unlucky 13: office

It is too bad OpenOffice.org developers will miss the planned version 2.0 release on Oct 13th which was to coincide with the fifth anniversary of the open source productivity suite, due to a last-minute bug. Instead, a third release candidate will be made available for final testing. But thats a good thing. No point of saying a program is stable when it is not. There is a bright side, two bugs will be fixed in the Mac OS X release of OpenOffice.org 2.0 as well. The delay has also given time for developers to fix a minor issue with printing under certain user interface languages. According to a revised schedule, the final OpenOffice.org 2.0 release is now slated for October 20, but developers acknowledge that date could change depending on feedback from RC3. "And its free to download." Star Office 8 came out not too long ago. It is not free, however it is far cheaper than the leading office program. If you're designing documents for output to PDF or for print, StarOffice 8 is a superior choice to Microsoft Word 2003 because of its extensive selection of paragraph styles and PDF export abilities. The ability to export to PDF was already in StarOffice 7, but version 8 adds hyperlinks, document outlines and notes, tables of contents, PDF controls, and tagged PDFs. OpenOffice.org probably has over 40 million users. Although that can not be proven,they had at least so far 49 million binaries downloaded. That does not include binaries distributed via the Linux distributors, alternative servers, CDROMs, or even P2P. It also does not include direct hits to their servers. So the number of users may be far larger or even smaller.