After more than seven months of development and ten release candidates, the OpenOffice.org development team has issued the final version of OpenOffice.org 3.3.0. The latest major release of the Oracle owned open source office suite comes six weeks after version 3.3 of Oracle Open Office was released in mid-December.

OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 features an updated, easier to use, Extension Manager user interface (UI) and several improvements to Calc spreadsheets, such as an increase in the number of rows supported from 65,536 to 1,048,576. The print system has been restructured, the thesaurus dialogue has been redesigned for better usability and slide layout handling has been improved in the presentation application, Impress.

Other changes include the addition of coloured individual spreadsheet tabs and PDF export updates that allow users to optionally embed the standard 14 PDF fonts. Improvements to document security include updates to the save file with a password function that allows users to add an additional password to protect a document from being edited.

Following four months of development, the Document Foundation released the final version of LibreOffice 3.3 yesterday. LibreOffice was created last September due to the community's frustration with Oracle's OpenOffice plans and development. Since breaking away from Oracle, an increase in the number of developers and a more open source friendly development model has allowed the Foundation to release ahead of its "aggressive schedule", and to offer a number of new and original features which distinguish LibreOffice 3.3 from Oracle's OpenOffice 3.3.

More details about the OpenOffice.org release can be found on the OpenOffice.org 3.3 New Features page and in the release notes. OpenOffice.org 3.3.0 is available to download for Windows, Mac OS X and Solaris from the project's site. OpenOffice.org is available under version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPLv3).

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