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Open Office as a Microsoft Alternative, Part 1
By TheEmperor | February 20, 2008
This is the first part in what will be a six part series about Open Office. The first part will be an overview of Open Office, what it is, where it comes from, and why you should use it. The second part will cover the most popular part of the Open Office Suite, the Word Processor. In the third installment I will delve into the Spreadsheet program. In the fourth article I will cover the Presentation software. In the fifth installment I will talk about the Database component, and in the final part I will cover several components of Open Office that Microsoft Office lacks including the Math program and the Drawing program. After this review I hope to have everyone reading it convinced that Open Office is not only an acceptable substitute to Microsoft office, but is in fact a superior option. Now, on with the show.
Open Office derives from a program called Star Office that was developed in Germany in the 80s by StarDivision. Eventually the Office suite was purchased by Sun Microsystems. At this point the codebase for Star Office was released to the Open Source community where development continues to this day. Sun is still the leading contributor of code to the project, but the community is driving the development, and insuring that the software remains open.
The Open Office suite in its current incarnation contains six applications; they are Writer, Calc, Impress, Base, Math, and Draw. The are analogous to Microsoft Office’s Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Access. Microsoft has no analogue to Math, and the Microsoft analogue to Draw is MS Paint. Open Office is capable of reading and editing all of the Microsoft formatted files from each of those applications as well as producing files in its own format and most other popular formats. And as a final feather in its cap Open Office is free. No cost. Completely gratis. You just point your web browser to OpenOffice.org and download the installer. Then click a few buttons and you’re done. In Part two I’ll start the in depth review of Open Office Writer and compare it to Microsoft Word. But don’t wait for me, go ahead and download the suite and start using it. I’m sure you’ll find it far superior to Microsoft Office.
Topics: Open office, access alternative, excel alternative, free access, free excel, free microsoft office, free office, free powerpoint, free word, math formula writer, microsoft office, office alternative, powerpoint alternative, word alternative |
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