Apache launches major revision of OpenOffice suite

In its first major revision in more than a year, the Apache OpenOffice suite now comes with a sidebar, from which users can launch their favorite tools.

...Other new features of OpenOffice 4.0 include additional improvements in rendering Microsoft Office documents accurately, a new color palette (also drawn from Lotus Symphony) and support for three additional languages -- Greek, Portuguese and Tamil.

The nonprofit Apache Software Foundation (ASF) oversees nearly 150 open-source projects, including OpenOffice, the Hadoop data processing platform, the Cassandra NoSQL data store and the Apache Web server software.

More than 58 million copies of Apache OpenOffice 3.4 have been downloaded since its release in May 2012, according to the nonprofit organization.