OpenOffice.org 3.0 RC1 released

The first release candidate of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is out. The next generation of the open source office suite has been in beta for months and is slated for a full release later this month.

So what's new in OpenOffice.org 3.0? First you get a nifty little launcher as seen above that lets you choose the application you want to use. You can still launch Writer, Base, Sheet, or another application without pulling up the unified launcher if you want to. But you can also just launch OOo for a list of available tools.

The latest release also includes a ton of features and bug fixes not included in Ooo 2.4.1 including:

• Sheet names can contain almost any character
• You can now add MS Access databases to Writer
• There's a multi-page view for Writer
• Support for Office 2007 documents
• Multiple users can edit spreadsheets simultaneously

You can find more updates in the release notes. OpenOffice.org 3.0 RC 1 is available for Linux, Solaris, Windows, and OS X. This is the first version of OpenOffice.org to include native support for OS X.

Tags: openoffice.org, openoffice.org-3.0, openofice.org-3.0-rc1, opensource