OpenOffice.org is an entirely free and impressively complete office suite which includes word processing, spreadsheets, databases, presentations and more. All the things you’re likely to find in Microsoft Office — but for free.
Installation and Setup
Considering OpenOffice.org 3 is an entire suite of applications, installation can take a while. The program also relies on a larger download than most free software. Compared to Microsoft Office, the installation takes under half the time. You can customise the program to only install the programs you want, so if you know you’ll never need the database software, you can avoid it completely.
Ease of Use
OpenOffice.org is one of those programs you really can’t believe you don’t have to pay any money for. It’s clearly taken much of its design and features from Microsoft’s famous Office 2003 but has removed the price tag, thrown in a few features of its own and even better offers full compatibility between the two applications. Unfortunately there’s not yet any support for Office 2007 file formats which could prove to be a problem in the future.
One of the best things you can say about the suite is that in a few weeks of using the applications, there were very few times we had to look for a feature or search help files in order to use any of the applications. There wasn’t a single time where we honestly needed to fire up Microsoft Office in order to fill some gap that OpenOffice.org couldn’t fill by itself. There were a few occasions where Microsoft’s software did things easier or faster than OpenOffice, but these were few and far between.
Some of the less important features were notably missing from the package. While functional, the interface isn’t aesthetically pleasing, especially to those who are used to the new Office 2007 ‘ribbon’ interface. It also doesn’t come with many different templates or dictionaries but there are plenty of places where you can download what you need, all for free.
OpenOffice.org might not be quite as ‘complete’ as Microsoft Office but once you’ve used the former, it’s hard to justify the price tag for a few extra features and a prettier interface. OpenOffice.org is a must for any Linux user and anyone using Windows and OSX owes it to themselves to give the software a try.
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