It’s a bit slower the 2.4, it’s got a nice new start centre, an icon refresh, a zoom control on the status bar and is now capable of supporting extensions to increase functionality.

To be honest I can’t say there are a great many useful downloads available at the moment, but some of them would be pretty handy if you use Open Office on a regular basis:

Professional Template Pack
A collection of elements to create your own professional style templates for documents, forms and presentations

Sun Web Blog Publisher
Microsoft Word 2007 comes with some impressive blogging capabilities, but now Writer can too. This extension supports “many popular blog services’”, so having not used it I can’t guarantee it’ll work for yours, but give it a try and see.

GoogleDocs to Open Office.
This works for both Google Docs and Zoho and can import and export your documents and presentations between Open Office and thestwo online services.

Oxygen Office Gallery Extras
A compilation of clip art and templates for your documents. Comes with multiple languages and with some other extras.

Pagination
A simple little dialogue to insert page numbers, works with all localizations.

Crop Images
Crop images in Draw and Impress with this add-on.

Writer’s Tools
If you live in Writer during the day, churning out documents or whatever it is you do then this pack will provide you with all the extra functions and features necessary. There are some pretty useless additions to this set, but some notable tools are:

• Lookup Tool
• Email Backup
• Remote Backup
• Start/Stop Timer
• Add to Basket
• miniInvoices

Test Fonts
This seems pretty handy, it searches for all the fonts contained in the document on your system. It then reports on missing fonts, all used fonts and gives statistics on available fonts.

The Open Office Extension Repository lists the currently available extensions for Open Office. Visitors can use the search function, the tag cloud or one of the six available entries like viewing the most popular or recently updated extensions for Open Office. Some extensions are, contrary to the Firefox add-ons website, not free but the majority of available ones are.

A quick glance at the available extensions brought up already several that I will definitely look closer at. You can grab some free content extensions like professional template packs (free) or graphics from the website and add (advanced) support for online services like Google Docs.

Sun did develop some useful add-ons as well. The two that caught my attention are the Sun Presentation Minimizer which reduces the size of presentations and the Sun Report Builder which can be used to create professional looking database reports.

The Open Office Extensions website is definitely worth taking a look at if you are an Open Office user.

I was a bit skeptical at first but soon found out that the changes would indeed speed up Open Office tremendously. Start Open Office and click on Tools > Options. This should open the configuration. Click on Memory in the left menu and change the following settings:

• Number of Steps: 30
• Use for Open Office: 128
• Memory per Object: 20
• Number of Objects: 20

Click on Java in the left menu afterwards and uncheck Use a Java Runtime Environment. Click OK and restart Open Office to see how fast it is now. That’s really a difference.

Update: Recent versions of the popular Office suite show improved loading times. The tweaks outlined above are still valid on the other hand, especially the bit about removing the Java Runtime Environment from the Office suite to speed up the load time. That is, of course, only an option if Java is not needed in the Office suite.

Another possible option is to move the Open Office installation to a faster drive. Moving it from a conventional hard drive to a Solid State Drive can improve the loading times of the Office software by a lot.