OpenOffice, the best alternative office suite to Microsoft Office
March 26th, 2009 | Published on: Review
We introduce you to OpenOffice , an interesting choice when it comes to choosing a complete office software suite, thanks to their application similar to Microsoft Office such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more.
In most offices, enterprises, professional environments and even on home PCs we are used to see Microsoft Office, the most used and well-known software package. But, since it´s an expensive package we can try OpenOffice , the perfect alternative which is gaining ground by the day thanks to its benefits and constant updates. OpenOffice is a high quality set of tools and they have nothing to envy to Microsoft´s application suit.
For that reason, OpenOffice includes among its several features, a word processor (known as Writer) with ODF (OpenDocument Format) document support, a worksheet (Calc), a tool for slideshows creation (Impress), a database management application (Base). All of these programs are compatible with Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access respectively. It also delivers several unique features such as a graphics editor (Draw), a Math Formula Editor (Math), and as if that wasn´t enough, it support slideshows sessions and creation of multimedia presentations.
All OpenOffice functions and tools are very intuitive and can be accessed easily. For instance, when launching OpenOffice a “Start center” will be displayed where each icon representing an application. Once inside each of them, we will find an interface similar to the one we are used to, therefore the main problem we will encounter is the language, which is English only. Other than that it´s quite a conventional software office suite.
Moreover, OpenOffice offers among its many features, the possibility to export documents to PDF (Portable Document Format) and SWF (Macromedia Flash) format, support for mobile devices such as AportisDoc (Palm), Pocket Word, Pocket Excel and compatibility for MySQL databases.
More, OpenOffice presents among its features with important options such as the possibilities to export documents to PDF format (Portable Document Format) and SWF (Macromedia Flash), as well as support for mobile devices such as AportisDoc (Palm), Pocket Word, Pocket Excel and compatibility for MySQL databases.
Without any doubt, the greatest problem in OpenOffice is the lack of fonts in spite of its great deal of applications and features; hence, we must manually add them in case we need more. Moreover, it´s worth mentioning the fact that OpenOffice is an Open-Source suite, therefore some minor issues may occur, such as stability issues and memory leaks.
OpenOffice is an application suite that can be used by anyone used to this type of software office suites. It´s just a matter of giving it a try and see if it´s worth leaving Microsoft Office aside, and install this free open-source application suite.
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