I was going back and forth whether I should write about this, but I wanted to see what everyone's thoughts were on this. I posted on Twitter a week ago about news of OpenOffice.org working on a ribbon-like design for an upcoming version of their office suite. When I saw the news on an official Sun blog I was rather disappointed, which is why I wasn't even going to mention it here on the site.

The OpenOffice.org team makes a great productivity suite, but the developers behind the famed open source project have also tucked away a few enjoyable Easter Eggs. Several of them are your typical run-of-the-mill Easter Eggs that show the credits, but one in particular is a lot of fun.

There has been a lot of buzz in the last week regarding OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta. Some people are excited with the new features that it brings to the table, while others are a little disappointed that the interface didn't get much of a facelift. No matter which way you look at it, this will be a huge release since milestones like this only occur once every three years for OpenOffice.org.

Back in September, we wrote about "The Ultimate Steal" from Microsoft because they were offering students the option to purchase Office Ultimate 2007 for just $59 bucks. Considering it retails for $680, this deal is a 91% discount. At the time they said the offer would end on April 30th, but as it turns out, they extended the offer a few days and now its set to end on May 16th, a week from today.

Win; Mac; Linux It's here! I've been waiting for OpenOffice.org 3.0 Beta for what seems like forever. I was getting a little bit worried when it wasn't released on April 30th like it was supposed to be, and the release date was never revised. Luckily it's only rolling in about a week late.

As we pointed out yesterday in our Daily Downloads the new version of OpenOffice.org 2.4 has been released, and here's an overview of the new features. In my opinion that is not the most exciting news though. To go along with the new release they've also revamped their website, and I have to say that they did an incredible job with it.

Back in October 2006 the free OpenOffice 2.0.4 was released, and one of the big new features that it shipped with was an extension management system similar to that of Firefox. With it, developers are able to create add-ons that are easily incorporated into the suite of applications.

If you haven't seen of, or at least heard of the "Dummies" books, I don't know where you've been living! Ever since the first "For Dummies" book hit the shelves back in 1991, they've been a huge success. At this point they cover nearly any topic possible, focusing on ones that are complex, confusing, or intimidating.

One of the things that OpenOffice has always seemed to lack is an abundance of clipart and templates. Those are things that people use all of the time for making presentations, writing reports, creating budgets, and more.

OpenOffice.org has an extension system just like the Firefox browser. One of the recently released extensions is for the Writer component of the office suite, and it adds a new menu option with some useful tools.