OpenOffice.org 3.2 is now available for download. The latest version of the office suite -- which is a free, open-source alternative to Microsoft Office -- boasts faster start-up times and built in support for Microsoft's Office 2007 file formats.

OpenOffice.org 3.2 is <a href="http://download.openoffice.org/">available for Mac, Windows and Linux</a>.

The big news in this release is full compatibility with files created by Microsoft's Office 2007. Indeed, if you've ever tried opening or converting .docx and other MS Office 2007 file formats outside of Office 2007 itself, you've likely pounded your head against more than a few walls -- downloading plugins or struggling with online conversion services.

For most users those hassles should be a thing of the past -- OpenOffice.org 3.2 supports all the Office 2007 formats out of the box. That said, the conversion process still isn't completely perfect, especially if you're trying for pixel-perfect document formatting or, in our testing, spreadsheets with complicated equation cells.

Of course it's hard to be too excited about the new conversion tools given that they arrive three years after Office 2007 hit the shelves. If your business had a mission critical need to work with Microsoft's formats we sincerely hope you weren't holding your breath for OpenOffice.org to come through for you.

Is it fair to give an open source project a hard time for taking three years to reverse engineer a document format more or less invented to make OpenOffice.org's life more complicated? Well, no, but in the real world MS Office is, for better or worse, the moving target OpenOffice.org is aiming for and, in this case, taking quite a while to hit.

Also on the document support front, OpenOffice.org 3.2 boasts improved compliance with Open Document Format (ODF) 1.2 standards as well as the ability to open password-protected Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files.

Given that Microsoft's preview release of Office 2010 offers support for ODF files there's some small chance that OpenOffice.org might actually have an easier time integrating with MS Office in the future.

The latest version of OpenOffice.org isn't all about format wars though. Even if file formats mean nothing to you, OpenOffice.org 3.2 makes a worthwhile update for the considerable speed boost -- especially in start up times. 

In fact, we no longer had time to grab fresh cup of coffee while OpenOffice.org started up. No, we double clicked the icon and just like that OpenOffice.org was ready to go. Also, while the release notes don't tout it as much as the startup times, we found most of the apps to be somewhat snappier in general usage as well. The one exception seemed to be the database application, which felt sluggish in comparison (particularly with large database files). 

After the speed and file format improvements, the OpenOffice.org release notes get very technical, very quickly. The gory details can be found on the OpenOffice.org site, but suffice to say that the Calc tool (spreadsheet app) has received quite a a few improvements -- like better copy and paste features -- and the rest of the apps see minor updates and bug fixes as well.

However, what's perhaps most significant about this release may have nothing to do with the improved apps at all -- this will be last release before OpenOffice.org moves to its new owner Oracle, which purchased Sun Microsystems last month.

Oracle has pledged to continue OpenOffice.org and plans to keep the entire Sun team on hand, running OpenOffice.org as an independent business unit. Of course Oracle clearly sees the online office suite as the future and plans to launch Oracle Cloud Office at some point. Whether that means OpenOffice.org will suffer neglect remains to be seen. 

It would be nice to see Oracle do for OpenOffice.org what Microsoft is trying to do for MS Office -- integrate an online component -- but do it without creating a massive vendor lock-in scheme.

Some might argue that the future of office suites is all online -- solutions like Google Docs or Zoho will one day be the norm, but while document storage in the cloud is all well and good, editing documents in a browser is still nowhere near as pleasant or powerful as with dedicated software. 

If Oracle can take OpenOffice.org, integrate it with Oracle Cloud Office and provide a first-rate connect-anywhere, edit-anywhere office suite, it might have finally found something that can break Microsoft's stronghold on business productivity tools.