OpenOffice - Free open source office suite 99% compatible with Microsoft Office suite

Company: Sun Micro Systems
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OpenOffice is a free open source multi-platform, multi-lingual office suite project and is compatible with all other major office suites such as Microsoft Word and Excel. As of version 3 OpenOffice now also runs natively on Mac OS without any addons.

OpenOffice includes several components you would expect to find in an Office Suite.

Writer word processor
Calc spreadsheet
Impress presentation software
Draw vector drawing program
Math for creating mathematical diagrams

Each of these components works seamlessly with each other so a written document can be embedded in a spreadsheet or the other way round. The Impress presentation package has many useful features and slide transitions including making custom transitions.

OpenOffice also supports Microsoft's VBA although not everything is guaranteed to work. Although OpenOffice does have it's own scripting language.

All in all this a very good all round alternative office suite and doesn't cost a penny for home or commercial use.

OpenOffice Articles

A guide to new users looking at OpenOffice

Here is a good tutorial for users switching from Microsoft Office to OpenOffice

This tutorial includes a quick start guide to installing OpenOffice and highlighting the different names for the applications, ie Word equivalent is Writer.

The first candidate release of OpenOffice 3.1 is now available for testing

The OpenOffice team have announced the first publicly available release candidate for the up and coming OpenOffice 3.1 release.

The release announcement isn't easy to read but there are a lot of fixes and improvements. Of particular note are drawings in documents are now anti aliased which makes drawings appear smoother and SQL code now has syntax highlighting.

This release is intended to be used for testing to find any show stopping bugs so use with care.

Download Squad have some handy hints to speed up OpenOffice

Download Squad have created a nice little article on how to speed up the loading of Open Office. Basically done by giving Open Office more memory to use.

Microsoft Holding Back New Office Suite: OpenOffice to Blame?

netbookdigest.com reflect on whether OpenOffice is to blame for Microsoft not releasing the new Microsoft Office until 2010

OpenOffice.org 3: Free and Easy

Redmondmag.com have quite a glowing article about OpenOffice 3 and how it stands up against Microsoft's Office suite.

The only real niggles were regarding minor startup speed, minor import issues and VBA scripts.

Lou Dolinar: OpenOffice is a worthy alternative

After a long time in development, OpenOffice 3.0 has been unleashed

OpenOffice 3.0 has been released after a long period of heavy development

Version 3 of this free alternative to Microsoft's Office has introduced many new changes. Including filters to import Office 2007 documents.

OpenOffice 3.0 already includes the new 1.2 specification of ODF. This basically means documents can theoretically be imported into any program capable of reading the ODF format. ODF was designed so that the underlying structure of a document is portable and not controlled and hidden away like the Microsoft Office formats are and means no one company controls the format of the document

OpenOffice 3.0 is now supported natively on Mac OS X and compatible with Windows Vista

The full release list can be found on the Open Office 3 features page.

Linux.com article: How to back up your blog in OpenOffice Base

OpenOffice 2.0.4 is described as a significant release

OpenOffice 2.0.4 has been released and is described as a significant release

Features listed are; Enhanced PDF management, Direct export to LaTex , New functionality in Calc and Impress.

Also noted is the imrpoved exntensions management. OpenOffice extensions allow delevopers to create extra functionality for various OpenOffice modules and can be developed using languages such as Java, Python and C++.

New Release of OpenOffice 2 with many enhancements and new features.

A new release of OpenOffice has been released. The 2.0.2 of OpenOffice features many minor bug fixes and a few new feautres and a couple of new import filters.

Also new icons have been created for GNOME and KDE to make OpenOffice appear more integrated with either desktop environment.

See official announcement for more details.