OpenOffice Vs MS Office: Battle Between Free & Paid

The latest version of Open Office comes with a slew of new features for the

money conscious office and home users. It provides support for the latest MS

Office XML format. Plus, with a look and feel that's similar to MS Office 2003,

it becomes a whole lot easier to migrate your docs, spread sheets, etc from MS

Office. There have been several enhancements to the different components,

whereby most of the older bugs have been fixed. 'Base,' for instance supports MS

Access 2007 files.

The word processor, i.e. Writer now includes an easier way to write in

multiple languages other than the default language. Earlier, whenever you used

multiple languages to write a document, it was very difficult to switch from one

language to the other and to tell Writer which spell checker to use. Now you

have three easy ways to run spell check on your doc. Just right click on the

wrongly spelt word, go to 'Select language for selection' and select the

language you want. Here, unlike earlier days when you had to select the word or

the para and navigate all the way to the Font tab under Format > Character

option, you can now simply switch amongst languages. Backreference has also been

introduced in the 'Replace with option,' a useful feature that was earlier

available only with the Search option. For example, you can change the data

written in mm-dd-yyyy format to yyyy-dd-mm across the whole document. You can

also select rectangular area of text in your document, similar to the 'Alt' +

Click selection in MS Word.

Now you can export Draw and Impress page directly to PDFs and create

bookmarks as per the name of the page, which will help easy navigation through

pages. For example in Impress you can create slide names as bookmarks. Plus, new

transition effects have been added. These include Flipping Tiles, Outside

Turning Cube, Turning Helix, Rochade, etc.

The comparison



There are some differences between MS Office and OpenOffice. Here we make a

comparison. The programmes in 'MS Office Student and Home, (SAH) and OpenOffice

are almost the same. But there are some uncommon applications between them, such

as MS OneNote in MS Office SAH 2007 and Database (like MS Access) in OpenOffice.

Again, MS Access 2007 is not included in MS Office student and home 2007 office

suite. While OpenOffice is available for almost all platforms, like, Windows,

Linux and Solaris, MS Office is available on Windows only.

MS Office 2007 uses less memory than OpenOffice 2.4. However, there is hardly

any time difference between the two to load up (less than 1 sec).

Memory consumption of OpenOffice apps is higher than MS Office. However, there wasn't much difference in the loading times of both

MS Word Vs OpenOffice Writer



Ribbons in MS Office 2007 provide easy navigation across different menu

items. OpenOffice Writer supports the DOCX format of latest MS Word but you need

to download 'ODF converter-integrator' to read/write a DOCX file. File

compatibility issues exist between the two Office suites. We prepared a Word

document with graphs; drew a bar chart, type 'Clustered Pyramid,' tables and a

box, and when we opened the document in OpenOffice the bar chart and the box

didn't appear. But there were no changes as far as texts and tables are

concerned.



We saved a file in DOC format in Writer and tried to open it in MS Word, it
opened as it was. OpenOffice supports DOC format but MS Word 2007 does not

support the ODF format, Plus 'SmartArt' of MS Office 2007 is not supported by

Writer.

A document in MS Office 2007 is created with a Word Art and a table and is opened in OO. The table got left aligned and the Word Art didn't appear at all. The text remained as it is.

MS Excel Vs OpenOffice Calc



Compatibility issues are also there when it comes to Excel and Calc. We

created a table in MS Excel with one Bar chart and one Pie chart. The table and

the charts opened perfectly fine, but the layout of both graphs changed a bit.

Then we saved the file in XLS file format and reopened the file in MS Excel

2007. Both graph didn't show up in MS Excel 2007, the chart area was blank.

After that, we created a spreadsheet in MS Excel 2007, and opened it Calc. The

spreadsheet opened fine.

The compatibility issue is clearly visible in the above screenshot. The cone bar chart appears as 3D bar chart, and sliced pie chart appears as solid pie chart in OO, while the table remains the same

MS PowerPoint Vs OpenOffice Impress



PowerPoint and Impress are also not without the compatibility issues. We

created a slide with arrows, similes, text and 3D images, and applied slide

design to it. We opened the presentation in Impress, everything appeared fine

except the similes which didn't appear at all. Then we inserted a bar chart in

our presentation, and saved in PPT format. While opening the presentation in

PowerPoint, everything appeared fine, including the bar chart.

From a cost alone perspective, Open Office is of course a better choice

because you get so many features for free. But if you're working in an

environment where you have to share files with a lot of external people (which

you most probably are), then your choice depends upon what everyone else is

using. That's because there are incompatibilities between the two, as we just

saw.

Bottomline: The latest version of Open Office is

a good choice, given all its enhancements.

Getting a Taste of OpenOffice 2.4

Open Office is now more user friendly for home and office users. To install

this productivity suit on a Windows system you need to have Windows 98 or above,

a Pentium PC with 64 MB RAM and 250 MB free hard disk space. In Linux, the

hardware specification is same as Windows, but you have to install Glibc 2.2 or

higher version and X Server. Java is required for both Linux and Windows; the

minimum version of Java to be installed is 1.3.1.

Open Office 2.4 has now support to export documents to new PDF/A-1 format. In

Impress, you can insert background images. However, you can also change the

yy-mm-dd date format to mm/dd/yyyy format using the 'Find and Replace' box.

Installation of this suite is easy. In this hands on, we show you how to

implement some of the new features of OO 2.4.

Create an XY scatter chart from Insert > Chart option, select 'XY (Scatter)' option from the 'Choose a chart type' chart option, and click on 'Finish'	Once a chart is created, click on the spreadsheet, double click on the chart image, navigate to Insert > Statistics option. Now select any regression curve from the 'Regression curve' option

You can also choose to show standard deviation from the 'Error category' list. After selecting all options, click on the 'OK' button to create the regression curve	Create a bar chart; select the sample data on the sheet and navigate to Insert > Chart option and then select chart type as bar chart

Double click on the chart, navigate to 'Format > Axis option, and then select 'X-Axis' (or Y Axis). A window will appear, choose the style you want and click on 'OK'	Again navigate to the 'Format > Axis option and go to the scale' tab. Check the 'Reverse direction' option and click on the 'OK' button

To change the yy-mm-dd date format to mm/dd/yyyy open the 'Find and Replace' box from Find and Replace, and write exactly the same as shown in the screenshot above	Open Office 2.4 has now support to export documents to new PDF/A-1 format. Go to File > Export to PDF, check the 'PDF/A-1' checkbox and click on the 'Export' button

To convert CSV to columns, select the CSV column, and navigate to Data > Text to columns option. Check the 'Comma check box' in 'Separated by' option and click on 'OK'	In Impress, you can insert background images. Right click on the slide you want to insert on, select Slide > Set Background Picture, choose the image and click on 'OK' button