OpenOffice.org Community Announces Third Major Release of Its Free, Easy-to-Use Office Software

OpenOffice.org Community Announces Third Major Release of Its Free, Easy-to-Use Office Software

OpenOffice.org 3.0 provides more flexibility and functionality than any other office suite on the market. Available for the first time as native Mac OS X application.

Edinburgh, UK (PRWEB) October 13, 2008

Celebrated at a launch party in Paris today, and just in time for the eighth birthday of the project, the OpenOffice.org Community today announced the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. The third major update of the leading productivity suite delivers significant enhancements [ http://www.openoffice.org/dev_docs/features/3.0 ] and advanced, extensible, productivity tools for all users, including Mac users, as OpenOffice.org now runs natively on the Mac OS X platform.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is more than a simple productivity application. With this release the basic components, which include word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, graphics, formula and database capabilities, can easily be supplemented by extensions downloaded from the OpenOffice.org extensions repository [ http://extensions.services.openoffice.org ]. Instead of feature bloat, OpenOffice.org 3.0 gives users in enterprises, offices, schools, as well as home users the freedom to configure their suite their way.

The freedom that OpenOffice brings has proven to be popular with early versions downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, far exceeding prior major releases. "Our market has grown," said Louis Suárez-Potts, Community Manager of OpenOffice.org. "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."

"OpenOffice.org 3.0 is more powerful than ever before and with support for MS Access 2007 .accdb files, improved support for VBA macros, and a new ability to read MS Office Open XML files, it's even easier to make the change away from legacy MS Office software," stated Florian Effenberger, Marketing Project Co-Lead of OpenOffice.org.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 naturally has a fresh look, with a new start center, new splash screen, new icons, and a host of usability improvements. New core features include:

Writer (word processing)

New slider control for zooming which allows multi-page display while editing
Powerful new multilingual support
Improved notes capabilities
Ability to edit wiki documents for the web, in addition to conventional office documents

Calc (spreadsheet)

Increase in capacity of up to 1024 columns per sheet
Powerful new equation solver
New collaboration feature for multiple users

Draw (graphics)

Ability to cope with poster-size graphics - up to three square meters or 32.3 square feet.

Impress (presentation):

Fully featured table designer inside a presentation

OpenOffice.org's support for extensions continues to come of age with OpenOffice.org 3.0. A rapidly expanding number of additional features are available from different developers to add capabilities such as an Impress presenter console, support for business analytics, PDF import, creation of Hybrid PDF documents, and a new way of supporting additional languages.

"OpenOffice.org 3.0 shows that despite the growth of web applications, when it comes to serious work, desktop-based software reigns supreme for the speed of use and sheer range of features offered. OpenOffice.org also makes it easy to join the new Web 2.0 world, without learning esoteric web languages like XHTML and MediaWiki, by enabling users to create web and wiki documents straight from Writer," said John McCreesh, OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead.

The entire OpenOffice.org community is invited to participate in the public OpenOffice.org Conference 2008 [ http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2008 ] to be held in Beijing, China November 5-7.

Download OpenOffice.org 3.0 for free [ http://download.openoffice.org ]

Contacts

Cindy Akus (UTC -04h00)
Crossroads Public Relations
+1 (919-414-6082)
cakus @ crossroadspr.com

John McCreesh (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
jpmcc @ openoffice.org
+44 (0)7 810 278 540

Louis Suarez-Potts (UTC +02h00)
OpenOffice.org Community Manager
Chair, Community Council
louis @ openoffice.org
+1 (416) 625 3843

International Marketing Contacts [ http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html ]

About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, translate, support, and promote the leading open source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org®. OpenOffice.org's leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc. to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.

OpenOffice.org uses the OpenDocument Format OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as supporting legacy file formats such as Microsoft Office, and is available on major computing platforms in over 100 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor.