Good news for folks looking for compatibility with Microsoft Office but who can’t or won’t pay the price for the official version.
OpenOffice is a free, open source Office compatible application suite for Mac OS X, Windows and Linux. It supports: word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, drawing and databases with an eye to supporting native Microsoft Office document formats. It also provides some support for Visual Basic scripting, a feature dropped from the latest official Office release (more details).
The major news in the 3.0 release is that it is finally available as a fully native Mac OS X application (previous versions used Apple’s X Windows implementation and frankly looked pretty awful in comparison to a typical Mac OS X app.) Some of the dialogs could still use a dose of Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines but the application itself is much improved. It’s also a simple drag and drop application install.
It’s free and well worth checking out. Make sure you grab the 3.0 release as some of the mirror sites are still vending the older 2.4 release.