OpenOffice.org has released a new version of its powerful suite of office applications, OpenOffice 3.0.1 Release Candidate 1. OpenOffice.org is an open-source, multi-platform, and multilingual office suite, similar to MS Office and NeoOffice.

The tool is compatible with all other major office suites, and is free to download, use, and distribute. With the release of OpenOffice 3.0, the development team could confirm that, after painstaking work, they were able to lift X11 dependencies off it, making OO a native Mac application.

Moreover, the Mac version of OpenOffice 3.0 brought some Visual Basic support, enabling users to program macros and customize their commands to a great extent. Best of all, they now have a productivity app that behaves natively, crashes less, and blends with the Aqua interface – typical to Mac apps.

With the current release of OpenOffice (3.0.1 RC 1), the Mac version of the suite includes, at this point in time, grammar checking in Writer. Naturally, the dialog box / notification window has been extended to also comprise grammar checking. Additionally, the dialog is currently able to show a vendor logo as a bitmap and name in the dialog title, according to the changelog.

However, the team of developers behind the open source suite also reveals that OO is still lacking some important functionality, such as locking documents out of third-party applications.

“As practice has shown, it is a quite common case that OOo is used to edit documents of alien formats on network,” the OpenOffice.org team notes. “Unfortunately, it looks to be impossible to let the file be locked using file system locking, since it does not work in heterogeneous file systems as expected, and the mentioned scenario has been recognized as very important one. Thus, the locking mechanics of OOo is not recognizable for third-party applications, except [when] they implement support for OOo locking mechanics. The implementation in childworkspace fwk94 lets the alien files be locked using the OOo file locking mechanics as well. That solves at least the cases when a file of alien format is edited only by OOo3.x in network,” the developer reveals.

OpenOffice 3.0.1 RC1 requires an Intel-based Mac (download link available below). PPC users can get the latest available version (2.4.0) here.

Download OpenOffice 3.0.1 RC 1 for Mac (Free)