The OpenOffice.org Community has recently released the final version of OpenOffice.org 3.2, the free alternative to Microsoft’s Office productivity suite. The new version is faster than previous releases, offers new and improved features and functionality, gives better compatibility with other office software, and fixes bugs and potential security vulnerabilities, announced the OpenOffice.org Community

Calc and Writer in OpenOffice.org 3.2 for example show a 46% speed increase compared to version 3.0. “Cold start” times for Calc and Writer in OpenOffice.org 3.2 take almost half as long as they did in version 3.0.

Here are the other bits and pieces you can expect to get from OpenOffice.org 3.2:

• - Faster start up times
• - Improved compatibility with open standard (ODF) and proprietary file formats
• - Improvements to all components, particularly the Calc spreadsheet, with over a dozen new or enhanced features
• - The Chart module (usable throughout OpenOffice.org) has had a usability makeover as well as offering new chart types

Marketing Project Lead of OpenOffice.org, Florian Effenberger, comments: “Some people are currently locked in to other personal productivity tools - maybe by corporate IT policy, or by tie-in to other legacy software. For everyone else, we want OpenOffice.org to be the 2010 office software of choice, and 3.2 takes us another step towards that goal.”

If you are currently using OpenOffice.org 3, then you should upgrade to version 3.2 and take advantage of all the new and improved features and functionality the software has to offer. If you are still using OpenOffice.org 2, then you should definitely upgrade. The OpenOffice.org Community stopped supporting version 2.0 since December 2.0. This means OpenOffice.org no longer releases security patches of bug fixes for this version.

As always, the software is available for download free of charge to Windows, Mac OS X and Linux users. You can download OpenOffice.org 3.2 here. A detailed list of changes in OpenOffice.org 3.2 is available here.