July 16 - 4:15pm EDT   Sun Microsystems recently unveiled OpenOffice 3.0b2, a new beta preview release of the next major version of its business productivity suite, adding a number of optimizations, features, and fixes. The new version introduces new regional grammar and numeric standards for Indian customers, as well as refined behaviour of editing filtered rows. Sun also introduced 'y axis' error bars, allowing users to define a range of error for estimated figures. [full story]

May 22 - 12:10pm EDT   European Union officials will be watching Microsoft's open format support to ensure the developer's move remains honest, the European Commission said on Thursday. The regulatory body says it will specifically monitor the newly added support for the universal Open Document Format (ODF) to determine if it delivers on Microsoft's promises of interoperability with other programs, many of which already support ODF but until now have been unable to send those files to users of Microsoft's software, forcing them to choose a more restrictive format such as Microsoft's DOC format for Word files. [full story]

May 21 - 4:00pm EDT   Microsoft today broke from its tradition of primarily endorsing in-house formats by revealing that it will add support to Office for a number of universal standards outside of its own. Office 2007 Service Pack 2 will support the Open Document Format (ODF) touted by OpenOffice, Sun's StarOffice, and other third-party tools as well as similarly universal document types such as PDF 1.5 and PDF/A. The upgrade will let users both open and create files in the formats without requiring either a plugin or an outside utility to convert the formats. [full story]

May 14 - 3:45pm EDT   Microsoft Office may be the most popular office suite in the world, but not everyone needs or wants to use it. Some people object to its cost, while others feel that it doesn't offer the features they need. If you don't want to use Office on Windows, you can choose from plenty of alternatives, including the free OpenOffice suite. Until recently though, Mac users have had far fewer options, limited to either Microsoft Office 2008 or Apple's iWork. While OpenOffice has been available in some form on the Mac for years, it used to rely on the X11 interface, which made the program look different from other Mac OS X applications. With the latest beta, you can now run OpenOffice ... [full story]

March 22 - 1:50pm EDT   The OpenOffice Mac porting team is reportedly working on a native Aqua version of its business productivity software suite, rather than simply porting the platform-independent Java version. The software is listed as being the third development snapshot, announcing a number of bug fixes and interface optimizations. OpenOffice says the newest version now uses a Mac OS X native print dialogue, and that extensions are installable through the improved GUI. [full story]