Thought a few people here might be interested: the open office 3.0 beta is out, including a stable beta version of the native OS X Aqua edition. Should be interesting to see what those full-time Sun Mac engineers have been up to.
I had downloaded a pre-Beta 3.0 about 2 weeks ago. It was much more stable than 2.4 for me.
I just downloaded the official Beta and will continue working with it. I am interested in seeing how the VBA works, since I had done a fair amount of VBA work in Excel. Of course, my main interest has now shifted to word processing, page layout, and the entire writing workflow. 
Thanks, I’m investigating that myself.
Just got to get around to the Installing of the 11. Found the CD though!
Supposedly I have to install that system from my old disk?
I’m assuming that I will then get upgrades. It’s three years old now.
“Installing of the 11”? You mean X11?
OpenOffice 3 for Mac (now out as a beta) runs WITHOUT X11. That’s the huge change from the earlier versions.
I tried the beta for a short while. Not longer, because moving in the text the standard Mac way (cmd-arrow, opt-arrow, ctrl-arrow) still does not work. And NeoOffice is still ahead in being integrated in the OS.
I will definitely check it out again, but now it is of no use for me.
Yup, that’s the biggest change 
No more X11, and it feels and acts much more ‘mac-like’ now.
The Aqua alphas were very unstable, but they seem to have nailed most of the instability now. It’s still a little slow in performance (better than Office 2004, much worse than pages), but unlike NeoOffice you can resize the document windows without completely whiting everything out.
I am pretty satisfied with Pages, but it’s nice to have a decent version of Open Office on here in case I ever need to export footnotes from Scrivener.
Absolutely. It’s great that there is a bundle of office programs with lots of functionality and lots of file support like OpenOffice (and its offsprings) and it is free and waiting for the day where you need one of it’s features, even if it’s just importing and exporting right again.
Which one, OpenOffice Beta 3 or NeoOffice, is considered as being more decent is a matter of personal taste. The whiting out in NeoOffice is terrible, true, but its tool bar icons look better than OpenOffice’s (even the new ones). Neither will win a beauty contest, to be honest.
Me, I work with a number of important calc documents and because of that NeoOffice’s non-beta status was the winner for me.
But in the long run I guess OpenOffice Aqua will make it.
Wow, folks, thanks!
My main concern is the creation of e-books; my online research spoke highly of Open Office, the word processor, for that purpose, but I’d also like a DB alternative to FileMaker, the conquering of which, life is too short.
I will investigate this beta immediately.