OpenOffice 2.3 released

While Office 2007 remains a very pretty and highly functional office suite, OpenOffice continues to move forward, providing equivalent functionality in many areas and a price tag that fits school budgets quite nicely (it's free). We are also seeing increasing adoptions of this suite among students who can't afford the Microsoft product, but need a full-featured office suite at home. OpenOffice released version 2.3 of this software on the 17th and are recommending the upgrade for all new and current users.

The new version includes many security enhancements/patches and makes further progress addressing a major concern with OpenOffice. One of the most significant complaints about the suite is performance relative to Office 200x and several sites are reporting improved load times. The new release also incorporates interface enhancements, additional improvements to the database component, and improved compatibility with Excel.

I'm actually a big fan of Office 2007; however, the price is definitely right for OpenOffice and improvements in version 2.3 continue to keep it competitive with its Microsoft counterpart.