Serdar Yegulalp writes on Information Week, OpenOffice.org's first release candidate for version 3.0 hit the tubes yesterday. It's an evolutionary, rather than revolutionary, edition of the open source office suite. It isn't to OO.o 2 what, say, Office 2007 was to Office 2003 -- but it's solid, and most importantly, noticeably faster. If there was one complaint I heard about OO.o more than any other, it was "It's too slow!" Slow to get started, mainly, but actually not all that slow when doing other things (at least not in my experience). On Windows, RC1 of version 3 opens all of its apps pretty snappily even without the Quickstarter running in the system tray. A well-engineered program shouldn't need a crutch like the Quickstarter in the first place, so I disabled it to see how well things worked without it.

Another major addition is native (if not feature-complete) support for Microsoft Office macros, something enormously useful to people trying to make a jailbreak from the Office but find they can't due to the need to support legacy macros. Financial houses and law firms seem to be two types of folks most heavily dependent on Office VB macros -- so maybe some success stories from their side of the fence will compel those with far less ambitious needs to make the jump, too.