OpenOffice is a popular alternative to the commercial office productivity applications suite from Microsoft, named MS Office. The OpenOffice software can be downloaded from the website OpenOffice.org – OpenOffice is based on StarOffice, an office suite owned by Sun Microsystems. The source code of the Open Office suite was released during July of the year 2000 in order to counter the growth of MS Office.
Here are five reasons why OpenOffice may be seen as better than MS Office for typical home and/or office usage.
a)OpenOffice can be downloaded and used for free as it is open-source. To be able to use MS Office, one has to purchase one or more licenses based on the number of seats the software is going to be installed on. Thus OpenOffice can be of interest to non-profits who are working on limited budgets. OpenOffice being free can be installed on as many computers as needed. Even commercial organizations can consider using OpenOffice if they have limited IT budgets.
b)OpenOffice is completely open-source and supported by an active open-source developer community. So organizations can actually change the source code of OpenOffice as they see fit to build custom functionality that they believe is left wanted by MS Office. These are called as plugins and can be developed by third-party developers by modifying the source code to support additional functionalities.
c)Compatibility with documents and spreadsheets produced by MS Office – OpenOffice can handle the document formats produced by MS Office. Files saved by MS Office can be opened and edited in equivalent Open Office programs, saved, and then re-opened and edited by MS Office. Thus files produced by Open Office can be exchanged and used interchangeably with organizations and colleagues who are using MS Office. Open Office is written in Java, and so can run on any platform (not necessarily Windows) that has a Java byte code interpreter/runtime for it.
d)Support for Native PDFs (portable document format) – OpenOffice Writer has built-in support for saving documents in Adobe’s PDF format. When using MS Office, you would need a third-party application like Adobe Acrobat or the open-source PDFCreator to be able to create PDF documents. Microsoft started supporting Save as PDF… option in Office 2007.
e)File size – The files produced by Open Office are generally smaller in size than the files produced by MS Office for the same content in the files. This is because OpenOffice uses optimized storage schema structures.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
Agree with all your points. Have been using OpenOffice since 2002 and found it to be way more stable than MS Office. Functionality wise, it has all the features I need. Even if it didn’t, it’s open source so anyone can add to it.
Best of all it’s free!
Problems with OpenOffice however are outlines and spreadsheets. Everytime I re-open an outline in OO, the bullets change, shift position, etc. Spreadsheets do not have the functions available in Excel. When working in a spreadsheet heavy environment, they just don’t cut it.
I have been using OpenOffice.org since it was Star Office 5. I am an avid fan and loyal user. The occasional troubles (like outlines and spreadsheets Stephen suggests) are sometimes due to bad coding and handling of the document, not shortcomings of the program (not that there aren’t any of them)
I.