OpenOffice 3.0 beta natively supports Mac OS X

The latest beta of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is the first to support Mac OS X without the need for X11.

The first alpha edition of OpenOffice 3.0, code-named Aqua, went live just shy of one year ago, and was reported to be extremely buggy. Naturally, however, when an update contains as many broad additions as this release does, a certain level of bugginess is expected, especially considering the nature of the program itself.

Besides being the first version of OpenOffice.org to natively support OS X, new core features include: support for OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2, filters for Microsoft Office 2007 and Office 2008 for Mac OS X, an entirely new icon set, the addition of a "start center" when the application starts, a solver component for optimizing complex spreadsheet cell values, 1024 columns per Calc sheet (spreadsheet) instead of 256, and a host of other features. Some items listed there, rather than being entirely new, are improvements to previous core features.