive features which really ought to be in official OO, but for some reason or another aren't, such as support for OpenXML, better Microsoft Binary support, Excel VBA macros, Visio diagrams and Word Perfect Graphics support. It also boasts significantly better start times -- at least on our poorly equipped test machine.

- Better interoperability
Compared with up-stream OO.o, it has better Microsoft binary file support (with eg. fields support), and it will import WordPerfect graphics beautifully. If you are reliant on Excel VBA macros - then Go-oo offers the best macro fidelity too. If you expect your spreadsheets to calculate compatibly, or you get embedded Visio diagrams in your documents, you'll want Go-oo.

- Better functionality
Go-oo's user interface is more familiar, with lots of small pieces of polish. We have built-in (working) multimedia integration on Linux, a beautiful solver component, and your Chinese should look sane. We also integrate with your system better by default: eg. enabling native file-selectors on Linux.

- A Faster application
From first-time startup, where we sort I/O to reduce seek cost, to a highly optimised second start application and a systray quick-starter on Linux we are faster. We use less memory than up-stream, we link faster, use better system allocators, and don't waste so much time & memory in the registry. Go-oo performance is hard to beat.

Posted: Jul 01, 2008 4:27 pm