(TheForceField.net ) May 7, 2008 — The OpenOffice.org Community announced the release of OpenOffice.org 3 beta to the public 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.
In an e-mail announcement distributed to members of the OpenOffice.org community Marketing Group, John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead, told members of the marketing group that the beta was released publicly to provide a broader base for testing the new version but was not intended for use in a production environment.
According to McCreesh, New features to the office suite 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.
In the e-mail, McCreesh told members of the Marketing Group that the new version would also be more compatible with OS X. "OpenOffice.org 3.0 will be the first version to run on Mac OS X without X11, with the look and feel of any other Aqua application. It introduces partial VBA support to this platform", McCreesh wrote. "In addition, OpenOffice.org 3.0 integrates well with the Mac OS X accessibility APIs, and thus offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications", he added.
According to McCreesh, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is due for release in September.
The Office suite is released under the GNU/GPL and is freely available. OpenOffice.org v3.0 beta is currently available for download in English for Windows, Linux, OS X and OpenSolaris at http://download.openoffice.org/3.0beta .
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