It’s been less than a year since Sun Microsystems’ OpenOffice.org hit its major 3.0 release, but the next version of the open source, cross-platform productivity suite is already available, complete with a slew of feature enhancements and performance tweaks. The first thing you’ll notice about the new OpenOffice 3.1 is that it just looks better—the program menus, letters and images it displays are sharper and clearer. This notable enhancement is thanks to the improved rendering of on-screen graphics through anti-aliasing, an advance that applies to the entire suite, but that should prove particularly pleasing to users of the product’s presentation component, Impress.

A few improvements that OOo has done on the graphics front are anti-aliased drawings, solid dragging (now you can see the transparent image while dragging, and not just an outline) and also translucent selections in Writer.

Feature wise, OpenOffice.org 3.1 matches up fairly well with Microsoft’s Office. In addition, the OpenOffice.org team has done a lot of work to make its suite compatible with MS Office’s traditional binary and newer OOXML file formats. With the latest option to ‘Reply to Notes’, improved support for bi-directional scripts and the introduction of grammar checking, Writer has evolved into one of the best and most advanced open source word processors in the market.

Other interesting features that you will surely look forward to are an introduction of Macros and syntax highlighting in Base, ‘Formula hot hints’ in Calc and also a very notable performance boost to every OpenOffice.org application. Do download the office suite and let us know if you’d like to review it for us!