OpenOffice.org turns 3.0 with general release

The OpenOffice.org Community is today announcing the general availability of OpenOffice.org Version 3. Right from the opening screen, OpenOffice.org 3 has a fresh new look, with a new start screen, new splash screen, new icons, and a host of usability improvements.

The Writer word processor has a cool new slider control for zooming, allows multi-page display while editing, has powerful new multilingual support, and boasts improved notes capabilities. As well as conventional office documents, Writer can now edit wiki documents for the web.

The Calc spreadsheet has been given another increase in capacity - now up to 1024 columns per sheet. It also has a powerful new equation solver, and a great new collaboration feature for multiple users.

Draw can now cope with poster-size graphics (up to 3sq metres), and Impress supports multiple monitors for presentations. Chart now produces much more clean looking graphics by default, and has a range of additional features requested by power users.

The popular built-in PDF export facility has been further enhanced with PDF/A support and a range of new user-selectable options.

OpenOffice.org 3 is now also available for the first time as a full Mac OS X application, bringing the power of the world's leading open-source office suite to a whole new group of users. And it's even easier than ever to persuade MS-Office users to upgrade to OpenOffice.org, with new support for MS-Access 2007 'accdb' files, improved support for VBA macros, and a new ability to read MS-Office Open XML files (Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2008 documents)

OpenOffice.org's support for extensions is really coming of age with OpenOffice.org 3. A rapidly expanding number of additional features are available from different developers to add great features such as an Impress presenter console, support for business analytics, PDF import, and a whole new way of supporting additional languages.

Tell your friends that 2008 is 'The Year of 3'; - the year we released OpenOffice.org 3; the year we make OpenOffice.org available on all 3 major computing platforms (MS-Windows, GNU/Linux, and Mac OS X); and the year to realise the 3 key benefits of OpenOffice.org: it's great software; it's easy to use; and it's free.

Links

Official Press Release: http://www.prweb.com/releases/OOo/3/prweb1459364.htm
Download: http://download.openoffice.org
Guide to new features: http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.0
Technical release notes: http://development.openoffice.org/releases/3.0.0.html
Availability of localised versions and ports: http://download.openoffice.org/other.html

The OpenOffice.org Community

I've been using OpenOffice.org's prior releases and it is working well. I'm going to upgrade to the general release on all of our PCs and Macs now.