A free office software suite designed as an alternative to Microsoft Office was announced Monday by the OpenOffice.org: OpenOffice.org 3.0. The software covers a variety of tasks, including spreadsheets, word processing and presentation work; XML support and XSLT based filter support, import filters for MS Office file formats: .docx. xlsx, pptx.

Editions are also available for a variety of different operating systems.

Another interesting feature is Solver, a solution engine for combinatorial optimization problems that is a strong selling point for the commercial Excel package from Microsoft.

This version is an important milestone release and could help boost the program's market share, particularly on Mac OS X, where it now provides a much higher level of platform integration; but it is once again available in PC and Linux as well.

Returning to the OS X, these changes are also said to aid in performance and stability, and introduce support for Mac OS X's accessibility APIs, which primarily help people with little to no eyesight. The Mac version is now native and no longer requires the Unix X11 environment.

The release had originally been scheduled for mid September. OpenOffice (163 MB) for Mac requires OS X Tiger or later and an Intel Mac. The installer of OpenOffice.org 3.0 for Windows is only about 140MB in size but it takes a little bit longer to install.

OpenOffice's Web site greeted its Monday visitors with the following message: “Apologies - our website is struggling to cope with the unprecedented demand for the new release 3.0 of OpenOffice.org. The technical teams are trying to come up with a solution.” In other words the software is far from lacking demands.