News 

The open source business software suite can now run on Mac OS X without the need for Apple's X11 software. It has been designed to integrate with the OS X accessibility APIs, with the developer claiming that it offers better accessibility support than many other Mac OS X applications.

It also provides limited support for VBA, the Microsoft scripting language that was dropped from the 2008 version of Office for the

ADVERTISEMENT

Mac. And Excel users may be interested in the solver component which allows solving optimisation problems where the optimum value of a particular spreadsheet cell has to be calculated based on constraints provided in other cells. Office for Mac no longer has this feature, since it was dependent on VBA.

Natively, OpenOffice works with the latest 1.2 version of the ODF file standard. But it is also capable of reading and writing Microsoft's recently standardised OOXML formats. It also supports the PDF/A format, a subset of PDF designed for long-term document archiving.

OpenOffice 3.0 beta is a 168MB free download from download.openoffice.org/3.0beta; all the new features are listed in the release notes.