Here’s a reason for academics to be interested in OpenOffice 3.0 – It has a much improved notes feature.

Recent version of MS Word enables users to include notes in the margins. I rely on that feature a lot to write up comments on papers from my colleagues or my students. MS Word always had a leg up on OpenOffice – until now. One of the big improvements in OpenOffice 3.0 is the note functionality. Writing up comments on student papers in a nice, neat way is now a breeze in OpenOffice.

In fact, the notes you type in OpenOffice show up in the MS Word note format if you save the file as an MS Word document. So…if you type comments on a student’s paper in OpenOffice and they use MS Word – they’ll be able to read your comments in MS Word. Pretty cool.

Read the rest of this post to view the nice instructional video on how to use the new notes feature on OpenOffice 3.0 from the folks over at beginlinux.com.

Drawback
My only complaint with the upgraded notes feature is that there is no option to print the notes and the document together in the way they appear on the screen. You have three options to print notes – (1) alone without the document (2) at the end of the document or (3) at the end of the page.

There is not, to my knowledge, a way to print the notes in the neat, easy to read format that they appear on the screen.

If anyone finds a way to do this, let me know.