Difference between revisions of "PR 2.3"

Revision as of 15:27, 31 August 2007

Category:Draft marketing ideas and materials

Draft marketing documents index

OpenOffice.org Announces Version 2.3

Draft - not for publication

The OpenOffice.org Community announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.3, the latest version of the leading open-source office suite. With upgrades to its word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, and database software, the free software package provides a real alternative to Microsoft's Office 2007 product - and an easier upgrade path for existing Microsoft Office users

Location and Timestamp -- The OpenOffice.org community is pleased to announce the release of OpenOffice.org 2.3, the latest version of the leading open source office productivity suite. OpenOffice.org 2.3 now incorporates an extensive array of new features and enhancements to all its core components, and protects users from newly discovered security vulnerabilities.

The charting component has undergone a complete revamp, adding a range of new features as well as simplifying and streamlining chart formulation. A new chart wizard, enhanced 3D chart designs, replacement colour palettes, additional axis options and scaling, improved toolbars, flexible data sources, as well as an improved data editor combine to offer the user a smoother, efficient and accommodating charting experience.

[WRITER - STILL NEEDS COMPILATION] Usability enhancements to Writer, the word processing module, in conjunction with the addition of a new MediaWiki export filter ... Zoom Aligns to centre rather than left ... language guessing of unknown text ... Smart Tag API Extended [LEAVE OUT?] ... separate UI/configuration of XML Form Documents from Writer [LEAVE OUT?] ... Simple Mail Merge now allows the saving of the merge to a single document ... Support for ODF specification soft page breaks added. Pages are not being centered. Changed ling behaviour in Writer (Ctrl+click for opening links).

A number of general productivity improvements to Calc, the spreadsheet module, have been added. Most noticeable of these is that the default print settings have changed to suppress the printing of blank pages and to only print the selected sheets. Additional simplification of shortcuts, the addition and improvement of various functions, changes to context menus and dialogues, improvements to import filters, modifications to toolbars, as well as the enhancement to the AutoSum feature go a long way to easing the day to day use of Calc.

[IMPRESS - PROBABLY WANT TO LEAVE THIS OUT OR DRAMATICALLY REWORD] Impress, the presentation module, has undergone many improvements. An error has been fixed, that in some circumstances with buggy video drivers the presentation module might crash. Overall performance has been improved as well.

Impress, the presentation module, has had the ability of an object to move along a curve, which was broken in 2.0, reimplemented.

The database module, Base, continues to evolve with improvements to window handling, support for keyboard shortcuts, the availability of a report builder extension, and additional features for expert users and developers.

OpenOffice Draw, the drawing and diagramming module, has been enhanced to provide improved exporting to HTML/Web by adding support for exporting the images to portable network graphics (PNG) format. Accessibility improvements have also been made by providing alternate text for image maps and layer titles and descriptions.

General improvements to the entire suite include a persistent stylist filter, re-ordering of the PDF export dialogues, new shortcut keys, easier keyboard customisation, previewing of web pages in a browser, a number of enhancements for extensions and a high default macro security level. In addition support for numerous languages and locales have added.

About OpenOffice.org

The OpenOffice.org Community is an international team of volunteer and sponsored contributors who develop, support, and promote the leading open-source office productivity suite, OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org's leading edge software technology (UNO) is also available for developers, systems integrators, etc to use in OpenOffice.org extensions or in their own applications.

OpenOffice.org supports the Open Document Format for Office Applications (OpenDocument) OASIS Standard (ISO/IEC 26300) as well as legacy industry file formats and is available on major computing platforms in over 70 languages. OpenOffice.org software is provided under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPL) and may be used free of charge for any purpose, private or commercial.

The OpenOffice.org Community acknowledges generous sponsorship from a number of companies, including Sun Microsystems, the founding sponsor and primary contributor.

Links

OpenOffice.org 2.3 may be downloaded free of charge from http://download.openoffice.org

OpenOffice.org extensions can be downloaded from http://extensions.services.openoffice.org

The OpenOffice.org community can be found at http://www.openoffice.org

To learn more about the community see http://about.openoffice.org

Your local native language project can be found at at http://projects.openoffice.org/native-lang.html

Press Contacts

Louis Suarez-Potts (UTC -04h00)
OpenOffice.org Community Manager
louis@openoffice.org
+1 (416) 625 3843

John McCreesh (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead
jpmcc@openoffice.org
+44 (0)7 810 278 540

Florian Effenberger (UTC +01h00)
OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Co-Lead
floeff@openoffice.org
+49 8341 9966 0880

Worldwide Marketing Contacts

http://marketing.openoffice.org/contacts.html