OpenOffice.org (what does it have to offer)?

Question

Can anyone tell me in their words what is special about OpenOffice.org. What does it have to offer?

Answer 1

We use it instead of M$ Office. It's free, and it does everything Office does. However, M$ Office has Outlook (the email program); OpenOffice has no email program. So, if you want something to do your email, then use Thunderbird or OutlookExpress or Eudora or something else...



Here. Lemme save myself some typing. In the rest of this explanation, I'll call OpenOffice OOo and M$ Office, just Office, ok?



OOo, depending on how you set it up, may be a little slower to start. (It isn't slower on a MacOSX system, but, I suspect you're running Windows, so there.)



OOo can create PDF files. Office can't. OOo can read Office .doc and .docx files, and create Office .doc files (not to mention of course .txt, .html, .xml, and some others), so you'll not have to worry about that. You can even set it up so it creates .doc files BY DEFAULT. This is likely what you'll want, if you want to trade docs with your friends via email, instead of just printing them.



OOo, however comes set up to create a file type called ".odt" which is an Open Document Type favored by several organizations including, for example, the European Union, the State of Massachusetts, and a growing number of others.



The OOo interface is slightly different. Some folks find it not as snazzy.



Add-ons are available for OOo (kind of like add-ons are available for Firefox, ya know?) So you can enhance its function, if you're into that sort of thing. And full documentation is available online, along with a forum of fellow users you can join to ask (and answer) questions of usage.



You may deduce, I'm an OOo bigot. So, take my advice with a grain of salt.

Answer 2

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is similar to Microsoft Office (MSO) and free. The most notable thing missing from OOo is clipart, templates and fonts. It used to be that you could buy StarOffice to get the same program with the extras for $50, but I'm not sure how that is holding up since Oracle bought Sun. There are also numerous places to download these on the internet, including http://OpenOffice.org and http://office.microsoft.org.



Given the ease of duplicating a feature once either one has introduced it, there is a huge overlap on what they can do, but I've found OpenOffice.org better oriented to someone who wants something more advanced than wordpad. The interface to OOo feels a little rougher around the edges, mainly due to having a more professionally oriented interface that keeps things more precisely defind, and it doesn't get in your way as much as the interface on MSO, which is often incorrectly guessing what I want to do. I haven't used Office 2007 much, but the previous versions had horribly laid out menus compared to OOo, though they will take some getting used to. OpenOffice.org also encourages the use of styles, which is something people should always do, where Microsoft hides the feature, and supports a better (more reliable) template system. OOo has much better features for aiding someone in any sort of data processing environment, with better database connectivity and more options in opening csv files and pasting into a spreadsheet. It also has much more extensions, due to the community driven nature of OOo (http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/).



The file types for OOo are well defined, giving you great compatibility between versions (I think back to 2.0 for the current file types). Microsoft keeps changing their file format and has trouble using the formats across version, or sometimes even on the same version. They finally bought approval for an ISO standard for a file type (something that should be earned by need and technical merit), so hopefully this will improve with Microsoft Office 2010 and later. Given Microsoft's track record for abandoning technologies, forcing upgrades, and generally abusing their position of dominance I'm not counting on it.



For more reading on OpenOffice.org: http://why.openoffice.org/

Answer 3

It does most of the things that MS Office will do, it's free, and it runs on any operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, etc.) Imagine you run a non-profit organization. You have 100 computers. In the public organization, you have to use legit software. You can't just download cracked stuff from the Internet because you'll get sued and your organization will get hefty fines. Do you put a $100 copy of MS Office on each computer (which adds up to $10,000) or do you put a free copy of OpenOffice.Org on every one. Even if you donate $10 per machine to OpenOffice.org, you've still saved $9,000.

Answer 4

What is special about is that is the leading free alternative to Microsoft office.

It is also an open-sourced program, so there are no suprises hidden in the source code that may impact you.



Other then that, not much really. Microsoft Office still holds out more then openoffice because of the number of features it has and programs. However a majority of non-business users will not notice these features.

Answer 5

The price is right. Unless you buy all the upgrades for MSOffice you can't open the new docx formats (ridiculous). MS is in business to sell upgrades. OpenOffice opens all the MS file types and some that MSOffice can not open.

Answer 6

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Answer 7

It's not special at all. It's like using Linux instead of Windows.

It works but it's not even close to being useful.