OpenOffice.org Altgernative to Microsoft Office
OpenOffice 2.3 offers a FREE open source alternative to the pricey Microsoft Office Suite. The suite includes word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, vector-graphics, mathematical formula, and a solid database program. It runs on a variety of platforms including Linux, Windows, Solaris, and Mac OS X.
This is a robust feature rich suite but lacks the calendar and email client that comes with Outlook. On the other hand the vector-graphics application, Draw, is something the Microsoft suite lacks and OpenOffice comes with the robust database program, Data, which comes at a premium in Microsoft Office. For the most part, this alternative provides all the major funtionality of it's pricey rival with a few less glossy features.
Writer - the comparable component to Word provides a full featured word processor with the familiar formatting, macro and mail merge functions. You can save your documents in a variety of Microsoft formats including Microsoft Word 2003 xml. In addition you can export documents as pdf files [ Adobe's Portable Document Format ].
Calc - the alternative to Excel. It too, a robust tool with a good selection of spreadsheet and application functions [ f(x) ]. File formats include the array of Excel files and spreadsheets can also be exported as pdf files.
Draw - a vector-graphics program, provides something not delivered by Microsoft. It include a full box of graphics tools comparable in look and feel to Corel and Adobe products. Files can be exported in a wide variety of formats including XHTML, PDF, SWF [ Macromedia Flash ], JPG, GIF, PNG, BMP, EPS, SVG [ scalable vector graphics ], among others.
Math - this tool is an extra that has operators, functions and formatting assistants to help you create mathimatical formulas. It can be called as an inserted object in other applications. It can also be used as a stand along where you can create and save more complex files that can be inserted later.
Impress - can read and write Power Point files. It comes with the same basic tools for creating presentations. What it lacks is the variety of graphics and templates found in Power Point and other presentation programs.
Base - the database program for the suite has an easy to use interface that should be somewhat familiar for users of Microsoft Access. Wizards are available to help you design tables. Afterwards, the same are available to help you with forms and reports. These are easily avoided for those who wish to do these manually.
The Suite is free for download. It is the open source version of Sun's StarOffice 8. The Star version comes with additional management features as well as templates and graphics and sells for $79.75, still less than half of any of the Microsoft Office upgrades. Find out more at the StarOffice Site. There you will also find some free plugins that work with both versions.
