Click the image below to visit the site and vote for OpenOffice.org! And be sure to check out all the other great projects while you’re there.

She highlights some of the proposals and includes several design mockups in the post to illustrate the participation levels already achieved.

What’s Next? The Renaissance team is determining which ideas (note: mixing and matching will happen here!) appear to implement the design directives* most successfully. Those that do will be used to create a handful of (wire frame) prototypes. Later, the concepts the Renaissance team is working on will be the basis for mid-fidelity prototypes that will be validated in tests: We need to confirm that the UI changes will be real improvements and will be well-accepted before we roll them out to our whole user base.

The team will publish further information as they go, so stay tuned! The excitement isn’t over yet.

The city wants to increase the number of local businesses. The initiative to organise OpenOffice training was taken by the municipal IT centre, the Ogre United Municipality Information System Centre (Ogre PVIS Centre), following discussions with organisations providing adult education.

The trainings are meant for all those in public administration, local businesses and citizens of the Ogre region. The courses will be hosted by the PVIS Centre. This is located next to the public library and provides cheap Internet access.

Johannes Eva and Jaron Baron have created two that I quite like, although I haven’t had the opportunity to look at all submissions yet.

For users of MS Office who need better compatibility, the solution is the Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office:

• The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office gives users of Microsoft Office Word, Excel and PowerPoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format (ODF).
• The plugin works with Microsoft Office 2007 (Service Pack 1 or higher), Microsoft Office 2003, XP and Microsoft Office 2000.

Malte Timmermann explains the situation in his recent post Better ODF support in Microsoft Office via Sun’s ODF Plugin:

So many people complain (everywhere, including in OOo mailing lists) about the bad ODF support in Microsoft Office 2007 SP2, that I thought it might be a good idea to post some information about the ODF Plugin here…

The Sun ODF Plugin for Microsoft Office, which is based on OpenOffice.org, adds support for ODF to Microsoft Office 2000 and newer versions. So you don’t have to use the very latest Microsoft Office 2007 SP2 version (in case you really need Microsoft Office for some reason) , where ODF support is insufficient anyway.

Anti-aliased rendering for Draw and charts, “eye-friendly” highlighting, spreadsheet zoom slider, formula hints, and comment replies got special attention from the Lifehacker team.

Those are just a few of the 3.1 changes we thought the average user might appreciate, but there are more technical and core-based upgrades—like spreadsheet performance, sorting defaults, and built-in document locking—detailed at OpenOffice.org’s release notes.

It’s always good to see OpenOffice.org and other open source software get attention from more mainstream media outlets. (I know, Lifehacker is not mainstream, but it’s a lot closer than free software-specific outlets!)

OpenOffice is the unsung software for personal usage. It offers two very convincing reasons to download: 1.) It’s free. And 2.) It comes with 24/7 online help.

Yes, both true, but there is more.

The article continues, with a collection of progressively more advanced tips for new users of OOo. It covers wizards for installing new dictionaries and fonts, and the Math component is discussed, as well as Calc, although very briefly. Of course it covers Writer, Impress and Draw as well, and one final tip on Base.

The official press release announces:

The OpenOffice.org Community today announced the general availability of OpenOffice.org 3.1, a significant upgrade to the world’s leading open-source office productivity suite. Since OpenOffice.org 3.0 was launched last October, over 60 million downloads have been recorded from the OpenOffice.org website alone. Released in more than 90 languages and available as a free download on all major computing platforms, OpenOffice.org 3.1 looks set to break these records.

Download it here. And, why not join the OpenOffice Facebook group while we’re all celebrating?

Popov walks the reader through the steps, including creating a data source, creating an invoice template, creating and printing invoices, and creating an invoice manager.

Updegrove said he thinks that Oracle would be wise to consider putting into motion the long-stymied spin-off of OpenOffice.org.

“It would provide even greater credibility and greater incentives for additional developers to join the project, from both the independent community as well as from major vendors like IBM and Google,” Updegrove said.

John McCreesh blogged about the possibility of a Foundation recently, as well, stating, “Philosophically, I am bound to agree that this feels the ‘right’ model for an open-source community.”

Computerworld also discusses the funding structure of the Mozilla, Apache and Linux foundations, and theorizes on strategies an OOo Foundation might take to fund itself sustainably, which would be a key part of this entire process.