Jack Wallen takes a look at some lesser known features found in OpenOffice Impress

Linux.com have a great article form Jack Wallen showing off some lesser known features found in Impress, the presentation package found in Open Office. Impress is a free alternative to Microsoft's PowerPoint.

LinuxCrunch have posted part one of their look into the new OpenOffice 3.2 release due for December.

The OpenOffice team recently released a beta version of OpenOffice 3.2 due for release in December which has many new features and enhancements.

LinuxCrunch have put up part one of their look into the new features in OpenOffice. This post looks at security, speed , ease of use and further internationalisation features.

A guide to new users looking at OpenOffice

Here is a good tutorial for users switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice

This tutorial includes a quick start guide to installing OpenOffice and highlighting the different names for the applications, ie Word equivalent is Writer.

The first candidate release of OpenOffice 3.1 is now available for testing

The OpenOffice team have announced the first publicly available release candidate for the up and coming OpenOffice 3.1 release.

The release announcement isn't easy to read but there are a lot of fixes and improvements. Of particular note are drawings in documents are now anti aliased which makes drawings appear smoother and SQL code now has syntax highlighting.

This release is intended to be used for testing to find any show stopping bugs so use with care.

Download Squad have some handy hints to speed up OpenOffice

Download Squad have created a nice little article on how to speed up the loading of Open Office. Basically done by giving Open Office more memory to use.

Microsoft Holding Back New Office Suite: OpenOffice to Blame?

netbookdigest.com reflect on whether OpenOffice is to blame for Microsoft not releasing the new Microsoft Office until 2010

OpenOffice.org 3: Free and Easy

Redmondmag.com have quite a glowing article about OpenOffice 3 and how it stands up against Microsoft's Office suite.

The only real niggles were regarding minor startup speed, minor import issues and VBA scripts.

Lou Dolinar: OpenOffice is a worthy alternative

After a long time in development, OpenOffice 3.0 has been unleashed

OpenOffice 3.0 has been released after a long period of heavy development

Version 3 of this free alternative to Microsoft's Office has introduced many new changes. Including filters to import Office 2007 documents.

OpenOffice 3.0 already includes the new 1.2 specification of ODF. This basically means documents can theoretically be imported into any program capable of reading the ODF format. ODF was designed so that the underlying structure of a document is portable and not controlled and hidden away like the Microsoft Office formats are and means no one company controls the format of the document

OpenOffice 3.0 is now supported natively on Mac OS X and compatible with Windows Vista

The full release list can be found on the Open Office 3 features page.

Linux.com article: How to back up your blog in OpenOffice Base