OpenOffice 3’s release candidate is here and ready for download for Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, and Windows.
This is more than a little cool. Those of us who don’t like paying the Microsoft Office suite tax have been waiting for the next version of OpenOffice for some time now and it’s almost ready to go. The OpenOffice developers are still saying it’s not ready for production use, but it is more than ready now for some serious testing by regular users.
This new version brings users a lot of features that they’ve been waiting for since 2007. One prime example is that you’ll be able to import Office 2007’s Open XML documents into OpenOffice. You may hate Open XML. I know I do. I mean what kind of standard can it be if Microsoft itself can’t support it? Still, being able to trade files back and forth between Office 2007 and OpenOffice is another step in making OpenOffice acceptable to offices that are still stuck on Microsoft’s proprietary formats.