Reprinted from TidBITS by permission; reuse governed by Creative Commons license BY-NC-ND 3.0. TidBITS has offered years of thoughtful commentary on Apple and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit http://www.tidbits.com/ OpenOffice 4.0 Agen G. N. Schmitz Apache has released [1]OpenOffice 4.0, a major update to the free, open-source productivity suite. The biggest visible change is the new Sidebar user interface, which brings context-sensitive panels that change properties according to the current editing task. Additionally, developers have been given a framework to build extensions to the Sidebar. The update improves compatibility with Microsoft Office documents, including support for Office Open XML (OOXML), .docx outline levels, table background color from table style in .docx files, and font color in .pptx files. It also brings an enhanced and extended color palette to the DrawObject, as well as new gradients, new gallery themes, and refined selection handles. OpenOffice improves translations for 19 languages, and adds three new localizations: Greek, Portuguese, and Tamil. (Free, 163 MB, [2]release notes) References 1. http://www.openoffice.org/ 2. https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/AOO+4.0+Release+Notes .