LibreOffice3.3 RC2 has been released, this release comes with some improvements and bugfixes.

The announcement is more about the Document Foundation than the software. The foundation is a wake up call for Oracle, which continues to rub the community on the wrong side.

The Document Foundation is a newly founded organisation with a mission: to make an office suite available as truly free software, developed within the wider community. Supported by companies like Google, Novell and Red Hat, the Foundation has forked the Oracle-owned OpenOffice software and created LibreOffice.

The Microsoft camp is attacking Oracle's OpenOffice.org (OOOo) while pretending that Oracle is an "evil empire" (whereas Microsoft "loves" open source)

OpenOffice.org surpassed 150 million downloads, 30 million of which came from the 3.2.0 release earlier this year.

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced yesterday a campaign to collect a clear list of OpenOffice.Org extensions that are FaiF, to convince the OO.o Community Council to list only FaiF extensions, and to find those extensions that are proprietary software, so that OO.o extension developers can focus of their efforts on writing replacements under a software-freedom-respecting license.

I tend to use OpenOffice if I am on my netbook and not connected to the internet. I can use the word processor to write and not be tempted to go on Twitter or use Stumbleupon to find random sites. At first, I didn’t realize you could use extensions; once I found that out, I was hooked.

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.