For the past six years or so, my office productivity suite of choice has been OpenOffice.org. In that time, I've watched the suite progress slowly but steadily toward the goal of being "just as good" as Microsoft Office.

IBM calls its new office productivity suite, built upon OpenOffice, Lotus Symphony. This disappoints two groups. The first group, fans like me of OpenOffice, wish it kept the OpenOffice name to help further the open cause. The second group wishes the old Lotus Symphony office suite, an early competitor to Microsoft Office, had climbed out of the grave.

OpenOffice may support Microsoft's Office Open XML standard in future, but the organisation behind the open source productivity suite anticipates that everyone including Microsoft will have "difficulty" in making the format work.

If you look back on the history of OpenOffice.org, it makes the 3.2 release that came out on Thursday the 11th even more impressive.

It has been almost three years since the release of OpenOffice.org 2.0. During that time we've seen community fragmentation and frustration resulting from Sun's heavy involvement with the office suite's development, and even a third-party online version that provides editing and collaboration features.

Warnings ! no objectivity there. Instead of simply listing what it believes to be the advantages of Microsoft Office over the open source OpenOffice.org productivity suite, Microsoft has compiled comments from 15 customers who switched to Office after evaluating OpenOffice. The result: this video recently posted to the company's officevideos YouTube channel, which we've embedded below.

Just over one year after the release of OpenOffice 3.0, OpenOffice.org (OOo) project developer Joost Andrae has announced that the free office suite has been downloaded more than one hundred million times since the launch of version 3.0. OpenOffice is an open source office suite from Sun Microsystems for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.

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.

OpenOffice arguably has always been the flag bearer of Open Source movement. It is basically an office suite with a number of functionality enhancing extensions. Here is my take on the best of OpenOffice extensions.