OpenOffice.org 3.3 is ready -- download it now

It's taken quite some time, and no less than 10 Release Candidate builds, but all the preparations are about to pay off -- the final release of OpenOffice.org 3.3 officially released today, and it's packed with handy new features that, taken together, make the suite significantly more comfortable to use.

All the major apps now come with a new Find toolbar, for example, allowing you to quickly search a document's text. Charts may be enhanced with drawing objects. In a click or two you can insert anything from lines, rectangles or text for simple captions, say, up to cubes, symbols, blocks, even flowcharts. The Calc spreadsheet now supports 1,048,576 rows, up from 65,536.

Adding new Impress slides of the layout you require becomes much easier in 3.3: a new toolbar option allows you to choose the layout you need, or duplicate the existing slide, in a couple of clicks.

Document-level additions include the option to define any number of custom document properties as name, value pairs. While you can now have two levels of password-protection; one that prevents unauthorised users from viewing the file, another that will stop them from making changes. And the revamped Print interface now includes an integrated preview of your document, and allows you to make all the changes you need from this one dialog.

OpenOffice.org 3.3 is a worthwhile upgrade, then, with useful incremental improvements across the suite. You can read more about the new additions on the official site, and the program is available for download now.