This Thursday, the Open Source project OpenOffice presented Release Candidate 1 of its free Office suite; this test version -- possibly the last one -- was, however, already available for downloading from the OpenOffice web site before the official release on Thursday: all of the mirror servers had been prepared since Wednesday.

While some office suite users are still waiting for OpenOffice.org 2.0 to arrive, its parent organization has quietly released OpenOffice.org 1.1.5.

The latest OO.o (OpenOffice.org) boasts several new features. Perhaps the most significant of them is that OO.o now supports the importing of OpenDocument documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

It's a little-known secret, but what you see in the interface of version 2.0 of OpenOffice.org isn't what you have to settle for. Hidden throughout version 2.0 are dozens of pieces of functionality, each available in a few seconds by customizing the menus, toolbars or keyboard shortcuts of OpenOffice.org applications.