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August 6, 2008

The OpenOffice Suite v. 2.4 is a free, Linux alternative to Microsoft's Office application software and has some neat new features that really need to be tried.

It's great if you need just basic office applications such as a word processor or spreadsheet and at no cost at all.

But large companies and some 'power users' may be disappointed by its lack of features and support in some cases. In its original version, OpenOffice.org used to be a proprietary office suite known as StarOffice and was originally developed by StarDivision. However, all that changed completely when Sun Microsystems acquired the company almost ten years ago.

As is usually the case with open source, things have changed a lot since.

Even if Sun Microsystems still sells StarOffice, it also released the software's source code and created a new, community-driven project:-- OpenOffice.org.

The application is now totally free and is available under the GNU Lesser General Public Licence. Some will be interested to know (or even be susprised to learn) that OpenOffice.org even runs under Windows.

Users can also run it under Mac OS X and, (of course) Linux. The download is about 127 Mb in size and the install process is quick and painless. Since 2005, there has been several revisions to the program and it now offers a few more features.

You can get free support for the software from the OpenOffice.org forums. We found the help forums to be straightforward, but not too comprehensive. Some in the Linux community will no doubt be left a bit disappointed in that department.

Open Office has an intuitive interface that you would expect with all the feedback it enjoys from a large open source community. But you may be a little confused at first if you're used to Microsoft Office — the two are subtly different. OpenOffice.org is closer to Office 2003 and below, and is markedly different in user interface from Office 2007's new "ribbon" style.

A nice feature of OpenOffice.org is the fact that you can add on extensions, which offer all kinds of unusual add-ons that proprietary vendors wouldn't touch, for example an English to Hindi Dictionary...

However, Open Office dosen't have any equivalent to Outlook or even Outlook Express for that metter. But there are some free open source email clients worth checking out, such as Mozilla's Thunderbird 2. You won't have any problems opening Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint files (including Office 2007 files) in OpenOffice.org, and you will be able to save to Microsoft's formats for use with Office.

A multitude of other file formats are also supported. Unfortunately, at times a document won't be formatted quite right, but it's usually no problem to work around. OpenOffice.org goes a little further than Microsoft in some places and allows users to export directly to PDF.

It also has its own file format, ODF, which Microsoft has pledged to support as well.

While OpenOffice.org supports macros, some written for Microsoft Office won't work in OpenOffice.org, and can't be transferred, which could serve as a major stumbling block for those looking to migrate, depending on how much effort has been placed into writing macros. You might have to rewrite some of them, maybe all, depending on your exact implementation.

However, OpenOffice.org is considerably more memory (RAM) hungry than Microsoft Office is... OpenOffice.org launches a "Quickstarter" on boot that will use up 20 Mb or so of system memory before you even launch one single application. We ran Writer and Microsoft Word simultaneously and found Writer consumed around twice the system resources of Microsoft's Word.

Of all the applications available in OpenOffice.org, its strength lies with its word processor, Writer. For those who use only the standard functions in Word or another proprietary office software, Writer is likely to meet your needs, unless you rely on a grammar checker, which is missing from the word processor.

Although the feature-set in OpenOffice.org is a lot smaller than Microsoft Office, the OpenOffice.org development team has obviously worked very hard to make some common tasks simpler. For example, OpenOffice.org allows you to change the default language for different documents, paragraphs or even sections of text — a useful tool for Web publishing.

For example, a right click will give you access to commonly used formatting functions. Another GREAT and very useful shortcut is the ability to export directly to PDF with a single click. This function appears across all OpenOffice applications.

In addition, we found Writer's help suggestions to be less intrusive than Microsoft's irritatingly perky "Office Assistant", while the help files comprehensively documented the application's real functions.

If Writer is the strength of OpenOffice, then Calc is its relative weakness. While Calc is a solid mathematical tool, its capacity to create graphs is a lot inferior — you just can't represent data with the flair of Microsoft Excel, and graphs are one of Excel's most-used features.

Both the type and the customisability of graphs are extremely limited. You're stuck with basic graphs including pie charts, bar graphs and XY scatter graphs. Once you create the graphs, they're basically images, with very little editable dynamic content.

If you're in science or finance and need to demonstrate complex equations graphically, or want to create trend lines on your graphs, you may find OpenOffice.org extremely frustrating, to say the least.

However, one positive aspect about Calc is that it actually offers about twenty-five per cent more functions than are offered in Excel (roughly 338 in Calc versus 233 in Excel).

Combined with Math, this makes OpenOffice a great mathematical tool and a worthy Excel rival. If only it could create better graphs...

Source: OpenOffice.org.

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