A Free Office Suite

This is the open source version of StarOffice from Sun Microsystems, and therefore, has a similar look and feel. It has most of the productivity applications available with StarOffice. These include Writer the word processor, Calc the spreadsheet program, Impress for creating presentations, an HTML Editor, Draw for creating graphics, Math the formula editor, and a global navigator. One important item that’s missing though is a database application. 

OpenOffice.org comes packed in a 50 MB zip file, which we gave out on the April 2002 CD of PCQuest. Setting up the office suite is pretty simple, though it’s quite a memory hog. On PIII system with Win 2000 Professional and 128 MB RAM, it took up around 27 Megs of memory just to launch and run the Writer application. This went up even further when we opened other OpenOffice applications. 

The interface for various OpenOffice apps is fairly intuitive. You can create any type of document from any application. For instance, if you opt for creating a new presentation through Writer, OpenOffice will automatically launch Impress, the presentation program for doing so. This office suite is good for setups that can’t afford to buy expensive office suites, and those having multiple OSs since OpenOffice is also available for Linux and Solaris.

Comments and formule you enter in an Excel spreadsheet are visible in OpenOffice Calc

Snapshot

OPENOFFICE.ORG 1.0

Price:

Free distribution

Feature:

Word processor, spreadsheet,  HTML editor, Math formula editor, presentation and drawing applications

Pros:

Autocomplete feature is useful in Writer, doesn’t clutter document folder with temp files

Cons:

emory hog, prompts to save in proprietary format everytime you save a document in Calc, spell check has to be downloaded  separately

Contact:

www.openoffice.org

Most applications in OpenOffice are fairly easy to use, and it doesn’t take much time to become comfortable with their basic functionality. Many features and commands are the same as Microsoft Office, making it easy for users to work with it. For instance, it uses the same commands (Ctrl+L, E, R) for aligning text to left, center, or right as in MS Office. There are features we found very useful. One was autocomplete in Writer. Here, it automatically completes many words for a user so that he doesn’t have to type the whole thing. This reduces the time to type, and helps if you’re unsure of the spelling of a particular word. In bullets, you can easily create sub-bullets by simply pressing the “Tab” key next to a bulleted point. Another good feature is that it doesn’t keep cluttering your document folder with ‘tmp’ files everytime you save the document you’re working on. This was a very annoying feature in Microsoft Office 2000. 

Though OpenOffice can open documents even from the latest edition of Office, you would face compatilibility issues if you try to use both in the same environment. For instance, it doesn’t present bullets in the same format as created in MS Word and vice versa. Comments added in a Word document are not visible in OpenOffice, though this compatilibility is present for Excel files. Some convenience features such as a right-click spelling correction are also missing. Another annoying feature is that everytime you save a document (originally in some other format) for the first time, it prompts you to save it in its own proprietary format. This happens only once with Writer, but happens everytime you save a spreadsheet in Calc. 

The presentation program in OpenOffice is good, but not quite as easy to use as PowerPoint. The Drawing program is quite good, and has some pretty useful features. It allows you to create vector graphics and 3D objects with ease. The other applications include a math formula and HTML editor. 

The Bottom Line: Overall, OpenOffice.org is a feature-rich office suite. If you plan to use only this office suite, you might find it a useful option, considering that it’s free. However, if you’re frequently exchanging documents with other popular office suites like MS Office, or are heavily using Office, the shift may not be worth it.

Anil Chopra at PCQ Labs