Open Office has grown up

Submitted by Sean Gates on Sat 08/05/2010

For many years Microsoft Office® has been the de facto standard office suite. All the while a Free Open Source Software (FOSS) alternative has been gaining more widespread use in the business community. The product is called OpenOffice and is currently on version 3 which means that is is both a mature and stable product.

The components are

  1. Writer – a word processing application that understands, and is able to create, a variety of document formats (Including MS Word 2007®)
  2. Calc – Spreadsheet application which supports a variety of formats (Including MS Excel 2007®)
  3. Impress – Presentation software (do I still need to mention formats and MS Office compatibility?)
  4. Draw – sophisticated drawing / diagramming tool (Similar to Visio if you’re looking for comparisons)
  5. Base – Database access tool that allows you to create queries reports etc.

Best of all its completely free. A number of corporate and home users have switched to open office for 3 main reasons:

  1. Cost: Did I mention its completely free?
  2. Dislike of MS Office 2007®. This is a significantly changed product with a very different user experience to any previous version of the suite. The average user requires training to make the conversion and training costs money – and time!
  3. Platform independence. Perhaps not a big deal for some users but the same product runs well, irrespective of which version of Windows® you are using. And its not restricted to WIndows, it will run equally well on Linux and Mac machines.

Recently I had a call from a solicitor client who had received a document created using Microsoft Works®. Her system did not know how to handle this – it’s an Office 2007® system. I logged on to her system and installed the free Works Conversion Utility. The documentation stated that this would work on some versions but that conversion could not be guaranteed. To cut a long story short she still could not read the document. Since I was connected remotely I emailed the offending document to myself. Once it arrived on my computer I double clicked the attachment. Without the need to set anything up this opened perfectly in OpenOffice Writer. I simply saved the file as a Word document and mailed it back. Job done – but it certainly made me think… Click here for more info on OpenOffice

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