While reading one of my favorite magazines, “Windows IT Pro,” I found an article announcing the completion of Open Office 3.  I’ve been waiting for this for some time now.  The new version promised to have the new Microsoft Office 2007 document format support and to run natively on Mac OS X without X11.

I downloaded it from http://www.openoffice.org last night at a large 146 mb.  Well actually considering that it’s a full office suite that isn’t too large.  The ISO for Office 2007 is over 600 mb.  Install was as simple as always and overall I didn’t find too many differences over the previous versions of OO.  There is a new screen when you first open OO that allows you to choose the type of document you want to create.   This should be a great bridge to avoiding Microsoft software all together as the new version of OO will be standard on almost all Linux installs.

Oh- did I mention that Open Office is FREE?  Currently I spend about $7000 yearly on office products at school.  This could save me a lot of money and it comes at a great time when the economy is in the toilet slowly spinning it’s way to the inevitible destination of the sewer.

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