The third major installment of OpenOffice.org's suite of applications has reached its final version. Probably one of the most important aspects surrounding OpenOffice 3 for Mac is that it now runs natively under Mac OS X, meaning no more X11, meaning faster performance, a standard UI and an increased overall reliability.

Being the major update that it is, OpenOffice 3 does many extra tricks, like reading documents saved with Microsoft Office 2007 or 2008 in .docx, .xlsx, .pptx and other new formats. This feature alone is enough to bite some of Microsoft Office's market-share, and upset some high-ups over in Silicon Valley. The suite can read and write documents in standardized OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 as well.

The Start Centre has received a major overhaul, adding new icons and a new zoom control in the status bar. Chart boosts looks while Draw and Impress come with improved crop features. Writer adds a new notes feature and a built-in math solver component, and is also able to display multiple pages during editing. Workbooks now support up to 1024 columns in each spreadsheet. New sharing options have also been added, enabling multiple users to collaborate on a single workbook simultaneously.

As for the Mac version of OpenOffice 3.0, for once, it brings some support for Visual Basic for Applications, which enables users to program macros customize their commands to great extent. Best of all though, the suite adds native OS X support for the first time. This means users no longer have to fire up that pesky graphical environment for UNIX applications known as X11. Thinking of Gimp's wasted potential on Macs, X11 commits a sin by simply existing. So, what does all this mean?

Well, for starters, you now have an office suite of apps that behaves natively, crashes less (or almost never); it blends in with the Aqua interface which makes it look and feel like any OS X app; it integrates with OS X's Accessibility API and is more accessible, fast and reliable.

OpenOffice 3.0 was uploaded to the organization’s servers at 10am (BST) on Monday, sources say. "The servers seem to have collapsed under the load," said  OpenOffice.org's marketing lead, John McCreesh. McCreesh pointed out that the "vast majority" of downloads of the suite take place through local mirrors, but said "the fact that our central site can't even run the bouncer [to divert requests to those local mirrors] must mean it's… our biggest-ever download".

You may download OpenOffice 3.0 Final here. OpenOffice 3.0 requires an Intel Mac. PPC users can get the latest available version (2.4.0) here.

Update: this article has been updated to include system requirements for OpenOffice 3.0 Final.