OpenOffice 3 available now

Years in the making, the latest version of the best (not to mention free) alternative to Microsoft Office is finally available. While it won't be officially released until next week, you can download it now via mirror distribution sites (link courtesy Lifehacker).

OpenOffice 3 is an incremental yet valuable update to the old version of the software. All the previous components (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation, simple database, drawing tool) are intact, with modest upgrades all around.

One key upgrade is support for Office 2007 documents. OpenOffice 2 really couldn't handle DOCX or XLSX documents at all, but now it does a respectable job of opening them for editing and maintaining existing formatting reasonably well. While you're likely to experience some hiccups here and there, it's probably good enough for most users who need occasional access to an Office '07 doc. One word of warning: OpenOffice can't save into a Microsoft format beyond the one used for Office 2000/XP, so while you can read 2003/2007 files, you'll have to save them in an older format (or in OpenOffice's native format). Another nice feature in the word processor: Inline comments (the not-for-printing type) look much better now than before.

PDF support, one of OpenOffice's biggest benefits and something wholly absent in Office, is even better now. You still can't open PDFs for editing, but you can now set copious PDF export settings for other documents, including resolution, whether PDFs can be edited, and so on.

Spreadsheets are now expanded: You can now have 1024 columns of data instead of a mere 256. There's also a new solver function like Excel has long since had. Finally, charting options are expanded and upgraded and look better than before.

There's also a very Microsoft-like "start center" which lets you pick which app you want to launch from a welcome screen. OpenOffice is crowing about it, but I find it mostly useless overhead.

Finally, Mac users will also love that OpenOffice now runs natively in OS X without X11. I'm running it on a Windows machine but so far most Mac guys seem pretty wild about it.

Grab it now and gear up for a fun weekend of making spreadsheets and writing memos! I mentioned it's free, right?