OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out!

Go get it now, from the main site if you can manage — they’ve been slaughtered by the demand so they have a lightweight download page up right now — or if you can’t, there’s an RSS feed of Bittorrent links for every version of OpenOffice as they become available.  (Who sez bittorrent is for illegal stuff only?)

New features include full native OOXML support; full PDF Import / Export; better notes under Writer so you don’t have to go blind looking for tiny yellow boxes to hover your mouse over any more; greater than 256 columns in its Excel-alike Calc; a ton of niggling bugfixes, as usual; and Much Much Moretm!.

About OOXML — that’s Microsoft’s proprietary Office “Open” XML format, which is only open if you don’t count the binary blobs they use for their formatting, so I’m actually a bit upset they included this from a purist’s perspective.  And anyway, the way the format is written, Microsoft is the only one that could ever claim 100% compatibility because it’s full of back-references to other parts of their Office suites, such as “format this the way Excel 97 does” without specifying exactly how Excel 97 formats that thing.  It’s also undetermined whether Microsoft Office 2007 actually fully supports the OOXML format as defined in their ISO approval documentation, so I’m holding out hope that OOo3.0 is the *first* office suite to fully support OOXML.

Rant aside, go get it.  Who knows, maybe your own personal pet peeve about OOo will be cured.  And if not, there’s always the bug reporting tool (which is down temporarily while the site is slammed).

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OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out!
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