Monday 13th should see the official release of OpenOffice 3.0, a free office suite to rival Microsoft Office (feature list here). It is available now from a few places but tomorrow isn't too far away. Check the OpenOffice site from Monday onwards.

http://www.openoffice.org/

Cool - I already use Open Office - I'll have to get the new one when I come back from holiday.

Sounds interesting.

I don't use all the features of the suite but the Word Processor is good. It will open/edit MS Word documents. I also use OpenOffice for opening .ppt and .pps files (after scanning them for malware).

Version 3.0 is officially available now. Click the link in the first post to take a look.

I used to use Wordperfect which was a great program and gave me far less headscratching than Word. Trouble is that if not enough people use it, then this gives incoming and outgoing problems with conversion, which is why in the end, I gave in and installed Word. I will certainly have a look at OpenOffice if it overcomes conversion glitches.

I once created a Microsoft Word 2000 document containing tables and a good number of bordered text areas. When opening this in OpenOffice, some shifting of the text areas had taken place. However, it was a quick operation to do a little shifting and resizing and make the document look OK. It was quite a complicated document. OpenOffice opens other Word documents without any trouble. .doc files can be converted to OpenOffice's native file type (.odt) if desired.

If you already have Microsoft Office, or are happy with another Office Suite, there maybe wouldn't be a reason to change. If you don't have an office suite and want one, or are looking for a free alternative because the current program is old, consider OpenOffice. I've only tried the Word Processor and opening .pps/.ppt files. I can't speak for the rest of the suite.

I wonder how 3.0 handles Office 2008. The extensions for that is .docx and .xlsx. Even older versions of Office won't read them unless a patch is installed. I've set my Office to automatically save in the .doc & .xls version if people I send files to don't have the patch. (Or, has the latest Windows update fixed that? -- a whole new subject~!). Do you suppose that 3.0 can handle .docx, etc. files?

I believe version 3.0 can open those file types but can't write/save in them. I haven't got any of those types of document, so can't put it to the test. In the 'Save As' dialogue, the following Microsoft options are listed:

Microsoft Word 97/2000/XP (.doc)
Microsoft Word 2003 XML (.xml)

..plus other earlier Microsoft Word versions.