While Microsoft is cooking Office 14, the successor of the Office 2007 System, the latest version of OpenOffice.org has become available for download. OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 is a free and open source alternative to the Redmond giant's productivity suite, which has lost the advantage of the ISO standard Open Document Format it had over Microsoft Office since the ISO standardization of Open XML. With version 3.0, OpenOffice.org has embraced Microsoft Office, namely the Office 2007 System for Windows platforms and Office 2008 for Mac, in terms of standard support. 

"In addition to read and write support for the Microsoft Office binary file formats (.doc; .xls, .ppt, etc.), OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 is now capable of opening files created with Microsoft Office 2007 or Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.). Thus, OpenOffice.org users can interact with users still using Microsoft Office. The various filters for the Microsoft Office file formats also make mixed environments possible, so that some users stay on Microsoft Office while others use OpenOffice.org," reads a fragment of the product's description.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 comes to the table with a range of enhancements from a touched-up graphical user interface to support for Mac OS X and ODF 1.2, to improvements impacting Charts, the Crop Feature, Spreadsheet Collaboration, Programmability, the Language Selector etc. At the end of September, Microsoft Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer indicated that he considered OpenOffice.org superior to what Google had to offer in terms of productivity solutions.

"Competition is a good thing, you hear me say the same thing, and the truth is we've had a lot of good competition. We've had StarOffice, we've had Open Office, we've had various – well, if you ask me today, I'm not recommending Open Office, but Open Office is a stronger product than the Google word processor and the Google spreadsheet," Ballmer stated. "Open Office is free. Open Office has not been – it's not as powerful as Microsoft Office, but it's much more powerful than the Google products today," he added.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 for Windows is available for download here.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 for Linux is available for download here.

OpenOffice.org 3.0.0 for Mac OS X is available for download here.