OpenOffice 3.0 Final to Launch Monday, But You Can Get It Now

OpenOffice.org is throwing a launch party in Paris on Monday, October 13th to mark the eighth anniversary of the open source office software suite and --- simultaneously --- to mark release of version 3.0. The launch event will be sponsored by the Region Ile de France, Silicon Sentier, and OpenOffice. The party is open to everyone, and registration is available online.

OpenOffice 3.0 has a lot of improvements, including

• The StartCenter (above)
• For Mac OS X users, OpenOffice.org 3.0 is finally an Aqua application, rather than one that runs through an X11 server
• Read support for Microsoft's Office 2007 .docx, .xlsx format
• Spreadsheets can now have 1,024 columns of data instead of a "mere" 256
• Spreadsheet collaboration is now possible among multiple editors with the Workbook Sharing feature
• Note taking on Writer documents is now much more usable

and more ...

Open Office 3.0 is available for the following platforms:

• Linux
• Mac OS (Intel)
• Solaris Sparc
• Solaris x86
• Windows (32-bit)

Can't want for Monday and want it now? There are a few sites such as MajorGeeks hosting the Windows version.

In general, though, go to the page listing the OpenOffice.org mirrors, and you can usually find the images in openoffice/stable/3.0.0/on their FTP site. For example, here and here. The cautious can wait until Monday, but the rest of you, start downloading and start playing around with it.