Office applications Toolkit

OpenOffice 2.4 released

David Meyer ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 28 Mar 2008 14:30 GMT

Version 2.4 of the OpenOffice productivity suite was released on Thursday, boasting enhancements to all its core components.

Possibly the most significant alteration in the new version of the free suite is in the description of file types. The "OpenDocument" description has been replaced by "ODF", which stands for "OpenDocument Format" and is becoming a well-known acronym thanks to rivalry with Microsoft's OOXML format.

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Photos: New features in OpenOffice 2.4

OpenOffice's spreadsheet, Calc, now has more streamlined data and formulae entry, and a new "smart move and copy" feature for blocks of cells. The Impress presentation application has also gained "a new range of thrilling 3D transition effects" via an extension.

PDF handling has also been improved. Relative links can be created in PDF documents and the extensions for exported PDF documents have been changed from ODF extensions, like ".odt", to ".pdf".

OpenOffice 2.4 is also the first version of the suite to support the Mac OS X QuickTime player natively. A full list of the suite's new features can be found on the OpenOffice website.

Version 3 of OpenOffice is expected to arrive in the autumn.