OpenOffice.org Portable 3 Beta 2 Released

OpenOffice.org Portable 3 Beta 2 has been released in English, German, French and Italian. It's the developer test version of the future version of the popular OpenOffice.org office suite bundled with a PortableApps.com launcher as a portable app allowing you to test all the latest features in the upcoming version without disrupting your current OpenOffice.org installation. This new release updates OpenOffice.org to version 3 Beta 1. It's packaged in PortableApps.com Format so it can easily integrate with the PortableApps.com Suite. And it's open source and completely free.

Read on for more details...

OpenOffice.org 3 Beta 2

OpenOffice.org 3 Beta 2 is the latest test release of the upcoming 3.0 version of OpenOfficee.org. It comes with a new iconset and many new features, like a new solver component and other notable improvements in Calc; Writer has now an improved notes feature and displays of multiple pages while editing and there are numerous Chart enhancements, and an improved crop feature in Draw and Impress. In addition to read and write support for the MS-Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.), OpenOffice.org 3.0 will support the upcoming OpenDocument Format (ODF) 1.2 standard, and is capable of opening files created with MS-Office 2007 or MS-Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.).

For more on what's new, read the OpenOffice.org 3 Beta feature list.

New in This Release

This release updates OpenOffice.org to version 3 Beta 2 (release notes) and comes with this features:

• update to the great new PortableApps.com Installer 0.9.9.9.
• all packages are now the result of a new modular built process. That means they have the same core files and only the language specific files are different. So the creation of a new native lang version takes about only half an our (including the time for download the non portable version). As result of the new built process we are now able to offer language packs for OpenOffice.org Portable too.
• all packages comes with the dics for the most recent languages en, de, fr and it as extensions, so You can easily de-install them if not wanted or install other dics as extension
• python is optional now, if You don't need functions like mail-merge You can save about 10 mb of space
• only the default images are delivered with the portable version now, cause 90% of all user never change the default icon style and so we save about 30 mb space (if You need the others like crystal, high-contrast and so on You can add them as Addon package availabe on the OpenOffice.org Portable 3 Beta 2 Homepage

PortableApps.com Installer / PortableApps.com Format

OpenOffice.org Portable is packaged in a PortableApps.com Installer so it will automatically detect an existing PortableApps.com installation when your drive is plugged in. It will install alongside a OpenOffice.org , Portable Edition 2.x installation by default and show up in your PortableApps.com Menu with a "Test" suffix. The installer supports upgrading existing 2.x installations by manually changing the install location as well and will automatically upgrade an existing OpenOffice.org Portable installation without affecting your settings. And it's in PortableApps.com Format, so it automatically works with the PortableApps.com Suite including the Menu and Backup Utility.

Download

OpenOffice.org Portable is available for immediate download from the OpenOffice.org Portable 3 Beta 2 homepage. You can get the German release from the German homepage and the French and Italian releases (and more language packs) from the Localization page. Get it today!