(TheForceField.net ) October 13, 2008 — The OpenOffice.org Community officially announced the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 to the public early this morning. OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the latest release of the open source office suite originally developed by Sun Microsystems and is considered by many to be one of few serious competitors of Microsoft Office.
The latest version of OpenOffice.org will be officially released on the 8 year anniversary of the open source Office suite during a launch event to be held at the Région Ile-de France in Paris, France today. The first version was released on October 13, 2000.
"Our market has grown," Louis Suárez-Potts, Community Manager of OpenOffice.org, said in a press release. "As government after government, enterprise after enterprise adopt the Open Document Format (the ISO-approved format OpenOffice.org uses natively), they frequently adopt OpenOffice.org and love it. With 3.0, the application is more interoperable with MS Office, more capable, more extensible. It frees the desktop from vendor lock-in."
New features to the office suite include a "Start Center", new icons and a zoom control located in the status bar. Other new features include an ability to display multiple pages in the word processor called Writer, a solver component and an increase to 1024 columns in the Calc spreadsheet, chart enhancements and an improvement to the crop feature used in Draw and the Microsoft Powerpoint-like presentation program known as Impress.
The new version will support ODF 1.2 and will work with Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac and Microsoft Office binary file formats.
The new version is also more compatible with OS X. "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", Florian Effenberger, Marketing Project Co-Lead of OpenOffice.org stated in an e-mail this morning.
The Office suite is released under the GNU/GPL and is freely available. OpenOffice.org v3.0 is currently available for download in English for Windows, Linux, OS X and OpenSolaris at http://download.openoffice.org/3.0 .
