OpenOffice.org 2.0 has arrived

October 21, 2005

OK, no more grousing from the FUD department about how OpenDocument isn’t actually supported by any shipping applications. OpenOffice.org 2.0 was released yesterday, making it the first office suite which uses OpenDocument as a native format.

(KOffice, which reads and writes OpenDocument via filters, says native support is coming in its 1.5 release in a few months.)

For us Mac users, there’s a bit of a lag – NeoOffice/J is still at 1.1, and even the X11 builds for Mac OS X have not caught up to the release yet.

Even if you don’t want to download the whole thing, check out the list of new features – besides OpenDocument you have improvements in native GUI support (so it looks like a “real” Windows app on Windows), floating toolbars, PDF export improvements, mailmerge wizards, digital signature support, and improved database tools.

I’m not much of an office-suite kind of guy, but this release is really good news.