OpenOffice.org goes Aqua

Looking for an office productivity suite? Use an Apple Mac? A great new alternative has arrived!

I have been using OpenOffice.org (OOo), the free and open source office suite since before it was OpenOffice.org. That would be when it was Star Office. That was a long time ago. So I've seen it develop and change (and helped a tiny, tiny little bit along the way by submitting bugs.)

The Apple OS has been the poor stepchild when it comes to OOo for a long time. With Windows and Linux, there were native versions that were easy to install and use. With OS X, you had to either use the most recent version of OpenOffice.org with X Windows, which most Apple users don't use, and didn't have the nice Aqua window dressing, or you had to use NeoOffice, which was steps behind OOo, and had some serious memory leak problems (it got better over time, but it still was pretty unstable last time I used it.)

Recently, OOo released version 3.0, and with it, native Aqua versions for Intel and PowerPC Macs. OpenOffice.org has been a great alternative to Microsoft Office for Windows users (and really the only full-featured office suite for Linux users.) But now, Mac users don't need to sacrifice to get the latest OOo goodies. And for Mac users, OpenOffice.org is a great alternative to paying for MS Office for Mac, or for Apple's iWork, which is very, very slick and well designed, but not quite as much in terms of features, compared to either OOo or MS Office.