New figures from webmasterpro.de show surprisingly high market share for OpenOffice.org around the world - peaking at 22% in Poland and Germany. Has the rise of OpenOffice.org to become a true rival to Microsoft Office begun?

OpenOffice.org is the greatest open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite. Over the years OpenOffice has evolved to become much more than just an alternative to MS Office however. Let’s look at some hacks that will allow you to become more of a power user of OpenOffice, enabling you to be more productive with the software.

The current setup of websites for downloading OpenOffice.org installation sets provides builds for several languages and operating systems. But nowadays a lot more are built. Unfortunately they are not that easy to find as they are on mirror servers.

The same application performs differently on different platforms. Differences include compiler brand (Microsoft Visual C++ vs gcc), compiler version (gcc 3 and 4), operating system characteristics, and file systems. These OpenOffice.org 3.0 benchmarks measure vanilla OpenOffice.org, StarOffice, Go-oo, and Portable OpenOffice.org on 3.0 on Microsoft Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex).

Before proceeding to the OpenOffice 3.2 installation (from its website), please note that there are quite a few differences between this version of OpenOffice.org and the OpenOffice.org version from the Ubuntu repositories!

IBM's Rob Weir is rightly angry at Microsoft's intrusion into OpenOffice.org Conference, which he claims Microsoft is denigrating after giving some anti-OpenOffice.org talks in the same city

I remain perplexed by the state of OpenOffice.org. After years of using Word 2 (yes, you read that correctly - by far the best version Microsoft ever produced), I jumped straight to OpenOffice.org as my main office software.

OpenOffice.org 3.0 is 167 days away, but who's counting? Maybe the software developers are counting because they have a whopping 2,278 issues targeted for this release. Even though OpenOffice.org 2.4 is not yet out the door, let's see how far they've come with OpenOffice.org 3.0.

When a group of German coders at OpenOffice (belonging to database major, Oracle) finally forked away on Sept28th 2010 there was much for everybody to talk about while Oracle OpenOffice maintained dignified silence.