EDINBURGH, UK:  The OpenOffice.org Community has announced the release of OpenOffice.org 3.0. The third major update of the leading productivity suite delivers significant enhancements 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. 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, 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, marketing project lead, OpenOffice.org.