Introduction
Everyone knows the importance of an office suite in our day to day life and a PC without an office suite is just plain old incomplete. Undoubtedly, the most popular office suite available for the Windows platform is Microsoft Office and it offers a rich set of features. Being a comprehensive software package, Microsoft Office is not free. When I think of an alternative that can perform all the tasks that Microsoft Office can, the name of that substitute is OpenOffice.org and the best part is that it’s free. This cross-platform office application suite can do what Microsoft Office is capable of doing.
OpenOffice.org was originally derived from an office suite known as StarOffice, an office suite developed by StarDivision. Later, in 1999, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision and the project has been running ever since. The latest version of OpenOffice is 3.0.0, released on October 13 2008. I downloaded the latest version of OpenOffice, a mere 127MB file, far less than Microsoft Office which is more than 500MB.
After you complete the installation you get the Application Chooser:
OpenOffice.org 3.0 Application Chooser
The OpenOffice.org suite consists of six applications: - OpenOffice.org Writer
- OpenOffice.org Base
- OpenOffice.org Calc
- OpenOffice.org Draw
- OpenOffice.org Impress
- OpenOffice.org Math
Writer is OpenOffice’s answer to Word and the most-used application. Before I talk about it I’d like to give you a brief description of all the applications included in the OpenOffice.org suite.
| Application |
Description |
| Writer |
This application is a word processor similar to Microsoft Word. It provides almost all the features available in MS Word. |
| Calc |
This application is a Spreadsheet similar to Microsoft Excel. You’ll find a number of features in it which are not available even in Excel. |
| Impress |
This is similar to MS PowerPoint. Impress can export presentations to SWF files which can be viewed on any machine with a flash player installed. It can also read .ppt files created in MS Powerpoint. |
| Base |
Base is a Database management application which is similar to MS Access. You can use this for creating database, tables etc and it is compatible with other database systems also. |
| Draw |
This is a vector graphic editor and you’ll find this application similar to Microsoft Visio, Scribus and MS Publisher. |
| Math |
As the name suggests, this is a tool for creating and editing mathematical stuff. You can compare this application with MS Equation Editor. |
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