The OpenOffice.org development team has made OOo Release Candidate 1 available for download. A few hours ago, Joost Andrae announced the new version in a public mailing.

Release notes for OOo RC1 can be found on the OpenOffice.org website.

Copies of OpenOffice.org 3.0 RC1 can be downloaded from here.

With the final version of OOo 3.0 scheduled to be released later this month the release candidate is a preview of what users can expect from the eventual release.

Some of those new features include:

– With Version 3.0, OpenOffice.org is now able to run on Mac OS X without the need for X11.
– OpenOffice.org 3.0 already supports the features of the upcoming version 1.2 of the ISO standard OpenDocument Format (ODF).
– As well as read and write support for the Microsoft Office binary file formats (.doc, .xls, .ppt, etc.), OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now also capable of opening files created with Microsoft Office 2007 or Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac OS X (.docx, .xlsx, .pptx, etc.).
– Multiple users can now collaborate and share spreadsheets.
– Calc, the spreadsheet application, now supports 1024 columns, a great improvement over the previous limit of 256 columns.

For a more detailed look at what to expect from OpenOffice.org 3.0 have a look at our beta release article.