For those who have never heard of OpenOffice, I have to say – I’m sorry to hear that.

OpenOffice is a full-featured office suite that is of the Sun Microsystems StarOffice lineage. It is in fact the open source development version of StarOffice.

OpenOffice has just released its 3.0 version with significant new features and improvements. It can open the new Office 2007 for PC /Office 2008 for Mac file formats and supports VB Script in those files (unlike Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac). This is a multi-platform product, available on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. The native file format for OpenOffice is supported by numerous other office suites used in the open source world, such as KOffice.

While file format support for Microsoft office docs is not 100%, it has come forward leaps and bounds and should prove a strong enough replacement for those outside of the finance office (Excel power users) that your company could try it out and see if you can save big on an expensive upgrade to Microsoft’s flagship suite.

OpenOffice is available for the low low price of free. Get OpenOffice (or for those in the know, get it even faster via legal bittorrent).