OpenOffice 3.0 Released with Support for new MS File Formats

by , 1:55 PM EDT, October 13th, 2008

After a period of beta testing since May, 2008 OpenOffice.org has posted the release version of OpenOffice for Windows, Linux, Solaris, and Mac OS X (Intel) in eight languages. The Website is seeing "unprecedented demand."

The Mac version is now native and no longer requires the Unix X11 environment.

New features in version 3 include:

Collaborative editing.
XML support and XSLT based filter support.
Import filters for MS Office file formats: .docx. xlsx, pptx.
Read/write support for OpenDocument Format (OSF) 1.2.
Re-introduction of partial support for Visial Basic for Applications.

OpenOffice is an open source equivalent of the Microsoft Office suite. TMO previously published a detailed explanation of the difference between StarOffice and OpenOffice. The readme file explains the licensing:

OpenOffice.org is free for use by everybody. You may take this copy of OpenOffice.org and install it on as many computers as you like, and use it for any purpose you like (including commercial, government, public administration and educational use). For further details see the license text delivered together with OpenOffice.org or http://www.openoffice.org/license.html

The release had originally been scheduled for mid September. OpenOffice (163 MB) for Mac requires OS X Tiger or later and an Intel Mac. It is free. The latest version for PPC Macs is 2.4.1.