OpenOffice.org: Great freeware alternative to M”$” Office!

Most people need to use office packages in order to work or to write and organize something. The most popular office package is currently Microsoft Office of course, and according to their standards, the de facto format for word processing is .doc, spreadsheets is .xls and presentations as .ppt files. Of course, any competitor to OpenOffice would need the ability to open, edit and save in these file formats in order to blend in with the world, but it would also newed some other advantages if it wanted some of the market share.

OpenOffice has now become a major competitor of MS Office, having about 8% of the market share, and MS looping up 90% of the rest of the users. This figure is steadily rising, and the main reason is that it’s FREE and OPEN SOURCE! This means that improvements to the suite is always in progress, almost inevitably from it’s users who are free to modify the source code of the suite.

Once you submit a bug, a whole base of users tries to fix the problem, and it’s done usually in less than a week! In the case of MS Office, it would probably take a few weeks for a team of a few hundred developers to fix the problem and release a patch. Another great advantage of the program is that you can  export files to PDF easily from within the suite’s Writer (=Word), Calc (=Excel) and Impress (=PowerPoint). This is a very convenient feature and does not require any additional installation of PDF printers.

Of couse, the office suite is not only limited to three applications, actually there are SIX! In addition to Writer, Calc and Impress, there is Base(database), as well as drawing, and math programs. As the [original] developer is Sun Microsystems, it’s natural that the suite totally depends on Java Runtime Environment.

More on the features of OpenOffice suite: [Please do not underestimate the capabilities of OpenOffice although it's free]

• You can open, edit and save as the defacto Ms Office formats.
• Quick export to PDF files.
• After a strict comparison done, OpenOffice has virtually every feature that MS Office Home has, plus some additional ones. However, VBA Scripting functionality in MS Excel Pro is not included. CLICK HERE to see a comparison between MS Office and OpenOffice. Nearly every feature is placed in a similarly named menu compared to MS Office, otherwise they are placed in very logical places. This means that MS Office users will not spend a lot of time in adapting to OpenOffice.org.
• OpenOffice uses the MS office 03 toolbars interface instead of the 07 “ribbons” interface.
• In reply to user requests, other users have translated OpenOffice to many different languages, of course including French, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, German, etc.
• Another advantage is that OpenOffice can be run on almost all of the Operating Systems there are in the world, e.g. Mac, Linux, Ubuntu, Solaris etc. while MS Office can only be run on Windows and Mac.
• Free for all uses; even commercial!

History of Open Office quoted from Freeware Genius

OpenOffice.org was spawned when Sun Microsystems realized it was spending millions of dollars on continually upgrading their versions of office software from Microsoft; at the same time, they needed office software for their Solaris operating system. It thence purchased a company called StarDivision that produced a suite of programs comparable to MS office (StarOffice) but could also run on Solaris and Linux. The source code to StarOffice was released and OpenOffice.org was born. Microsoft has worked incredibly hard to become the standard in every single way (esp. in the areas of operation systems and Office suites), but with OpenOffice.org users are finally presented with a real choice; and choice is good, especially if its free.

Verdict: Can easily replace MS Office, even in working environments, except when  macros are involved, which OpenOffice does not support.

Version Tested: 3.1.1

Compatibility:  Windows 98 and up, Solaris, Mac OS X Intel and PPC, Linux 32 and 64 bit, Java RE required for Windows and Mac users.

Download: http://download.openoffice.org/other.html

Also download more extensions: http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/