OpenOffice.org 3.3 is feature frozen in first beta

The OpenOffice.org developers have released a first beta of OpenOffice.org 3.3, the next release of the Oracle owned open source office suite. The OpenOffice.org 3.3 release, which has the motto "Fit and Trim", is expected some time later this year. The beta release sees the features of OpenOffice 3.3 frozen for refinement and debugging.

The features in this beta include the first work from the Renaissance Project which has been refining the Impress user interface, a restructuring of the print system and a thesaurus available in context menus. Writer will now be able to compare tables when comparing documents and a new FindBar toolbar will enhance search functions. Calc, previously limited to 65,536 rows, now supports up to a million rows, and custom colours can now be set on sheet tabs. A detailed list of the changes incorporated in the beta release is available.

The beta release is available to download from the OpenOffice.org site as untested full installation sets, untested language packs or as source tarballs, for Windows, Linux 32 bit and 64 bit (in RPM and DEB format), Mac OS X Intel and PowerPC, and Solaris on Intel and SPARC. As with all beta releases, use in a production environment is not recommended; the latest stable release of OpenOffice.org is 3.2.1 which can of course, also be downloaded from the OpenOffice.org site and is available under an LGPLv3 licence.

(djwm)