PR 2.3

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OpenOffice.org Announces Version 2.3

Draft - not for publication

The OpenOffice.org Community announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.3, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. With upgrades to its word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and database software, the free software package provides a real alternative to Microsoft's Office 2007 product - and an easier upgrade path for existing Microsoft Office users


Location and Timestamp -- The OpenOffice.org community is pleased to announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.3, the latest version of the leading open source office productivity suite. OpenOffice.org 2.3 now incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities.

The Charting component has undergone a complete revamp, adding a range of new features as well as simplifying and streamlining chart formulation. A new chart wizard; enhanced 3D chart designs; replacement colour palettes; additional axis options and scaling; improved toolbars; flexible data sources; an improved data editor - all combine to offer the user a smoother, more efficient, and powerful charting experience. This component may be used throughout OpenOffice.org.

Writer, OpenOffice.org's word processor, has been boosted with the addition of intelligence to handle multi-lingual documents better. Wiki users will love the addition of a new MediaWiki (Wikipedia) export filter. Mail merge has some additional usability features. Links in documents are now opened with Ctrl+click.

A number of general productivity improvements have been made to Calc, OpenOffice.org's spreadsheet. Most noticeable of these is that the default print settings have changed to suppress the printing of blank pages and to only print the selected sheets. Additional simplification of shortcuts, the addition and improvement of various functions, changes to context menus and dialogues, improvements to import filters, modifications to toolbars, as well as the enhancement to the AutoSum feature all make Calc a pleasure to use every day.

Performance improvements have been made to Impress, OpenOffice.org's application for creating presentations. The 'move along curve' animation feature has been re-introduced, giving 'cartoon-like' abilities to presentations.

OpenOffice.org's database application, Base, continues to evolve, with additional features for expert users such as keyboard shortcuts, and a Report Builder, available as extension on http://extensions.services.openoffice.org.

OpenOffice.org Draw, the drawing and diagramming module, has been enhanced to provide improved exporting to HTML/web by adding support for exporting the images to portable network graphics (PNG) format. Accessibility improvements have also been made by providing alternate text for image maps and layer titles and descriptions.

General improvements to the entire suite include a persistent stylist filter, re-ordering of the PDF export dialogues, new shortcut keys, easier keyboard customisation, previewing of web pages in a browser, a number of enhancements for extensions and a high default macro security level. In addition support for numerous languages and locales have added.

About the OpenOffice.org Conference

Located at the Universitat de Barcelona in the city centre of Barcelona, Spain, 19-21 September, the annual OpenOffice.org gathering is where representatives of all the community projects meet to celebrate and learn from the achievements of the past twelve months, and discuss how to meet the challenges of the next twelve. Developers get hands-on experience with the technology, can network with their peers, and have the opportunity to network directly with technology experts from technology industry leaders. Since the project's creation by Sun Microsystems in 2000, nearly 100 million have downloaded the product; thousands contribute to it. As an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors, the OpenOffice.org community has created what is widely regarded as the most important open-source project in the world today. For more information about the OpenOffice.org conference, visit http://marketing.openoffice.org/ooocon2007.


About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org's leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.

OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as legacy industry file formats and is available on major computing platforms in over 70 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor.


Links

OpenOffice.org 2.3 may be downloaded free of charge from http://download.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org extensions can be downloaded from http://extensions.services.openoffice.org

The OpenOffice.org community can be found at http://www.openoffice.org

To learn more about the community see http://about.openoffice.org

Your local native language project can be found at at http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html


Press Contacts

Louis Suarez-Potts (UTC -04h00)
OpenOffice.org Community Manager
louis@openoffice.org
+1 (416) 625 3843

John McCreesh (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
jpmcc@openoffice.org
+44 (0)7 810 278 540

Florian Effenberger (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead
floeff@openoffice.org
+49 8341 9966 0880

Worldwide Marketing Contacts

http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html

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