OpenOffice Review -- a free alternative to Microsoft office

OpenOffice Review

By Chris Mendla - October 2006

Open office is a realistic alternative to Microsoft office. Microsoft office cost between $200 or less for a student version to over $500 for the full fledged professional version. This can be extremely expensive for both individuals and companies of all sizes. in addition, Microsoft seems to be changing the licensing for its vista product that will only allow you to install it on two machines. In other words you will not be able to move the license from machine to machine as you upgrade. This isn't too much for a problem with an operating system however we regularly see people who move their office products from a sheen to machine as the upgrade their hardware. A similar licensing scheme for office would add substantially to an individual or companies computing costs.

Open office is a free alternative. It has been around for over six years. a current copy can be downloaded from the open office web site at www.openoffice.org/index.html . The download is about 80MB say you'll want to do that from a high speed connection.

The install went smoothly for us on several machines. They give you an option of making it the default application for spreadsheets, word processing and databases.

Application	Description
Writer	This is a full function word processor that will do much of which you could do with Microsoft Word. it has the capability of exporting your documents a home
Calc	a spreadsheet with advanced features such as what if analysis and wizards
Impress	Impress is similar in functionality to PowerPoint. In addition to being able to read and write PowerPoint files, it will also let you export your presentation in a flash format.
Draw	A graphics package that will be able you to create drawings and organizational charts and save them in a variety of formats. the format options also include the flash format.
Base	A database program that supports most of the major formats and is compatible with ODBC and JDBC driversand LDAP
Math	An equation editor

All of the products are integrated as a suite.

Pros:

The application is absolutely free although you are encouraged to contribute with bug reports and in other ways

the open document format ODF That open office uses is becoming a standard in many parts of the world

open office can be set to save documents in office formats (doc, xls, ppt) by default.

Open office has built in support that allows you to save your documents in the PDF format

The products are very intuitive to use. Our 11 old jumped right in and was producing documents with Writer, Impress, and Calc. Math was also very useful for his homework.

Cons:

some people may have some problems with a learning curve since it does not exactly duplicate the look and feel of office

currently it appears that impressions, the counterpart to PowerPoint does not have a lot of support in a way of templates . As open office becomes more popular this will change as users contribute their templates to the community.

There may be cases where another application will require the genuine Microsoft office products for data exchange. You'll have to determine this on a case by case basisand

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