OpenOffice.org 3 Released

We’ve been waiting for a little while, but wait no more – OpenOffice.org 3 is here. The initial release is available in eight different languages and all current platforms, including Linux, Unix and Apple. Opinions are mixed, but if you are already an OOo user, there is literally no reason for not upgrading. The UI looks slightly better and the functionality has been improved (although none of those enhancements have effected me directly, yet).

One writer at a Houston Chronicle blog seems entirely pleased with the latest release and states that it’s becoming an “even better alternative” to the more mainstream office suites, including of course, Microsoft Office. The best part is the fact that it’s free, and it’s hard to beat that. Plus, if you are a Mac user, you’ll notice a nice stability boost since this is the first version of OOo to run on that platform without the use of the X11 Unix shell.

In addition to native OS X support, the latest OOo updates support for more formats, including Microsoft Office 2007’s XML-based files, and you can see an example of that in the image below. In this particular case, OOo did import the proper graph graphic, but it’s non-editable… so the options for actually editing Office 2007 documents is going to be a bit limited. It’s definitely improving, though. That aside, that’s going to be a limited issue, and doesn’t detract from the great application it is. I’m still unable to shift from Office 2007… but I’m confident it will happen someday.

OOo supports several file formats, but uses OASIS’s OpenDocument Format (ODF) by default. ODF is rapidly gaining widespread acceptance and is also supported by Google Docs, Zoho, IBM’s Lotus Notes, and KDE’s KOffice project. ODF is increasingly being adopted as the preferred format by government agencies in many different countries. This trend has placed pressure on Microsoft, which has agreed to include native ODF support in future versions of Office.